If you’ve ever longed to be a fly on the wall with some of the world’s greatest poets of the last 50 years or so as they crafted their poetry, listen up: You must read Poetry in Person. I’ve scattered some of its diamonds here in this two-part post but if you love poetry and are curious about how it is created you should definitely get your hands on this fabulous book.
Alexander Neubauer, the book’s editor, sets the scene: “In the fall of 1970, at the New School in Greenwich Village, a new teacher posted a flyer on the wall. It read ‘Meet Poets and Poetry, with Pearl London and Guests’.”
Few students turned up at the first seminar run by London (daughter of M. Lincoln Schuster, cofounder of Simon & Schuster). However, her first guests were John Ashbery, Adrienne Rich and Robert Creely — and other literary luminaries soon followed.
During 25 years London interviewed poets like Lucille Clifton, Seamus Heaney, Amy Clampitt, Louise Glück, Philip Levine and many more about how they carried out their work and found inspiration. They brought drafts of their poems and she and her students asked incisive questions about their poetic process — their nuts-and-bolts decision-making about line length, revision, word choices and form.
As a teacher at the New School, Neubauer knew about Pearl London’s class and, after her death in 2003, discovered that there were tapes of the meetings. He carefully edited and compiled the transcripts with background information on the poets, revealing their distinctiveness of style and personality, the stage of career they were in when visiting London’s class and their attitudes to poetry and life.
The resulting conversations are intimate, fun, wise, informed and revealing — and Neubauer’s labour of love involved a strong commitment to the fidelity to each poet’s voice.
He writes, “My primary goal was to capture the poets’ voices and habits of thought as faithfully as possible, whether they spoke in complete paragraphs, like Walcott and Matthews, or sounded like telegrams. In short, poets not only spoke for themselves, they were also allowed to sound like themselves.”
The 23 poets included are Maxine Kumin, Robert Hass, Muriel Rukeyser, Philip Levine, Louise Gluck, June Jordan, James Merrill, Marilyn Hacker, Galway Kinnell, Derek Walcott, Amy Clampitt, Lucille Clifton, Stanley Plumly, C.K. Williams, Molly Peacock, Robert Pinsky, Edward Hirsh, Frank Bidart, William Matthews, Paul Muldoon, Li-Young Lee, Charles Simic and Eamon Grennan.
Here (and in Part 2 of this post) are some of my favourite quotes from the poets featured.
Robert Hass visited Pearl London’s class in December 1977. The draft he brought to class was “Meditation at Lagunitas”, one of his most anthologised poems. Hass told London, “Aside from the subject, what’s happening in this poem — it’s a long poem — is the slowness of the breath. The spirit, literally the breath of poetry — is the slowness of breath … The patterning of breath, is the way a poet actually reaches into and takes over your body while you’re reading and experiencing his poem.”
Muriel Rukeyser visited the New School in 1978. The poem she read in class was “Dream Drumming”, which had appeared in The Gates (1976). Rukeyser died in 1980. She told London, “It’s very hard to talk about the rewriting that goes into them [poems] because the major rewriting is likely to be in the matter of sound, the sound that is deep in the structure, almost a crystalline structure of sound in the poem … There’s a whole movement that comes into it [when a poet reads], a movement of, as I say, heartbeat, breathing, all the muscles voluntary and involuntary playing and syncopated against the breathing and the heartbeat — that makes the rhythms of poetry.”
Philip Levine visited the class in 1978 and revealed to London that his poem “You Can Have It” was about his identical twin — and that twins was a theme that ran through his poetry. He said his upcoming book, 7 Years from Somewhere, was his most autobiographical and revealing — a good deal of it about dying and being reborn. “I’m not the person I used to be. I also came very close to literally dying and found myself quite indifferent to the whole thing … At any rate, my recent poetry is very different. My last book and present book are informed by religious faith that has seized me in my forties and fifties, which I’ve lived most of my life without.”
Louise Glück visited the class in 1979 and, in the three decades since, has become one of the most influential American poets of her generation. Glück talks to London about her poems in The House in the Marshland. She says, “The attempt in the poems that are elliptical … is an attempt to render silence; to use silence to … almost … if you can properly frame an image or a verbal gesture in white space, in silence, you can make of that whole movement something equivalent to a single word; that is, the way a word, a contained word, explodes into meaning. It’s like those little Japanese stones that you drop into water. They become flowers. That’s a metaphor that’s very attractive to me — the idea that something small should ramify. Of course it has to be controlled. Also it has to be unexpectedly beautiful.”
Glück also said, “Something can be marvelous and still need to be stopped. Otherwise you don’t change. It’s as simple as that. And if you don’t change, then you stop writing good poems.”
Galway Kinnell visited the class in 1981 and 1991. He told London that, “I like poems best where I hear the person in them. I think that’s the only time they live, when you hear the person speaking them — someone else with whom you are able to sympathise so much that when you speak of his life you are speaking of your own.”
Derek Walcott visited London’s classroom in 1982 — ten years before he received the Nobel Prize in Literature. He said, “Memory absolutely is the mother of the muse … [But] memory is not practised in cities … Books that are read are not read for commemoration’s sake, they are consumed like cereal. Things are not learned by heart. Poetry is not recited; it is read. The Russians remember that the duty of the poet is to be bardic and outward, consequently Brodsky will get up and recite. A poet is like a dancer. You can dance? Dance. You can play? Play.You can write a poem? Recite. Now confront an English or American poet with that and he says, “Oh gee, I don’t even know my own work.”
Amy Clampitt visited the class in 1983 around the time of her late-in-life début with The Kingfisher. She was 63 when it was published. London asked her to talk about the use of sound in her work and to expand on her sense of the prevailing flatness of diction that Clampitt had said was “the wholesale deafness to the sonorities of English”. Keats had a very good ear, Clampitt said. “I think most poets who do write sonorous poetry do not do it by any science but simply hear echoes — one word will suggest another because of the sound. For me that is so, and I can’t tell you how it happens, but I do write by ear. I’m an editor by profession — if I can call it that — and I edit by ear. I want to hear how the sentence falls; I want to hear a cadence someplace.”
Useful information
Some of Pearl London’s conversations with the poets are available as audios at Neubauer’s blog.
I purchased my copy at a great price from Readings bookshop.
So this is how great poetry is made … (Part 2)
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