http://www.northwestern.edu/newscenter/stories/2010/01/gibbons.html

Working with the Russian poet Ilya Kutik on translations of modern and contemporary Russian poems, I am almost always struck by how impossible it seems to say in English what can be said in Russian in such a way that the English words have enough weight, enough energy in them, and enough connection to each other by all poetic means, to begin to convey that quality of “poemness” (in one form or another of its many possibilities) that we want.   (Ilya holds that anything that can be said in a poem in English can indeed be said in Russian, but I can’t help doubting this–if only out of respect for my own beloved English, which to me seems so wonderfully capable of expressive variety and depth–but then, what else could I feel?)  And I have wondered if this divide isn’t finally something with which, finally, I am content.  Why should I or anyone be content with it, since that kind of contentment is only likely to lead to laziness in translation?

A few days ago we were working on a short poem by Victor Krivulin (1944-2001).

As Ilya often does, he told me again several times as I suggested alternatives for one phrase or another that I was explaining too much. The Russian poet and reader, he told me again, understand each other without all the concreteness.  I, however, was looking at lines that seemed too… made-up in English because the movement from metaphor to metaphor was too abstract, insufficiently anchored in the sensuous, perceptible world, and the metaphors seemed  mixed.

There’s nothing universal about an aversion to mixed metaphors.  Mine, I know, is simply an alertness I acquired because I was socialized, as a poet, in the realm of English and American poetry, which means that my mind is entirely Englished.  And I try to un-English myself often–I have been translating poems for many years, from Romance languages and from ancient Greek, and this impulse of mine has probably been an attempt to see language and poetry from different angles. And I’m well aware of the translation theorists, including Walter Benjamin in his famous and very elusive essay, “The Task of the Translator,” who have argued that the most desirable way of translating is to move the reader close to the original language and text, and let the translation sound awkward, rather than bringing the source language and text closer to the reader to make it more comprehensible in already existing ways of saying things, in already existing literary modes and and already familiar devices.

But what if moving the reader closer to the source language and source poet’s way of writing produces lines in English that just seem… bad?

I can illustrate with our current version of Krivulin’s poem in the voice of Oedipus, who, according to Ilya, in this poem speaks at the moment when he has come upon the Sphinx, and yet at the same time already senses that he will defeat it, and that the power that will come to him because he has succeeded in doing this may be dangerous.   I take my counsel from Ilya, since I cannot read Russian and since I was not formed as a reader within the context of how the Russian language works and what poetry can do in Russian. None of this information is explicit in the poem, though; it is available by deep inference in the Russian text, and scarcely at all, I think, in the English text—not only because it cannot be implied so clearly, or rather doesn’t even need to be implied clearly, but also because readers of the translation are very unlikely to realize that they need to listen for so many subtle implications as a matter of course, in the midst of all our American poems for Dick and Jane. (I am referring here mostly to bad American poetry, and not even to all of it, since there are also bad American poems that have no implications but only seem to need them, desperately, and deliberate work without creating them. But I won’t go any further in those directions, right now.)

Now that I have already explained everything, I’ll offer these lines of Krivulin doing his version of the voice of Oedipus in English, according to Kutik and Gibbons:

I see the boulders and silver mines of sleeping power

Tectonics of dreaming in plates and pleats

Beast-furred slopes of fallen stones and scree

And the violet shouting of burdock

That was pounded into steep ravines

We infer that this is the landscape around Thebes, as Oedipus approaches. This Greek Sphinx was a supernatural (but evidently not immortal) creature of the mythical age of heroes (who themselves had died off, even though the gods themselves were still alive, by the time Oedipus the King was written by Sophocles, perhaps around 420 BCE). She (the Greek noun is feminine) is understood from the main mythological sources, including the play itself, to have been waiting along the presumably narrow road into Thebes, with her back to a precipice, and of each young man who approached, she required the answer to a riddle that she posed. Those who could not solve the riddle—that is, everyone until the arrival of Oedipus—she ate.  (Here I go, explaining again–just the thing that makes Ilya so understandably impatient with me.) The Greek Sphinx had a woman’s head and breasts, no arms but rather two eagle wings, and the body of a lion.

Here is another ancient representation of her:

The literal images of this first stanza are clear enough in English, I think, but inevitably, compared to the Russian words and lines, they must suggest and fail to suggest a very different cloud of connotations, colorations, specificities and abstractions in English.

Krivulin avoids punctuation so for now Ilya and I are leaving almost all of it out, too. And here comes the Sphinx—or rather, she is presumably still, waiting, but as Oedipus draws near, her shadow seems to rush at him while at the same time it crawls (perhaps this means that it stays on the surface of the ground or nearby rocks).  Keep in mind that my purpose in detailing all of this is only to illustrate my own failings of imagination, and nothing about either Krivulin or Kutik. The word-for-word version of the second and last stanza that Ilya had prepared for our work session reads like this:

I see—and cannot move

Up crawls—has rushed after me—clouding over me

Burning shadow of Sphinx, rough and with jagged edge

Is it indeed just a precipice–

This unsayable thought of grandeur?

So far, we have done this with it:

I see… and cannot move

Crawling rushing the fiery shadow of the Sphinx

Rough and rough-edged clouds me over–

Is the inexpressible thought of great power

A precipice?

Allow for other possible synonyms for the Russian words that are invisible here—so that for example, “grandeur” becomes, as Ilya and I talk about the poem, the idea of “great power,” since the Russian word, Ilya tells me, suggests the grandeur, if we are to acknowledge it neutrally, of the figure of a king. But after I say that to my ear “grandeur” can also have a note of skepticism in it when it is used ironically, Ilya and I choose to represent the Russian word more neutrally as “great power.” So in fact our version, up above, is still very close to the meaning of the Russian, as I understand the latter, even though it would seem to me that in English it has much less linguistic energy and much less poetic rightness (for lack of a better word).

Amidst a somewhat romanticized or mythologized landscape—dramatically craggy, arid, hot, and animated by qualities associated with ambulatory living creatures rather than with mountain slopes and plants (“dreaming… beast-furred… shouting”), Oedipus confronts his own intuition that it might not be a good thing to have solved the famous riddle and thus caused the infamous Sphinx in a fury at herself to have thrown herself off the precipice behind her to her death (this is what the myth says, so the eagle wings did not suffice to save her, if she had second thoughts once she was falling). As Oedipus says in Sophocles’ tragedy, he defeated her not with his physical prowess and weapons (as the other mythological Greek heroes did when facing their monsters) but with his mind. And already, as Krivulin sees it, the mind of Oedipus is inching ahead from his present triumph to the danger ahead.  Yet all readers of the play know that the dangers ahead  have to do with Oedipus’s inability to know what he needs to know about himself, and act accordingly, so as to have avoided what awaits him in Thebes.

So here we have a poem which, with the benefit of explanations, makes sense, and with the benefit of two poets’ deliberations, isn’t dull.  And yet English can’t fit it like a second skin, any more than it can fit almost any translated poem.  To me, this translation seems “poetic” rather than having the inner strength I’d like it to have.  Of course I don’t dislike English on account of this.  In some ways I relish English even more, for the things it does do–such as all those chewy descriptive words in the first stanza.  But the poem needs even more explanations than the ones I have spelled out–such as that the obliqueness of the visual images and the narrative itself (not the Sphinx herself, but her shadow; not the contest with the Sphinx, but an anticipation and an aftermath all at once) are part of the exhilarating poetic effect of the Russian poem in a way that is very unfamiliar to us.  And having moved the English-language version over near that obliqueness, as some theorists believe we should, have Ilya and I succeeded in creating an effect that refreshes the possibilities of poetry in English?

It is thought that by around 7000 BCE the first sizable human communities were established in Mesopotamia. Over the next two thousand years, the idea of the town moved west into the European continent, people made pottery and jewelry, buried the powerful dead in graves with offerings. Along the way cattle, sheep, goats, and dogs traveled with human migrants westward. Invaders from the steppes to the east, where the horse had been domesticated, seem to have ridden west to destroy older, settled communities.

(One thinks of the high-status individuals buried in stone tombs with valuable artisanry as grave-offerings, as opposed to a pit dug in the earth for the horse-sacrifice at the tombs of nomadic leaders. At both such graves, though, poet-priests chanted or sang the poems of those days, celebrating and grieving.  The excitement of archeological discoveries tends to suppress in us the awareness that some of those who were buried with such ceremony and offerings were the warlords of their day–murdering and protecting, commanding till defeated or dead of murder, illness or accident…. yet of course they had their poets, whom they paid for the skills of reciting genealogies, cosmologies, curses and blessings, messages from the gods.)

I cannot be the first to think of what’s in the following paragraphs, but perhaps it is worth saying again:

Often poets, and once in a while a scholar or critic, will hold that Adam was not only the first man, but also the first poet, because his naming of the animals (Genesis 2.19) was the first instance of what we think of as a central element in what poets do: naming.

I regard this as the fanciful and self-flattering idea of modern poets, since the poets of prehistoric times, and through much of historical antiquity, had a far larger task at which to work, which was underlining (the first metaphor that occurs to me is of course from print culture rather than the oral culture of those poets), that is, uttering again in formally distinct ways, the relationship between the human and the divine (which included nature as a kind of theater of divine action). The formal distinctions that made poetry different from other language were at the heart of the specific craft of poets (and priests, shamans, and others who used language in a way that they hoped and believed might have an effect on the physical world and on divine attitudes and action).

So I think that to regard the story of Adam’s naming of the animals as the birth of poetry is to mistake what poetry is–by putting naming at the center of it. (And I don’t doubt that there are social reasons—both present-day and historical–why we might believe this mistake.) Naming would be the assigning of noun-words to animals. But then, we might ask–to all objects, and then the assigning of adjective-words to qualities, and the assigning of verbs to actions, and so on…?

But all this would be a utilization of only the representational function of language. I do not think that Elohim/Yahweh, creator of all, would have been so narrow in his attention to human language–that most remarkable of all human capabilities which the divine ruler had himself invested in what he is said to have regarded as his highest creature. (But yes, now that you mention it, I agree that it is interesting that one other creature in Eden was given the power of thought and speech, and only one: that dread serpent. Did that, in the minds of those who compiled and edited the book of Genesis, make the serpent almost human? Or on the other hand did it make human beings almost serpentine?)

Far from limiting itself to mere naming, language and (hence) poetry make meaning with all the functions of language. While some of the pleasure of poetry may lie in eloquence, in memorability of phrasing, in the clarity and aptness of the way it names (especially when the “name” for what it names is not one word or even a whole line but a whole stanza or passage), much of a poem’s pleasure and, if it has any, its power, lies in how it makes possible (or necessary) a use of language apart from our customary use of it. Even when the language of a poem is at its plainest in the modern world–beginning especially, in American poetry, with works by William Carlos Williams–the poem makes it possible for us to hear more meaning, and more complicated, richer meaning, than we would have heard even in that same sequence of words if we were to encounter it in another context. One of the reasons (just one) why we get pleasure from poetry–pleasure in the sheer richness of ways in which language makes meaning–may be because we are recuperating, albeit unwittingly, the pleasures we got in language when we were first acquiring it, when we were beginning to understand (unconsciously) how to use all of its functions, and making them work to achieve our desires of expression and of being.

Mutually engaging our attention with another person, invoking beings and things, events and places that are not present, establishing our own presence, attempting to regulate the presence of others, or successfully avoiding being regulated by their language, and so on, we use language in different ways. (See my post of September 21, 2009, “Poetry and language use,” on the several functions of language.) At any rate, making meaning not only with the definitions of words but also with their sounds, with all sorts of morphological and rhythmic devices and strategies, with the way in which syntax unfolds–these lie beyond the merely semantic function of putting a name in relation to what it signifies.

And finally, even though, according to the myth, Adam was given by Yahweh the power or responsibility or onerous duty or sheer pleasure of naming the animals, Eve (if she had existed—but according to this creation myth, the first of two at the beginning of Genesis, she was created after all the animals, according to verse 2.22)–Eve, I’m saying, could have done it also. Was she too not human? And since she was Eve, not Adam, she would have done it differently. She might have been a greater namer than Adam. (That Yahweh did not make her such leads me to think that many centuries later, the text-compiling priests, however pious, could not possibly have conceived of such a possibility, even if it had been true. Included among them, by the way, there had to be some who composed hymns and prayers; that is, poets.) (Many years ago, Susan Donnelly published a poem with a title that neatly filled the empty space that had existed for two and a half millennia, “Eve Names the Animals.”)

Among all those creatures were what Genesis calls the “cattle,” meaning all the four-footed herd animals of the ancient Middle East–cows, sheep and goats. In the Judeo-Christian myth, Yahweh creates these domestic creatures alongside the wild ones. Donnelly proposed a few of Eve’s animal names in our English; my liking for trying to think with several functions of language at once leads me to add a few more (and recall that at the time of the naming, there is no violence in Eden): “Why Sky Brightens After Night,” “Withholding Nothing,” “Beautifully Bizarre Way of Walking,” while Adam’s names (or for that matter Eve’s, if this was her temperament) might have been “Milk-Giving,” “Shear It,” “Tastes Sweet.” “Stop That!”

This is a link to the Jan. 2, 2010  New York Times obituary of poet Dennis Brutus, who, decades ago, taught at Northwestern:

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/03/world/africa/03brutus.html?scp=1&sq=Dennis%20Brutus&st=cse

Here is the AP obituary (Dec. 27, 2009):

http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/2009/12/27/us/AP-US-Obit-Brutus.html?_r=1&scp=2&sq=Dennis%20Brutus&st=cse

The friends that have it I do wrong

Whenever I remake a song,

Should know what issue is at stake:

It is myself that I remake.

(1908)

“What we meet with in the best, most moving passages of A Literary Bible, on other hand, is a literary God, who has both the power of literature—since poetry can move, inspire, provoke—and the weakness of literature—since poetry is always hypothetical, a matter of thought and feeling rather than history and covenant.”  So writes Adam Kirsch, in a restrained but clearly disapproving review of A Literary Bible, by David Rosenberg, in The New Republic (Dec. 8, 2009, on line at http://www.tnr.com/article/books-and-arts/the-prophets-pen).  Kirsch’s strong distinction between poetry that “moves, inspires, provokes” and poetry that is merely “a matter of thought and feeling rather than history and covenant” seems to me to have a wrinkle in it.  After all, Kirsch does not even mention imagination–however one might want to define that human capacity.  And beyond that, perhaps “history and covenant,” too, even for believers (and certainly for nonbelievers), are “a matter of thought and feeling,”  and they too are also a matter of imagination–not in the sense of misrepresenting history and covenant, but rather of entering into them with the greatest possible awareness, engagement, thoughtfulness.

Poetry at its strongest, which “moves, inspires, provokes,” and does much more than this, is a kind of exercise of imagination (emotional, social, intellectual, fantastical…).  Sometimes this exercise is humane in a specific way–as when poetry brings to us, persuades us of, the reality of feeling and thought in another person, and hence the reality of another person’s humanness (whether we love or hate that person is not always the most important distinction).  Sometimes the exercise is impersonal, even non-human–as in much poetry of nature, or in the kind of poetry of violence that does not seem to wish to claim, either for enemy or ally, the full humanity of the person in the midst of destructive chaos, personal or social.  And to think about history, to put one’s faith in a covenant with the God of Abraham, is necessarily to imagine, since the first is larger than we can grasp, and the second is beyond our grasping….

In any case, to judge Rosenberg’s translated lines by Kirsch’s sampling of them, there is little in them that would deserve the descriptor “literary” as an honorific term–the quoted lines seem pedestrian and clumsy to me.  But even if other passages are impressive because of literary skill and imagination, there are more ways of thinking about these sacred texts as literary than this.

Like Rosenberg, and perhaps like Kirsch, I too think of the Bible as literary– but in another sense.  I see in it the development of the social role of the poet–but for poet, here we have to read “priest.”  Poetry not only is a way of narrating, of thinking about symbols, of expressing awe and fear with regard to the divine, of legislating human behavior, of persuading listeners and readers that the prophet (and the priest) has power loaned to him by the divine.  Poetry also becomes a technology, if we can call it that, or at least an instrument, of social power.

A technology–because in the most ancient verse of which we know, poetry makes use of skills of language and imagination that are not easy to acquire, that have to be studied, and that have to be practiced, enacted, in order to have any validity.  While the genre of some passages in, let’s say, the Torah (or Pentateuch), is disputed by scholars, there are evidently passages that clearly have the look and sound and structure of poetry, as opposed to those that are prose.  When God curses the serpent in Genesis 3.14-16, and then, after the interruption of his brief prose admonition of Adam, in a few more verses, too, the Jewish Study Bible (The Tanakh Translation of the Jewish Publication Society) prints this as poetry:  “Because you did this, / More cursed shall you be / Than all cattle / And all wild beasts:  On your belly shall you crawl / And dirt shall you eat / All the days of your life” (and so on).

And what is literary in the sense I am thinking of is that the technique of poetry is used at a moment of enormous intensity in the words between God and the most despised of mortal creatures.  Earlier in this second of the two creation myths at the beginning of Genesis, when Adam sees Eve for the first time, after God has made her from his rib, he is given by the compilers of these texts a brief speech that is represented as poetic lines–again because of its emotional intensity, although in this case an overflowing of human wonder rather than of divine wrath: “This one at least / Is bone of my bones / And flesh of my flesh. / This one shall be called Woman, / For from man was she taken.”

Evidently something about the technique of poetry makes both Adam’s words and God’s all the more powerful.  That would be because of the ancient attribution to poetry of a power to use words to make things happen in the physical world. And nothing is more useful to the priest of any religion than a persuasive claim that his words can and will have an effect on reality because they have in them, as a result of his alliance with the divine (or the satanic), special powers that others cannot summon in the words they speak or chant.  (Adam is not the poet, here; the priest who shapes these passages is, or he is at least an editor who is keeping for good reason the poetic lines of an older oral poetic tradition about the first man.)

Hence in the technique and technology of poetry we see the special power of the poet (priest) in the most ancient verse that survives–not only in Judaism, of course.  And in our present world, a belief in the power of individual and formulaic prayer (Jewish, Christian, Islamic) is still strong.

Well, of that I will say no more, in this mundane prose.  Instead I will return to think about a poem.  At least the subliminal dance of rhythm and breath, of thought, too, and feeling, is a movement that poetry can still evoke not only in our minds but in our bodies, without making any claim to control anyone or anything.  And an utterance of awe, fear, hope, insight, acknowledgment of an other, still has some power without any intent to control anyone–a small yet precious power that enables our spirits, whether in a religious or a nonreligious sense, to thrive for a moment.  Who is to say that there is not a kind of samizdat even of free societies?  Such a samizdat is out in the open, yet is scarcely visible to the dominant discourses.  It subverts not a censoring state power over thought (as the old samizdat did; there is an increase of such power in the world, according to the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life; see “Global Restrictions on Religion,” 16 December 2009, http://pewresearch.org/pubs/?TypeID=1).  Instead, it subverts, feebly albeit inspiringly and even effectively, here and there, the enormous pressure of conformity to consumerist, fearful, xenophobic, combative, and I would say masochistic politics.  And poetry at its best is a part of that samizdat.

Sefi Atta was the Visiting Writer in Residence at the CWA during the fall quarter of 2008. She was born in Nigeria, educated there and in England, and for some time has lived in Mississippi.

In September 2009, I was a guest writer at the Garden City Literary Festival in Nigeria. It was held in Port Harcourt, the capital city of Rivers State and commercial center of the oil-rich delta region. Port Harcourt is known as the Garden City, but in recent years has become the kidnap capital of Nigeria.

I wasn’t worried about traveling to Port Harcourt. I had read reports about oil rig workers and oil company executives who had been kidnapped by militia groups, but they were expatriates.  Just before I traveled, a gang had abducted a popular Nollywood actor and held him for ransom, but that was in a neighboring state. As far as I was concerned, no one in Port Harcourt would recognize me, except the festival director, Koko Kalango, and other employees of the Rainbow Book Club who had seen my photograph in their brochure.

I arrived in Port Harcourt in the early evening of the 24th to find my face and name on billboards advertising the festival, but I still wasn’t concerned about being kidnapped.  More renowned writers like J. P. Clark and Ngugi wa Thiong’o were attending the festival, and the only person who had bothered to waylay me was a Drug Law Enforcement agent at the airport.  He was just annoyed that he couldn’t intimidate me, and to scare him, I told him I was a guest of the state governor, which was true.  I was meant to be at a command performance of J. P. Clark’s play, The Wives Revolt, at the state government house that evening, and I was running late.  Koko Kalango, who was already there, had sent a driver and escort to meet me at the airport. The traffic to the city center delayed us further.

My hotel, Le Meridien, was fairly posh by international standards.  I got ready and the driver took me to the government house, where I met up with Koko Kalango.  I was in time for dinner, but I’d missed the play.  I reminded J. P. Clark that I’d met him once before as a child, through my late father, then I had an Obama moment when I met Governor Amaechi.  He was my age, but I’d always imagined Nigerian politicians as old men.  Governor Amaechi gave a welcome speech during which he mentioned that he had studied Ngugi’s books as a student.

This was the second year of the Garden City Literary Festival, a collaboration between Rivers State Government and the Rainbow Book Club.  For the next couple of days, drivers shuttled me and other guests from Le Meridien to Presidential Hotel, where the festival was located.  Because of the risk of abductions, we were always accompanied by armed guards, which didn’t actually make me feel safer, but I remained unconcerned.  There was a press conference to attend, workshops, open mic readings, interactive sessions and a prize-giving ceremony for school children.

Unlike the students I’d encountered at Northwestern University, the students who attended my fiction workshop at the festival did not write about personal relationships.  Their stories were topical.  I had stories about student cults and local abductions.  Some had typed their stories at home and others had gone to Internet cafes.  One asked if it was fair that I used the same standards I used overseas to critique their work and I said yes, as I did not expect less from them.  They were on par with American students, but none of them was writing for fun; they all wanted to be published, eventually.

Several Nigerian publishers were at the Garden City Literary Festival and I often hear that there is no money in publishing in Nigeria.  There is definitely not enough investment in the publishing industry and the market for literary fiction in particular is small, and so is discretionary income.  Plus, the average Nigerian would rather buy a Nollywood DVD than a book by a Nigerian writer.  But Nigerian publishers can and do get funding to promote books.

As an accountant turned writer, I find that the lack of accountability surrounding fundraising practices in Nigeria is cause for concern.  Private, for-profit publishers don’t seem to have any requirements to declare how much funding they raise in a writer’s name or how the funds are spent.  If a writer doesn’t have name recognition, or if (as I have recently discovered) a writer is unwilling to allow a publisher to solicit funds in this ambiguous manner, there is little incentive for a publisher to promote the writer’s book, so the experience can be rather like having your book held for ransom.

Here is a brief account of reciprocated class aversions in two young writers who were both conscientious objectors during World War II (from Jim Peck, We Who Would Not Kill, 1958).  The writer who remembers this moment is little remembered now; the writer whom he remembers is remembered by everyone:

Because it was a Federal jail, West Street held few murderers. The only killers were men convicted of some Federal offense in addition. A famous inmate was Louis Lepke, then sought by New York authorities for the chair at Sing Sing. In West Street he was well liked because he was friendly with other inmates and told nothing to the authorities.

This is what counts in jail. What a man was sentenced for is almost immaterial. Unless an inmate talks about his case you do not question him.

Next to Lepke’s cell at one time was a young CO from Iowa, Lowell Naeve. He tried to explain to Lepke what a CO was but the gangster had trouble understanding.

“You mean they put you in here for not killing?” Lepke finally exclaimed—and he laughed and laughed. [...]

Days in West Street were not brightened by the building itself, a former warehouse and garage owned by Al Smith. Hardly any daylight got past the unwashed windows. The electric bulbs were high and dim, which made reading tough on the eyes. A refreshing, though brief, relief was the exercise period on the fenced-in roof. The outside air, though none too pure in New York, used to hit us like a shot of cold water after the foul air of the crowded cells.

[... The scene shifts to the federal prison in Danbury, Connecticut:]

The Federal penal system also recognizes blue blood. When other COs in New York were being sentenced to a minimum of three years, Robert Traill Spence Lowell, Jr. [in fact, IV] was sentenced in the same city to only a year and a day. A member of the Boston Lowells, he was paroled in four months.

Lowell was a cousin of A. Lawrence Lowell, former president of Harvard University and chairman of the special committee which reviewed the Sacco-Vanzetti case and sent the two men to the chair. Some of us tried to persuade Lowell to read Upton Sinclair’s story of the frameup in Boston, but in vain. I prepared a fourteen page digest of the case, but he wouldn’t read that, either.

“I believe they were guilty because my cousin said they were guilty and I have complete confidence in his integrity,” Lowell would drawl. “I never considered the matter of sufficient importance to make my own investigation.”

“You want to do the greatest possible amount of good, don’t you?” I argued. “Well, the greatest good you could do as a Lowell would be to tell the world that the Sacco-Vanzetti case was the dirtiest frameup in American Labor history.”

“I disagree,” Lowell replied. “I think it is more important that I work for Catholicism and help to establish Catholic communities.”

Lowell had broken with his family after turning Catholic and poet. He was the only CO in Danbury who cited as one reason for refusing to join the army the fact that the United States was fighting on the side of the Soviet Union. Although he could have had a white collar job, he chose the mason shop to get experience which might be useful in building a Catholic community. It was strange to see him, clad in shabby overalls, sitting on the floor and arguing Catholicism in his bored voice. Most of the other country clubbers could be picked out immediately even though they wore regulation clothes. They usually went around together and they walked with what might be called an executive gait.

At the time recalled by Peck (1942), Lowell (1917-1977) had graduated from Kenyon College (1940), and had not yet published his first book, Land of Unlikeness (1944).  Lowell’s famous poem, “Memories of West Street and Lepke,” was published in his book Life Studies (1959). The poem includes these lines:

Given a year,

I walked on the roof of the West Street Jail, a short

enclosure like my school soccer court,

and saw the Hudson River once a day

through sooty clothesline entanglements

and bleaching khaki tenements.

Lowell’s poem has been much discussed in print; perhaps both its memorable phrases and its moral and emotional evasions enact the conflicts of the time it portrays, and of Lowell’s entire life and work.  If I sympathize with Lowell’s dilemmas, I also cannot help sympathizing with Peck’s disappointed account of Lowell the young prisoner.

Language forming itself at the threshold of consciousness has to be noticed as a faint star is, with averted vision. Look directly at it and it disappears.

How many poems have I stared—scared—back into hiding?

****

Of course what hovers at the threshold of consciousness may turn out to be terribly dull once it crosses the threshold. But has all of it survived the crossing?

****

“Within the writer, another speaks” (Reg Gibbons) is one way to put it. But to speak of within-ness immediately constitutes its binary opposite, without-ness. Unconscious processes are not an entirely inward-looking, intramural affair of our own personal bone-house. We respond to the world all the time in unconscious, nonverbal ways, which others may pick up as body language or “vibes” before we have any inkling of them ourselves.

Zen teaching says that everything is mind—not just you sitting “inside” your body thinking or perceiving, but that which you think about or perceive. Your very breathing is a constant exchange of within and without.

We’re without even when we feel we’re within. Even when we’re just plain “out of it.”

****

I’m thinking and typing on my laptop computer in my living room. A private activity in a private setting, right?

As I do this I am wearing a shirt, produced somewhere in the United States for Land’s End. Someone—or more likely, several people in sequence—cut the cloth, stitched it together, dyed it purple. The cloth is cotton. Persons unknown to me sowed the cotton in the ground, picked it when it was ready, baled it, sent it somewhere to be woven into cloth.

(Trying to say this makes me aware how poorly I understand how a shirt is made. I couldn’t have written Robert Pinsky’s poem, “The Shirt,” which makes you think he knows something about it. Of course, he may have been bluffing, but I’m not the right person to catch him).

Stories could doubtless be told about the rest of what I’m wearing. I won’t tell them, since I would tell them badly.

My bare feet rest on floorboards laid in 1894, refinished no doubt several times since then (and once by my wife and myself). They were once oak trees (growing where?), which took root somewhere, or perhaps were intentionally planted by persons unkown to me. Someone cut them down to make the boards, then someone hauled them to a sawmill where someone else cut a tongue-and-groove pattern in them (no easy job—ever tried to saw oak? Now that’s something I know about) , then another round of hauling and unloading brought them to what would become my house, and still other unkown persons fitted them in place, sanded and stained them. All this depending on beams, dressed and seasoned, already in place. I haven’t stopped to ask who made, or drove, the trucks that were used for the hauling, or who supplied saws, woodplanes, sandpaper.

And I’ve said nothing of the laptop itself, assembled by Dell from parts made by workers in factories scattered around the world, or of the science and technology, the collaborative work of many generations, that make such a device possible. (When I was a graduate student in Virginia during the Seventies, my wife was a programer-analyst for Morton Frozen Foods. The computers, tall as an NBA forward, took up a large room and had a smaller combined storage capacity than the flash drive you are perhaps carrying in your pocket.)

What were those people, living and dead, paid for their work?

My front door is locked, but they’ve all found a way to come in.

“So you are best off with rhyme and meter to make the stuff [prison writing] memorable, especially in view of some interrogation methods that render your output frequently unreliable. On the whole, poets fare better in solitary confinement than do fiction writers, because their dependence on professional tools is marginal: one’s recurrent back-and-forth movements under that electric luminary [a 60-watt bulb in the cell] by themselves force the lyric’s eventual comeback no matter what. Furthermore, a lyric is essentially plotless and, unlike the case against you, evolves according to the immanent logic of linguistic harmony.”

–Joseph Brodsky, 1996.