James Wright: Dog, Horse, Gopher, Blessing

Here is an excerpt from Peter Stitt's 1972 Paris Review interview with esteemed poet James Wright (1927-1980), whose eloquence here makes clear why his finished poems are so widely admired.

Snowy Egret

(The Bly to whom Wright refers is poet Robert Bly, who had—still has?—a farm in Minnesota, which Wright sometimes visited).

       THE PARIS REVIEW

The book that followed, of course, is The Branch Will Not Break. How do these things show up there?

        JAMES WRIGHT

At the center of that book is my rediscovery of the abounding delight of the body that I had forgotten about. Every Friday afternoon I used to go out to Bly’s farm, and there were so many animals out there. There was Simon, who was an Airedale, but about the size of a Great Dane. There was David, the horse, my beautiful, beloved David, the swaybacked palomino. Simon and David used to go out by Bly’s barn. David would stand there looking out over the corn fields that lead onto the prairies of South Dakota, and Simon would sit down beside him, and they would stay there for hours. And sometimes, after I sat on the front porch and watched them, sometimes I went and sat down beside Simon. Neither Simon nor David looked at me, and I felt blessed. They allowed me to join them. They liked me. I can’t get over it—they liked me. Simon didn’t bite me, David didn’t kick me; they just stayed there as they were. And I sat down on my fat ass and looked over the corn fields and the prairie with them. And there we were. One afternoon, a gopher came up out of a hole and looked at us. Simon didn’t leap for him, David didn’t kick him, and I didn’t shoot him. There we were, all four of us together. All I was thinking was, I can be happy sometimes. And I’d forgotten that. And with those animals I remembered then. And that is what that book is about, the rediscovery. I didn’t hate my body at all. I liked myself very much. Simon is lost. David, with what Robert called his beautiful and sensitive face, has gone to the knacker’s. I wish I knew how to tell you. My son Marsh, the musician, is in love with animals.

I’m posting Wright's passage today simply because I find it stunning, but also because some regulars here are animal lovers, as am I.  I can’t imagine a piece of writing that better captures what I find beautiful and comforting about the furry and the feathered (and lizards and bugs, though less so). 

True, animals can be crazy and mean (with or without pollution by humans), and I question the popular, romantic notion that animals kill only to feed themselves. A few months ago, a television piece showed an adult female lion (or was it a tiger?) who ate so much of her prey that her stomach exploded and killed her. 

I’m wary of sweeping generalizations, even when they seem to come from reliable sources and tell me what I think I want to hear about nobility in nature. 

However, what James Wright says here captures animals at their best, which is what they are most of the time—plus the benefit of a human with convincing humility and admiration.  

For those who are interested, here is the entire interview, about various aspects of writing poetry, not just animals:

http://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/3839/the-art-of-poetry-no-19-james-wright

If you have the time, see also James Wright’s poems, “A Blessing” and “Lying in a Hammock,” which are rather directly related to the passage above.

Yellow-Rumped Warbler, Female

A Blessing by James Wright : The Poetry Foundation

Lying in a Hammock at William Duffy’s Farm in Pine Island, Minnesota by James Wright : The Poetry Foundation

See and hear Wright reading the poem here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wpQU79sda3Q

Visitors and I discussed these poems here a few years ago:

 "Lying in a Hammock":
 http://banjo52.blogspot.com/search?q=lying+in+a+hammock

"A Blessing":
https://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=2883979841111173610#editor/target=post;postID=5566567101729438795

Rainer Maria Rilke, "Archaic Torso of Apollo," trans. Stephen Mitchell

Arp, Torso of a Giant, 1964, D.I.A.

I hadn’t read Rilke’s “Archaic Torso of Apollo” in a long while, and frankly I’d forgotten about it. That's shameful, but instead of leading vapid, jejune cheers about the poem and its perplexing conclusion, let me simply admire a few of its particulars.

http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/15814

First, let’s note that it’s an Italian (or Petrarchan) sonnet, fourteen lines that begin with a rhymed octave (8 lines) to which a 6-line, rhymed sestet responds in some way. So it’s a bit similar to an English (or Shakespearean) sonnet’s concluding with a rhymed couplet that responds to its preceding twelve lines.

How translators manage to preserve any kind of rhyme has always impressed me. I’ve read somewhere that a good translator often has to make the choice of what’s primary—the poem’s content, including literal translation, or its formal characteristics such as rhyme and meter. At any rate, that kind of intelligence is magic to me, so hats off to Stephen Mitchell.

Apollo was the god of truth and light as well as music, poetry, and some other good things, and as foil to that loosey-goosey, hell-raising frat boy, Dionysus. I think of Apollo as the god of reason and moderation.  So the figure of a decapitated Apollo might suggest an entirely physical, animal power (“like a wild beast’s fur”) with too little wisdom or soul to “burst like a star” “from all the borders of itself.” The thinking god has lost his head.

The danger of a god’s sexual power might feel menacing us, especially as we remember Zeus' rape of Leda, the mortal, who gave birth to the child who would become Helen of Troy, and be partially responsible for a ten-year war, as her Greeks tried to retrieve here. But in Rilke's Apollo, we perceive “a smile” running “through the placid hips and thighs /  to that dark center where procreation flared.” Even there, at the “dark” sexual center, which might be anarchic power in an animal or human, the god’s internal “brilliance . . . like a lamp” illuminates and “dazzles”; he's  empowered with the light to see everything we do, even without his head.

Here, I'm reminded of Yeats’ “Leda and the Swan,” another knockout sonnet, which concludes by wondering if mortal Leda takes on the rapacious Zeus’ “knowledge” with his power before “the indifferent beak could let her drop.” And there’s James Wright’s memorable, disturbing conclusion to “Lying in a Hammock”—“I have wasted my life.”  I wonder if Yeats and Rilke, as contemporaries, were consciously or unconsciously influenced by each other. And did the younger James Wright owe a debt to Rilke's  sonnet?

Here’s a little game to play:  put Rilke’s first and last lines together, and we get “We cannot know his legendary head. . . . You must change your life.”  Apollo’s “legendary head” is missing from the sculpture, so in both literal and figurative ways, we cannot know his inner life. 

More importantly, we cannot know it because we are mere mortal schmucks. Light does not explode from our torsos and make our dark crotches glow with smiling benevolence. Maybe most of us would rather come across as Darth Vader anyway. 

But how shall we change our lives—to be more like the god or to be more submissive to him? Shall we try harder to emulate Apollo’s light, though we know it’s a doomed effort? (Maybe Sisyphus thought so as he rolled his rock up the hill). 

Or, since we cannot be immortal or comprehend divinity, should we become more modest and submissive, accepting the limits of our puny knowledge and the sinister darkness of any power we have?

Are there third and fourth and twentieth ways to read Rilke’s last line?

My thanks to poet and professor Carol Muske-Dukes for returning me to Rilke’s sonnet, which she discusses from a different perspective in her essay, “What Is a Poem?” (in The Eye of the Poet: Six Views on Craft, ed. David Citino). 

We should remember that the purpose of literary criticism and scholarship is leading well-intentioned readers from one worthy poem, poet and idea to another. Too often the whole enterprise is debunked as academic charlatanism, the smelly alley to tenure, promotion, and ego-enlargement within The Academy. 

To be sure, some of it is that, but much of it consists of one well-lit head shining a light for others who want to know . . . and accept the fact that they need to know. 

http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/15814

"Lying in a Hammock at William Duffys Farm in Pine Island, Minnesota" by James Wright

Lying in a Hammock at William Duffy’s Farm in Pine Island, Minnesota by James Wright : The Poetry Foundation

Off Indiana Rt. 1, near Angola

Here's a revised version of an earlier post about James Wright's "Lying in a Hammock."  Several works about fall, directly or indirectly, are just too good not to post twice, or more.

After I read the poem for the first time, I threw the book across the room and stayed away from Wright for over a year. How dare he spring that last line out of nowhere. Yes, a poem is a journey, a discovery, for the poet, or at least his speaker; but there's discovery and there's snake oil.

On the other hand, does that last line come out of nowhere?

Peer pressure—in the form of anthologies that insisted on including the poem—kept me going back to it. Finally, I used it in a class to see what would happen. Of course, some students are all too happy to hate any poem, especially work that seems dishonest, interested in tricking a reader or leaving him in the dust for no reason better than illustrating the poet's intellectual superiority.

Off Indiana Rt. 1, near Angola

But soon enough students and I began to see the earlier lines more or less prepping for the final boom (or is it a thud? a whimper? a flash?).

“Lying in a Hammock . . . “ is now among my favorites, and in my most reckless moments of outrageous bravado, I exclaim that no work better illustrates the nature of epiphany. Take that, James Joyce.

My experience with "Lying in a Hammock" also illustrates a great line from E.M. Forester, who said, “How do I know what I think till I see what I say?”

Near Jonesville, Michigan

When I risked sharing "Lying in a Hammock" with students before I was sure what I thought about it myself, I had to say things and let them say things that eventually led us as individuals and groups to what we thought about a significant poem with a compelling idea (or a few) at its core.

No, we did not all agree about every part or the whole; some conversations and some individuals were animated, yet we didn't kill each other and no one shouted, "You lie!" (I was glad I'd kept my book-throwing to myself).

Off Indiana Rt. 1, near Angola

Pedagogy: experiences like those class discussions amount to one more reason I blast off about rigid adherence to rigid lesson plans, which lead to rigid, stultifying classes, aimed at mere coverage, not inspiration, discovery, pleasure, or meaningful interaction with others. Clocks and calendars must bend; coverage has to happen, but we don't need to be its whipping boy. 

I propose that calendars and clocks and A.P. exams and admission to any of the several Harvards out there must take a back seat to the enjoyment of learning, which includes polite but frank discussion and debate, in which "You lie!" will usually be an unacceptable comment, and "Let me re-think that" or "Maybe I was wrong" are essential statements that every student and every teacher (and every Congressman) must learn to embrace.
 

I've probably already bitten off too much for one post, but let me add this link to a Warren Buffet idea about Congress, which connects to my point about honesty informed by civility:

https://www.facebook.com/kellyannejulinforrester/posts/2508974365521

Lying in a Hammock at William Duffy’s Farm in Pine Island, Minnesota by James Wright : The Poetry Foundation

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A CRIMINAL ELEMENT IN FOOTBALL? DENIS JOHNSON. JAMES WRIGHT.

I'll be interested in reactions to Denis Johnson's poem, below. It's new to me, and I think it's an interesting take on the ways football can be more meaningful than it seems to those fans or anti-fans who see it as little more than kill, kill, kill.

I'm adding James Wright's classic, "Autumn Begins in Martins Ferry, Ohio," even though I posted it last fall. Like Johnson's poem, it plays beautifully into the . . . meta-discussion . . . of what football is: frolic, fight, art, and minor tragedy, among other things.

Last Sunday, October 17, there were some nasty helmet-to-helmet hits in the NFL, some injuries as a result, and some hefty fines ($75,000 in one case), which led to an orgasm of commentary from the . . . dare I say it? . . . Talking Heads. Should the rules be changed? Would it be enough to simply enforce the current rules?

From there it's a short, obvious step to the question: What can and should be done about the criminal element (as it was once called) among football players at all levels?

After last Sunday's disputed hits on sometimes vulnerable players (especially receivers jumping to catch passes), there were some troubling comments from TV's Talking Heads and some visitors at a blog I visit regularly, Ohio River Life, which is located in an Ohio town near the Pennsylvania border. Some Pittsburgh Steeler fans there were vocal about defending their linebacker, James Harrison, against charges of a cheap, dangerous hit. Some folks were defending recklessly violent contact that seems intended to injure an opponent rather than simply preventing him from getting his way--catching a pass or running for yardage.

From there, it's another short step to worrying that the old, old charge against football might be valid: fans want to see violence, not ballet or strategy or courage or grace under pressure or speed or the arc of a ball in flight or the hometown colors.

The corollary charge, of course, is that there are plenty of players who are happy to oblige, who would just as soon injure an opponent as tackle him, who couldn't care less about another guy's multiple concussions or career-ending injuries or even paralysis. If they were allowed to use sledge hammers and scalpels, would they? If Tommy told you to jump off the roof, would you? If Coach told you to get hold of that guy's injured knee in the pile-up and twist it, hard, would you?

If, in order to win, you must cripple the other team's players, rather than beating them with the skills that define the game, yours must be a piss-poor team. Dude. Psycho.

There is a moral difference between intending to rattle or even hurt another player and intending to injure him. Hurting him means shaking him up, intimidating him, letting him know you are not going away, you will be there any time he invades your territory, you will not give him one inch more than necessary, "you're mad as hell and you're not going to take it anymore," and your refusal might cause him some discomfort. That has almost nothing to do with trying to injure that other player, intending to put him out of that game for the rest of his season or to cripple him forever.

Football is a metaphor for war, not war itself. Fans and players who crave injury need to examine their inner lives. Or simply enlist.

Where does that rage come from? What can you do about it that's more purposeful for you and less damaging to others? Someone should write a post titled "Football, Introspection, Morality and Self-Improvement."

Football will never be injury-free; that's a sad fact about a game that requires of its contestants so much in the way of speed, strength, character, and, yes, brains. But to make injury your objective is stupid and criminal.

There might be no way to know a character's intent, a kid's heart, his sense of what it means to be human; but officials in football must try to do just that, and it is often, not always, possible to determine that leading with a helmet, especially aiming at the other guy's helmet, is avoidable.

Spearing with your helmet is also less effective than a low, hard, shoulder tackle and wrapping up with your arms. Unless you intend to injure a man, or you lack the skill and courage to tackle low and hard, there's no need to go after an opponent's head. It's his legs that speed him down the field, and it's his arms that hold the ball. If you're not a psychopath, why do you want his head? What are coaches telling players? And the younger the players are, the bigger that question is.

So when you have players who want to be the next Jack Tatum (see video clip below--a few seconds will make the point), yes, fine 'em, kick 'em out of the current game, and suspend 'em from X number of future games, without pay. That will make a statement to the criminal element on the field and in the stands--and to little kids of all ages, who need such guidance, whether or not they realize it.

As for bloodthirsty fans, don't share a beer with them. Don't join their slobbering bloodlust. Make sure you're happy enough with your life that you don't need to pin your identity on a football team's success and violence. Shun those fans, who are fans of violence more than football. As far as I know, shunning works for the Amish.

Why I Might Go to the Next Football Game by Denis Johnson : The Poetry Foundation [poem] : Find Poems and Poets. Discover Poetry.

Autumn Begins in Martins Ferry, Ohio by James Wright : The Poetry Foundation [poem] : Find Poems and Poets. Discover Poetry.

Jack Tatum Darryl Stingley Video | Jack Tatum Video | Darryl Stingley Hit Video | Oakland Raiders Jack Tatum | Buzzy Times

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James Wright, Ohio Pastoral

I've been wondering about a follow-up to Snodgrass' "The Campus on the Hill," and I keep coming up blank. So this seems as good a time as any to start posting this picture from time to time.


Also, I'm just back from four days of wandering on two-lane roads back in Ohio. I saw some friends from high school, too, so I think I'm overstimulated (I heard you laughing!), and I've got to sort out what I want to say, which could take a few days and a dozen posts. In the meantime, when in doubt about what to say about Ohio, go straight to James Wright, from Martins Ferry, across the Ohio River from Wheeling, West Virginia.

Beginning by James Wright : The Poetry Foundation [poem] : Find Poems and Poets. Discover Poetry.

Wright and I seem to agree that, under the moon, women and other mysteries can arise from or fade into Ohio fields.

































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Edward Hirsch, "Fast Break"

Left: Dunking


I don't want to rush anyone away from the Addonizio and Stevens discussions; we can keep that going indefinitely.

But Final Four weekend in college hoops is approaching, and with it comes the question, again, of whether there can be important literature that centers on sport. If so, the writing has to be about larger issues than people playing games, doesn't it? Some might remember that this came up regarding James Wright's football poem, "Autumn Begins in Martins Ferry, Ohio." (Banjo52, Sept. 23, 2009), and I think of Joyce Carol Oates writing on boxing or Hemingway on bullfighting.

Since the mid-1980s, I've wondered how Edward Hirsch's "Fast Break" fits into the discussion. The fact that Hirsch's poem is dedicated to a man who died young encourages me to see see something more than the literal, more than a basketball poem, yet not abandoning or cheating on basketball as a worthwhile subject. Why and how does one write a basketball poem that serves as an elegy for a deceased friend? Doesn't Hirsch risk trivializing both the game and the friend?

I think the poem does succeed in both purposes, but I'm baffled as to how to explain it.

Fast Break by Edward Hirsch : The Poetry Foundation [poem] : Find Poems and Poets. Discover Poetry.

Autumn Begins in Martins Ferry, Ohio by James Wright : The Poetry Foundation [poem] : Find Poems and Poets. Discover Poetry.

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Poem for a Day: "Autumn Begins in Martins Ferry, Ohio" by James Wright

Friday night lights: high school football players “gallop terribly” against each other, both the arty, abstract version (or is it just a bad photo?) and plain old family album realism.










You can find James Wright’s poem at poetryfoundation.org:
http://www.poetryfoundation.org/archive/poem.html?id=177228

I’ll try to make this the last Wright poem for a long while. But it is now officially autumn, and I did see part of a high school game last Friday. Moreover, I grew up in or near towns like Martins Ferry on the Ohio River—often as not, steel and coal towns.

An obvious question arises: can serious art center on football or other sports?

Before you offer your final answer, the answer you must stand by for the rest of your life, you might want to watch the documentary film, Go, Tigers, which centers on another Ohio team, the Massillon High Tigers of 1999. Massillon’s is a legendary program, like those in Pennsylvania or Odessa, Texas. I think Go, Tigers succeeds in the way any serious work about sports must succeed: it makes itself about more than the sport itself—sport as metaphor, sport as vehicle, sport as revelation of character, sport as sociology, politics, even art. Maybe I could argue that this film and this poem are also about England, India, and China--anywhere the children of industrial centers, large or small, try to find their way.

If you hate organized sports, especially at the high school level, Go, Tigers should both challenge and confirm your thinking. So too might “Autumn Begins in Martins Ferry, Ohio,” and it’s a lot shorter and easier to get to.

* * * *

Poem of the day: James Wright's "A Blessing"

For James Wright’s “A Blessing,” copy and paste:

http://www.poetryfoundation.org/archive/poet.html?id=7564

Although I like cheering for the little guy, I want to plug the website for Poetry magazine, which is no underdog. The site also includes some good commentary about a variety of poems and poets.

“A Blessing” is one Wright’s best known works. I like his comfort with content that some serious thinkers might deem sentimental or relentlessly optimistic. But are those fair conclusions?

Notice how Wright softens some major assertions by cloaking them within four lines in the middle of the poem (from “They ripple” to . . . “no loneliness like theirs”), rather than closing the poem with didactic proclamations, as those lines might feel if they came at the end.

Also notice the paradox: love and loneliness are a pair. There’s no debate or explanation; they just belong together, a couple. If the mental process in these lines is that complex and subtle, can we rightly call the lines or the whole poem sentimental—that is, saccharine and simplistic, as opposed to being respectably restrained in thought and language?

In a similar vein, watch out for that hurdle into the final two lines. Are they OK? How did Wright get there? Epiphany is the most likely explanation, but does that justify or explain this particular leap? Should the poem justify or explain the leap more than it does?

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