Matthew Lippman and David Weiss

A Conversation about Poetry - Part 2

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I think I have been trying to say the impossible thing out loud since I was a boy.

We ended our confab in the fall issue, talking about the “me,” the “world” and the transit and intercourse between them, in and out, back and forth; it gave way to the idea that these dualities are inadequate to our experience and that we, the “me,” are also in the world and the world is also in us. Another way of saying this is that poetry’s telos, its work, is to find ways of saying the unsayable. Maybe a way to ground a term like the “unsayable” is to say that lived experience and our use of language to capture it can draw near each other and all but touch. This is where we pick up . . .

David:

I think I have been trying to say the impossible thing out loud since I was a boy.

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This line of yours, Matthew, came to mind while was I reading Diane Seuss’s new book of poems Modern Poetry last night. More exactly:  it came to mind this morning as I recalled reading Seuss’s poem “Monody” which, like the book as a whole, is retrospective and self-critical. She doesn’t cut herself any slack, an inclination (or practice) I sometimes think of as speaking against oneself, something she fiercely shares with Louise Glück.

To grieve is a dilettantish

stand-in for the subject

of my grief.

Meaning, to my mind, that it’s not the feeling of grief that matters to her. It’s the subject of grief and it’s also whom and what she is grieving for that matters. Another way of saying this is that it’s a poem about poetry, about how hard it is to move out beyond our illusions. That’s what she views the work of poetry to be.

I don’t know how

to feel anymore.

Use metaphor,

But don’t adhere to her.

As more than once

I was used but not adored.

It’s sorrowful, Seuss’s “used but not adored,” but she is likening what happened to her as what one must do with metaphor: use it “but don’t adhere to her.” It’s the use that metaphor is put to that matters. Don’t be beguiled by it. The same goes for adoration. It’s the work of a poem to use its experience, which may be bitter yet part of the long, difficult effort of self-knowledge to find the redemption song in it — worth that doesn’t close its eyes to what she calls “the garbage.” That “garbage” is the “bag of garbage” she brings with her “onto the stage” in the next poem in the collection, “Villanelle” — which is not a villanelle but a dream about reading one on stage.

That poem ends,

Go back for the garbage and deal with it.

In doing so, if you rouse a swarm of flies,

they’re yours to tolerate or swat. Choose

your poison but don’t poison the well.

Your dreams are just dreams,

and all dreams go up in smoke.

The thing that must not be done is “poison the well.” The material is hard, it’s “the garbage,” the difficult stuff. But what you do with it in a poem is to make something of it that is more poem than it is you. It must take you beyond yourself. I know that may sound mystical. But it isn’t, really. Writing a poem makes a claim on the writer. Or, the poem you write makes the claim. And its sole imperative is: “don’t poison the well.” Maybe, then, the poem is “the well.” Don’t throw your garbage in it. Like metaphor, you have to use it. To put it to use.

This, finally, brings us to where I started this train of thought — with what you said, “I have trying to say the impossible thing out loud since I was a boy.”

I think that “impossible thing,” has to do with finding the words, almost beyond expression, that capture the feel of lived life, of one’s living life.

And the feeling of impossibility comes from how hard it is to capture that. To capture it without destroying it — like trying to cup a bee in your hands.

How I see your likeness to Seuss is in trying to render the impossible thing, you have to give full weight to “the weariness, the fever, and the fret,” Keats’s words for the “garbage,” without which you can’t catch and keep alive the impossible thing.

A poem that doesn’t do justice to the garbage would itself be poisoned by fantasy.

There wouldn’t be enough difficult life in it to make the magic trick of creating “news that stays new” work.

This is what you manage to make happen. You get your hands dirty. You’re a one-man nitty-gritty dirt band.

I’m thinking of this stanza from your poem “Marriage Pants”: (the whole of “Marriage Pants” appears at the end of this conversation): 

Then there was Katie and Todd who loved caviar and sparrows.

They wanted to have a kid and thank fuck they didn’t.

When Katie left she blew up Todd’s motorcycle

and the neighborhood kids ran down the block for a second

to see the debris

then went back to their basketballs and bong hits.

The line that hurts for all your non-sequiturish humor is the last one which erases Katie and Todd, a thing they have already done to themselves. And that’s what drives the ending towards its stoicism.

My kid cries because her hands are wet;
my wife undresses in front of open windows.
 

What am I supposed to do?
 

I wake up.
I say good morning.
I put on my pants.

It’s not a poem about fidelity, it turns out. It’s a poem about the sadness of how life can run through your fingers like water or disappears like smoke. And the writer of this poem is not going to allow that disenchantment to preside.

But you don’t say this. That’s just me gisting it out. The gist doesn’t make us grind our teeth. The representations of the garbage does. The weariness. The fever. The fret. That’s why “Marriage Pants” is so good, my friend.

And, in fact, the figure of Keats’s nightingale runs through Seuss’s book. The book’s last line is, “But the nightingale, I said.”

That bird’s song grows fainter as it flies from tree to tree even into the next vale, and the night, which has been coming on throughout Keats’s poem, gets darker and darker.

The bird and its song know nothing of the human realm “where but to think is to be full of sorrow.”

That bird is one of the impossible things. Even as the poem itself expresses an impossible thing.

In your case, Matthew, it’s acknowledged helplessness before all the fragilities of daughter and wife that becomes the poem’s strength. It involves a kind of surrender. The consequence of all the accumulations. It’s a kind of polyphony that you create. In some poems it’s a polyphony of voices. Here it’s all the micro-stories that are tallied.

It goes without saying that there is no one “impossible thing”; that is made possible inside the pressure cooker of writing a poem. And it should be said, it doesn't happen often. Here you really pull it off.

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Matthew: You had mentioned ‘The Idea of Order at Key West” the other day. I had not read the poem for years. Yesterday, walking the dog, I pulled it up on my phone. I kept thinking about how stupid I was in my 20s and 30s, even 40s. I never got the poem. It’s a slow roll with me. Then, yesterday, it all slammed me on the pavement, hard, and when I got to the penultimate stanza, ‘Ramon Fernandez, tell me if you know . . . I wept, right there on the street, the dog pulling me toward her next sniff. I can’t say why. It doesn’t matter why. It’s like when a song tears open your chest, and you can’t help the heaving. 

This is the unsayable thing, and I agree with Seuss:

I don’t know how

to feel anymore.

Use metaphor,

But don’t adhere to her.

As more than once

I was used but not adored.

What is there left to use metaphor for? Even to feel anymore though when it happens it’s great because I wouldn’t trade that moment for anything, on the street, finding Mr. Fernandez who came out of nowhere, suddenly, like a charge. You do something long enough, write these poems, they almost seem to feel like beautiful litter. Little shards in the window of nothing and who can remember the last poem one wrote when you write so much. The mystery become demystified.

In your piece that you sent me, “How Over Why Any Day,” you pop this language into my heart:

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And that was how

I found it

or it found me

One moment I was

lowering a pump

into the sump hole

and in the next

a sparrow was

perching on my shoulder

in that windowless

basement that was

knee-deep

in sewery water  

a nether world

that makes possible

the couch and the coffee

The mystery makes the world. You lower the pump and then the sparrow lands on your shoulder and that’s what makes everything possible. That surprise and maybe, just maybe, we don’t write to capture the essence of the thing, whatever the thing is. Maybe we write to be shocked out of our guts, so we can have those sparrows, David, find our shoulders more and more and more often than we could have ever imagined. 

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David: I once had the thought that W. C. Williams’ “no ideas but in things,” which is his koan-like conception of embodiment in poetry, really meant that the entirety of a poem was itself the embodying or concretizing of an idea and that idea was not just an abstracted gist but actually the grounded experience of the idea in the world. And for me, that meant experience rendered in language was far stranger and more idiosyncratic and individual that our shorthand representations. That, to me, is the impossible thing, or one of them. That’s the thing we trust poetry to do, though it’s a trust reaffirmed every time we come across a poem that does that impossible thing of manifestation. And, the thing is, the impossible is not the end point, the thing you arrive at. You feel it from the start of a poem as if it were drawing a map whose scale is 1:1.

I have always marveled at the way you think through feeling, Matthew. I, on the other hand, feel through thinking (a formulation that’s probably too clever by half). And because all your feeling spreads across the poem, it’s important to say that you also think by plurality (which earlier I called polyphony). You allow others in. And that plurality has no unanimity. There’s lots of friction and cacophony. Lots of differences. So, your thinking is a lamination of thinkings. And they all get suspended in a kind of supersaturated way (by which I mean that the solution, which should lose its liquidity and crystallize into a solid, doesn’t). One great virtue is that it lets you even think against yourself in your lateral movements. 

In “The Idea of Order” Stevens goes impossible on us right away: “She sang beyond the genius of the sea.” It’s almost impossible to paraphrase. What’s beyond mean here? And, beyond the genius of? And what is the genius of the sea? You could make a religion of that word beyond. Or of the elusive. And yet it’s where we want to be. And all in the first line. A poem is an environment. A landscape. A hologram. It puts you inside it. And it puts itself inside you. Maybe that’s the strange elation of reading a poem when it does that or, put otherwise, when you are susceptible to it. You manage to do that, too. Create an environment. In your case a social world. There are always others in it. You share that with Tony Hoagland, who, I know, you miss. 

There’s more to say about Seuss’s Modern Love and her dyadic ways (as opposed to your pluralistic ones). In Frank: Sonnets, she’s pluralistic in an effervescent way. But I’ll stop here for now.

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Matthew: A poem is an environment. You just said that. This surprises me because it’s so familiar. I never put the word environment next to the word poem. I have put the word landscape next to the word poem. Recently, I have been interested in the word colors or coloring next to the word poem. Juan Felipe Herrera uses those words when he talks about poems. Color and coloring. Or, colorings. Your word ‘environment’ challenges something about a poem. Not that it is a landscape – a place with hills and streams and buildings and trees. More, the word ‘environment’ alludes to aura, spirit. It’s physical and metaphysical all at once. 

Then, I think about a young boy named Carl. I was his daycare provider back in 1988. I worked in a daycare center at McLean Hospital. When I resigned my position to take off for the great wildness of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop some of the parents gave me gifts. Carl’s parents bought me a collection of Elizabeth Bishop’s poems. Carl drew a tree on the inside cover and next to the tree his mother wrote, “Carl said this, ‘Poet-tree.’ There was an arrow pointing to his tree as if he knew, intuitively, or did not know at all, that a poem must be a manifestation of the physical. Make of it what you will, but that’s one hell of an environment right there. The poem as tree. You can do with that what you like but it was, his expression, the model which I would try and follow. Make it all concrete. Like Bishop. No coincidence that his drawing lives in that book. Her imagery and the tightness of her poems. Something to appreciate even though Tony is more up my alley. Concrete, yes, but messy. That is what I appreciate about Tony’s poems. They are rivulets of water teeming down a window and though it might appear to be haphazard, chaotic, there is a great order to the environment of that pane of glass. 

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David: So then, environment. Atmosphere. Hologram. Tree. Especially if we consider what is now known about the virtually dendritic networks of fungal threads that connect trees across sometimes great distances. All this is in the spirit of “The Overstory,” Richard Powers novel about the secret life of trees and how they shape us. All of which rhymes with an idea in Emerson’s “Nature.” Without our language of or about the natural world, we wouldn’t have a way, symbolic / metaphoric, to characterize what’s going on inside ourselves. There’s nothing concrete about our innerness. By likening ourselves to things in nature and its processes, we become describable, apprehensible, allied. Nature not only gives us a vocabulary, but it shapes our understanding. Emerson really meant it when he called it the book of nature, that it’s our first book.

The virtue of this kind of figurative thinking – environment, tree – is that it begins to think of a poem as an organism in which all its elements are speaking or communicating to each other and, even change each other, by which I mean the more you read a poem that knocks your socks off, the more it changes through your growing understanding of it and its internal relationships. In that way, it’s alive, and metamorphically so.

It’s so alive that it can even renounce, repudiate or pull the rug out from under us. As in those lines of Seuss’s:

Use metaphor,

But don’t adhere to her.

As more than once

I was used but not adored.

Her poem ends by first allying herself with metaphor: “use metaphor . . . As more than once / I was used.” But already you can feel the way she was misused. Then you realize that “don’t adhere” is not the same as “not adored.”  She’s showing us the limits of metaphor even as she says: use it. Why “don’t adhere” to metaphor? Because “adhere” means “to stick to,” but it also means to obey and to conform. For Seuss, that’s the rub. A word can be so faceted that you can’t adhere to all of it, semantically. And, likewise, similar or alike is not the same thing as identical. It helps you see or understand one thing in terms of another, but do not mistake one thing for another. “I was used but not adored.” Seuss closes the poem with this line. And it hurts. It’s painful. And yet, metaphorically, adhere and adored are given to us as equivalent. And they are – but in a remarkable and ironic way. Adored has the same problem for Seuss (and for us) that adhere has: it means to love deeply, but it also means to worship or love excessively. She feels the hurt of not being adored, it’s a deep and primitive wound. But she also knows that there’s a problem with adored, however much it’s what she wants. 

And, now, having thought (and felt) this out, I think I understand the two lines that precede these four:

I don’t know how

to feel anymore.

Why doesn’t she know? Because it’s all so freaking complex and multi-faceted and murky and designed to thwart our desires. The problem with metaphor is the problem with love and because infidelities and betrayals are part of the nature of our reality, and that’s what we must give our fidelity to (i.e., to poetry) if we’re going to be truthful; we’re going to be hurt and we’re going to give our assent to it. It’s a bitch.

And, lastly, for now, Matthew, in the spirit of the great mycorrhizal network of the forests and of Carl’s tree, I have just looked back at first four lines of “Monody” and think I understand them now that I see how the parts of the beautiful machinery of the poem’s end go together. Here they are:

Kindness, like enthralling

madness

after shock 

treatments, is first to go.

So much at the start for the reader of a poem has to begin in abeyance. You don’t know what’s going on; however, the poem’s got you where it wants you. But now returning to the start, I can see that this is a poem about disenchantment, just as “Marriage Pants” is. And we just know that enchantment is like adoration. And like madness. It’s enthralling. But it’s a problem. Even as disenchantment is also a problem. Likewise, adoration is also a problem.  Even sobriety, the sobriety that follows shock treatment, is a problem. Even as sobriety is a solution — a state of perception that has perspective. These are the woods we are walking through: “To grieve is a dilettantish / stand-in for the subject / of my grief.” It makes you think that grieving can be like enchantment and adoration and madness. We are walking through the woods of disillusion. Of knowledge. And it’s a bummer. A bitch. But the poem that embeds us in this knowledge is thrilling. It’s what we’ve come to these woods for.

And now that I think of it, these are Tony Hoagland’s woods, too, the woods of disenchantment . . .

                                                            To Be Continued

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Marriage Pants

I don’t know when the shitstorm of failed marriage took off.
I’m talking about people who I went to high school with,
   to college and Italian villas—
where we could see Vesuvius and if we could not see it, imagine it,
and if we could not do that either,
played with the sound of the word
as it rolled around like horny lovers
in the backs of our throats.

There was Jack and Lucinda,
who spent three years building banjos
that neither of them ever played
but the plants flourished in their stinky apartment near Gowanus
so who cared.

The question persisted:
Who the hell am I
and what the hell have I done?

Then there was Katie and Todd who loved caviar and sparrows.
They wanted to have a kid and thank fuck they didn’t.
When Katie left she blew up Todd’s motorcycle
and the neighborhood kids ran down the block for a second
to see the debris
then went back to their basketballs and bong hits.

I wanted them to make it
for everyone on the planet.  I wanted her cancer and his insatiable desire for obese ladies
at the Target to be beaten into death;
to prove to the 21st century TV newscasters
that nobody knew what the hell they were talking about
when they newscasted on TV
that marriage was dying like an obese lady
in the lingerie department
at the local Target.

It felt weird,
like people weren’t getting divorced,
but more, like they were dying—
crawling into the earth with the worms and roots
to hide away in horror
while their children ran to the school bus and the Batmobile
and the EZ Bake oven that, of course,
could never, ever, ever,
catch fire.

It made me want to beat up my mailman
and the woman who sold me my internet cable
and the telephone guy, Lou,
like all of this was some reflection on how we had forgotten to talk
to one another.

But it wasn’t.
It was age.
The age of worn out marriage pants,
untended.  One leg torn at the knee,
the other, burned out in the crotch.
It was bad cloth, warped stitching, inseams with no in
and I knew it.

And then I got hitched.

Eight years later,
my buddy Stu said to me:
How do you stay connected?

I said:
You want to stay close, stay close.
You want to be in love, be in love.
It’s like watching TV
Like ping pong after dinner.
You pick up the clicker, you pick up
the paddle.

But who the hell was I?

Some mornings I get up and can’t tie my shoes.

I’m forty-four years old and can’t toast the seedless rye.
My kid cries because her hands are wet;
my wife undresses in front of open windows.

What am I supposed to do?

I wake up.
I say good morning.
I put on my pants.

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