What are Poets For? : On John Haines

Fables and Distances: New and Selected Essays by John Meade Haines

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


This collection of essays is a long-term consideration of the writing life and all its aesthetic and critical potential. John Haines will stand out from now on to me as a voice from the wilderness, speaking of the need to consider all that has been lost as human beings cover the globe in an endless cycle of production and consumption, construction and destruction. The wisdom of the aging Haines of the 1980s and 1990s lies in his realization that this perspective on humanity at first seems to pit it against nature, but actually it is only ever a part of nature. Something in this idea may have helped Haines attain the acceptance, or at least resignation, for the onslaught of human progress, though at the same time he would never stop speaking for the wilderness, for an ancient world where poetry had mystic power, for “a certain attention” that is born only in such states of quietude, detachment, and thoughtfulness as were once common elements of our life, but increasingly less so.

I love that the collection includes both longer, deeply-considered arguments (“What are Poets For?” and “On a Certain Attention to the World” stand out) as well as occasional pieces as seemingly insignificant as a letter to the New York Times Book Review addressing a young girl who wanted to become a “success” in poetry. What the juxtaposition reveals is that a single voice may present a largely consistent message in a great variety of venues. This message concerns the role reading and writing ought to play in modern life: a greater one. And not just any reading and writing, but reading and writing that aids us in cultivating the attention we need, that gives us the power to consider, and perhaps revise, our social and cultural values. For a true poet, the problems of a rapidly globalizing, industrializing and domesticating society can be summed up as a kind of loss of attention, a lowering of awareness. The wilderness, our attachments to the earth, our attachments to each other, our sense of spirit, and our very minds, especially the feelings and judgments of the mind, are in great peril. They always have been, but it always gets worse.

Poetry has always been a way to speak that gets the attention, that increases awareness. Poetry in the age of the declining wilderness must take up this decline and this wilderness as its theme. Poetry in an age when our attachments to the earth have grown brittle and feeble must present the problem along with a vision of something healthier. Poetry must restore our spirit and our very minds by the sheer application of the faculty to read, to write, and to imagine. If more people imagined a better world, or even a worse one, then the world would change.

Poetry is the main subject of most of these thirty-plus writings, though poems themselves do not always appear. Thus I have come to believe that an implicit point in this collection is that poetic language can be found in prose. To the degree that a poem is any text that is read in such a way as to re-direct the attention back at the form of the work, to suggest a sense that lies in the music and craft behind the words and statements, and not only in the sense of the words and statements themselves, well then to that degree prose may be poetic.

The autobiographical essay is thus in a sense an prose-lyric-poem. “Within the Words: An Apprenticeship,” (1991) for example as both a prosaic and a poetic sense. The prosaic sense is to account for the young poet’s progress towards answering life’s call to read and write. There are moving elements distinct to this prosaic sense, which we may also call “the story.” The turning point, for example, when Haines decided to “abandon” drawing and painting to devote more of his day to poetry, is the central decision, and thus the climax, of the story. But the story contains more that is of a more poetic than prosaic sense, as we can see in the portrait of the poet Charles Olson:

He read two of the poems in a ponderous and pontifical manner, staring out over the small audience from behind his eyeglasses, looking rather like a stranded walrus. It was my first poetry reading, and I found the poems for the most part impenetrable.

This portrait certainly adds to the driving force of the story, but it also makes the reader change the direction of his attention. Our gaze is focused on an image, which is colored lovingly with metaphor. The moment soon passes, for the story must go on, but it was indeed a moment, a kind of pause in the story, though “pause” is misleading in that it detracts from the real motion of the lines (“staring” strikes me as the eye of the poetic moment here).

The truth is, there is no firm boundary between prose and poetry, story and image, motion and stillness. When a statement needs expressing with emphasis, then it needs modification so that the reader’s attention will zoom in on the statement and then be redirected to consider the statement again. This modification is what may be labeled “form,” and the statement itself is the “content.” So clearly form and content are inseparable. Haines’ consistent point throughout his prose is that form and content must be continually developed anew. Sometimes form and content develop simultaneously, as in many lyric poems where the speaker and his attachment to language emerge together. But content can also come first, leaving the artist with the project of fashioning the correct form to put out the content in the most effective way. Haines thinks this is how poets probably worked most often in the past, but can no longer do so.

Here are some statements that seem to me both prosaic and poetic, statements with basic sense and tailored to a form that is self-referential, even musical:

“Literature is the written expression of revolt against accepted things.”

--Thomas Hardy, quoted in “What are Poets For?”

“Political indifference is ethical indifference.”

--Hermann Broch, quoted at least twice

“How beastly the bourgeois is!”

--D.H. Lawrence

“When did we stop taking our words seriously, and cease to believe that what we had to say really mattered?” -- “What are Poets For?”

“In order to write such poems you must have a certain conviction, and be willing to submit that conviction to scrutiny, to questioning, and, if justified, to doubt.”

“Turn the page, and it continues with a new title. And into this hectic, driven journey with no destination are blown up from moment to moment scraps of newsprint, discarded announcements and ripped posters, to accompany, to illustrate and emphasize, the pop culture of our time, with its neon-lit totems that crowd the highways and litter the malls: BUNS, TACOS, VIDEO RENTALS, USED CARS, CINEMA, TRAVEL, BANKING, NINTENDO, etc...And all of it with no visible center, no perceptible order, and nearly without end.” -- “In and Out of the Loop: Review of John Ashberry’s Hotel Lautréamont”

“It is a strategy that in this case, and despite an initial and lingering sense of a false note, can be said to work.” -- “Less than Holy: Review of Philip Levine’s The Bread of Time: Toward an Autobiography”

“I recommend The Estate of Poetry for its wisdom, its clarity and generosity, for its quiet and embracing passion that offers a balanced and effective reply to all current and perennial wars among poets. What it has to tell us can never grow old, for it is the very ground of poetry.” --from Haines’ introduction to the volume.

“Among the things I was shown was a photograph of the first small house he had built on that shore, with nothing but space and ocean around it. Standing at the top of the tower with Donnan Jeffers, I compared that photograph with the densely settled scene before me, and I felt acutely how discouraging and embittering that intrusion on his solitude might have been to him, taking from him finally all but a piece of land not much larger than a normal city lot. It was a lesson in how relentless and cynical in its regard for the intrinsic nature of a place our society has always been. In the face of that encroachment, fulfilling his own prophecies, Jeffers’s patience (or resignation) seems exemplary.” -- “On Robinson Jeffers”

“A poem is anything said in such a way, set down on the page in such a way, as to invite a certain kind of attention.” -- William Stafford, quoted in “Formal Objections: Review of Expansive Poetry: Essays on the New Narrative & the New Formalism”

“I would feel much better about the intentions of these formalist poets if they simply wrote their poems and let us dispense with the programming and the self-advertising. Whatever there may be of a reforming character in their poems would sooner or later speak for itself and far more persuasively than all the dubious rehearsals of the lapses and failures of modernism.” -- “Formal Objections”

“Wyatt Prunty’s academically corrective discussion of minor poems by Creeley and Ammons trails off into absurdity, and his essay otherwise is mainly contemptible.” -- “Formal Objections”

...Poetic form in its proper sense is a question of what appears within the poem itself. It seems worth while to isolate this because it is always form in its inimical senses that destroys poetry. By inimical senses one means the trivialities. By appearance within the poem one means the things created and existing there. The trivialities matter little today, and most people concede that poetic form is not a matter of literary modes.” -- Wallace Stevens, quoted in “Formal Objections,” and in other places as well

“I am not in favor of an art that is too subjective.” -- Milosz, quoted in “Something for Our Poetry.”

“...the potential subject, Nature, is so vast an inclusive that it is not easy to imagine it being exhausted by any amount of study and writing. Nonetheless, the capacity of this society to seize upon, promote, and trivialize any and every enthusiasm should not be discounted. Few people really know Nature in any depth or detail, whereas many would write about it, if for no other reason than that they have read some of the books and because it is now the thing to do.” -- “Reflections on the Nature of Writing.”

“...I learn more of contemporary life from reading a story by Ray Carver or Richard Ford, more about society and its political arrangements from an interview with Noam Chomsky, than I do from reading any poet I can name at the moment. The reasons for this are probably complex, but may owe something to the perceived position of the poet within society, and which might be stated: ‘Society behaves as if I did not exist. Therefore I will write as if society did not exist.’”

“The essence of modernism, in poetry, as in literature and art generally, has been identified with a clearing away of historical debris and cultural baggage, that the spirit of the age -- mutilated, skeptical of inherited values, but determined in any event to seize from the wreckage something it can hold up as truth -- might find adequate expression and at least a partial fulfillment. And this expression must have at its command a means an potential effect not dispersed or deflected by traditional consolations, whether in terms of an agreeable music or of familiar structures, at least where these would seem to support the illusion of a harmony that no longer exists.” Letter to Hudson Review

“The modernist revolution may be over and, typical of revolutions, has left in its wake mainly confusion and the petty tyranny of factions. But what remains most important is the astonishing variety and richness of American poetry in the first half of the century; an achievement that includes Eliot and Williams, includes Pound, Jeffers, Stevens, Crane, Moore, Cummings, and a number of other people, none of whom resemble each other in either manner or substance.” -- Letter to New Criterion, November 1988

“Learn first to be an intelligent and passionate reader. If you must be ‘successful,’ then find an occupation that will allow you that; and write, if you must, when you can and what you can.” Letter to a girl, July 1988

“To look at the world: and when we have learned once more to look, we see the possibility of renewal, of an implied order, in every aspect of the life around us. In the stillness of leaves floating in a forest pool; in the flight pattern of a flock of birds obedient to an invisible current of air; in the twilight folding of a particular hillside...Sometimes I think that is all we are really here for: to look at the world, and to see as much as we can.”

“When we observe cattle or sheep grazing in a pasture, we are looking at a fallen species. Compared to the alertness of the wild creature, a steer or a sheep is changed, into something less, even while we sense in the dulled gaze of the domestic beast a wildness that is merely slumbering and is never completely converted. And it seems all too likely that as we have tamed and reduced these creatures according to their utility, we have at the same time deformed something in ourselves.”

“What we see depends on an inner, psychic disposition, so that there can be no final and objective view of anything. The world changes before our eyes, and mind, to call it something, is an endless unfolding of many complex relations.”

“It is not so much Christ himself, as personality, as historical reality, that is figured in so many representations in the art of the time, and who looks out from countless nativities, but a new soul in a new man. This new soul may never, except in a few individuals, have come to completeness, but it was there, as promise and potential, and of which we have the lasting evidence in the art that survives.”

And there are so many more, which explains to some degree why I took such time and care in reading this book. I should name the beginnings of disagreements, too: when Haines decries the lack of love poetry, why doesn’t American popular song count for him? Why does he seem to read no women or black poets at all, ever? But these are but quibbles against the very real moral and ethical grounding to reading and writing that Haines offers; I can do much worse than to offer in return my thanks.

The final entry in this book, “Early Sorrow,” offers the deeply personal and exposing story of an early childhood romantic attachment. This is a great surprise after reading so many passages against writing that is entirely subjective or personal or autobiographic. The solution seems to be that Haines presents his memories as something other than entirely subjective. Certainly one passage makes this explicit:

What is missing now is that increasingly rare mysteriousness of departure, and the sense of a whole new adventure beginning, and which I suspect lies near the heart of the human experience of life on earth.

Haines is describing a ferry ride here, but beauty of the idea is that it applies to his first feelings of romantic, sexual attachment to girls just as well. Also, Haines’ keen sense of “what is missing now” refers more often to his own perception than to any universal statement of fact; this idea occurs to Haines himself in the end:

Would we have found anything to say to each other? When I thought of that -- of facing each other and finding the necessary words -- the suppressed memory of my own folly and embarrassment returend with a rush, and with it a stumbling inability to speak. There remained that slim blue question mark in the cold stands, and scattered like dust or pollen over the wrinkled vastness of a continent the improbably elements of a story that no one would ever write. Though, as I say this, it occurs to me that it has already been written many times.

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I love that the collection includes both longer, deeply-considered arguments (“What are Poets For?” and “On a Certain Attention to the World” stand out) as well as occasional pieces as seemingly insignificant as a letter to the New York Times Book Review addressing a young girl who wanted to become a “success” in poetry. What the juxtaposition reveals is that a single voice may present a largely consistent message in a great variety of venues. This message concerns the role reading and writing ought to play in modern life: a greater one. And not just any reading and writing, but reading and writing that aids us in cultivating the attention we need, that gives us the power to consider, and perhaps revise, our social and cultural values. For a true poet, the problems of a rapidly globalizing, industrializing and domesticating society can be summed up as a kind of loss of attention, a lowering of awareness. The wilderness, our attachments to the earth, our attachments to each other, our sense of spirit, and our very minds, especially the feelings and judgments of the mind, are in great peril. They always have been, but it always gets worse.

Poetry has always been a way to speak that gets the attention, that increases awareness. Poetry in the age of the declining wilderness must take up this decline and this wilderness as its theme. Poetry in an age when our attachments to the earth have grown brittle and feeble must present the problem along with a vision of something healthier. Poetry must restore our spirit and our very minds by the sheer application of the faculty to read, to write, and to imagine. If more people imagined a better world, or even a worse one, then the world would change.

Poetry is the main subject of most of these thirty-plus writings, though poems themselves do not always appear. Thus I have come to believe that an implicit point in this collection is that poetic language can be found in prose. To the degree that a poem is any text that is read in such a way as to re-direct the attention back at the form of the work, to suggest a sense that lies in the music and craft behind the words and statements, and not only in the sense of the words and statements themselves, well then to that degree prose may be poetic.

The autobiographical essay is thus in a sense an prose-lyric-poem. “Within the Words: An Apprenticeship,” (1991) for example as both a prosaic and a poetic sense. The prosaic sense is to account for the young poet’s progress towards answering life’s call to read and write. There are moving elements distinct to this prosaic sense, which we may also call “the story.” The turning point, for example, when Haines decided to “abandon” drawing and painting to devote more of his day to poetry, is the central decision, and thus the climax, of the story. But the story contains more that is of a more poetic than prosaic sense, as we can see in the portrait of the poet Charles Olson:

He read two of the poems in a ponderous and pontifical manner, staring out over the small audience from behind his eyeglasses, looking rather like a stranded walrus. It was my first poetry reading, and I found the poems for the most part impenetrable.

This portrait certainly adds to the driving force of the story, but it also makes the reader change the direction of his attention. Our gaze is focused on an image, which is colored lovingly with metaphor. The moment soon passes, for the story must go on, but it was indeed a moment, a kind of pause in the story, though “pause” is misleading in that it detracts from the real motion of the lines (“staring” strikes me as the eye of the poetic moment here).

The truth is, there is no firm boundary between prose and poetry, story and image, motion and stillness. When a statement needs expressing with emphasis, then it needs modification so that the reader’s attention will zoom in on the statement and then be redirected to consider the statement again. This modification is what may be labeled “form,” and the statement itself is the “content.” So clearly form and content are inseparable. Haines’ consistent point throughout his prose is that form and content must be continually developed anew. Sometimes form and content develop simultaneously, as in many lyric poems where the speaker and his attachment to language emerge together. But content can also come first, leaving the artist with the project of fashioning the correct form to put out the content in the most effective way. Haines thinks this is how poets probably worked most often in the past, but can no longer do so.

Here are some statements that seem to me both prosaic and poetic, statements with basic sense and tailored to a form that is self-referential, even musical:

“Literature is the written expression of revolt against accepted things.”

--Thomas Hardy, quoted in “What are Poets For?”

“Political indifference is ethical indifference.”

--Hermann Broch, quoted at least twice

“How beastly the bourgeois is!”

--D.H. Lawrence

“When did we stop taking our words seriously, and cease to believe that what we had to say really mattered?” -- “What are Poets For?”

“In order to write such poems you must have a certain conviction, and be willing to submit that conviction to scrutiny, to questioning, and, if justified, to doubt.”

“Turn the page, and it continues with a new title. And into this hectic, driven journey with no destination are blown up from moment to moment scraps of newsprint, discarded announcements and ripped posters, to accompany, to illustrate and emphasize, the pop culture of our time, with its neon-lit totems that crowd the highways and litter the malls: BUNS, TACOS, VIDEO RENTALS, USED CARS, CINEMA, TRAVEL, BANKING, NINTENDO, etc...And all of it with no visible center, no perceptible order, and nearly without end.” -- “In and Out of the Loop: Review of John Ashberry’s Hotel Lautréamont”

“It is a strategy that in this case, and despite an initial and lingering sense of a false note, can be said to work.” -- “Less than Holy: Review of Philip Levine’s The Bread of Time: Toward an Autobiography”

“I recommend The Estate of Poetry for its wisdom, its clarity and generosity, for its quiet and embracing passion that offers a balanced and effective reply to all current and perennial wars among poets. What it has to tell us can never grow old, for it is the very ground of poetry.” --from Haines’ introduction to the volume.

“Among the things I was shown was a photograph of the first small house he had built on that shore, with nothing but space and ocean around it. Standing at the top of the tower with Donnan Jeffers, I compared that photograph with the densely settled scene before me, and I felt acutely how discouraging and embittering that intrusion on his solitude might have been to him, taking from him finally all but a piece of land not much larger than a normal city lot. It was a lesson in how relentless and cynical in its regard for the intrinsic nature of a place our society has always been. In the face of that encroachment, fulfilling his own prophecies, Jeffers’s patience (or resignation) seems exemplary.” -- “On Robinson Jeffers”

“A poem is anything said in such a way, set down on the page in such a way, as to invite a certain kind of attention.” -- William Stafford, quoted in “Formal Objections: Review of Expansive Poetry: Essays on the New Narrative & the New Formalism”

“I would feel much better about the intentions of these formalist poets if they simply wrote their poems and let us dispense with the programming and the self-advertising. Whatever there may be of a reforming character in their poems would sooner or later speak for itself and far more persuasively than all the dubious rehearsals of the lapses and failures of modernism.” -- “Formal Objections”

“Wyatt Prunty’s academically corrective discussion of minor poems by Creeley and Ammons trails off into absurdity, and his essay otherwise is mainly contemptible.” -- “Formal Objections”

...Poetic form in its proper sense is a question of what appears within the poem itself. It seems worth while to isolate this because it is always form in its inimical senses that destroys poetry. By inimical senses one means the trivialities. By appearance within the poem one means the things created and existing there. The trivialities matter little today, and most people concede that poetic form is not a matter of literary modes.” -- Wallace Stevens, quoted in “Formal Objections,” and in other places as well

“I am not in favor of an art that is too subjective.” -- Milosz, quoted in “Something for Our Poetry.”

“...the potential subject, Nature, is so vast an inclusive that it is not easy to imagine it being exhausted by any amount of study and writing. Nonetheless, the capacity of this society to seize upon, promote, and trivialize any and every enthusiasm should not be discounted. Few people really know Nature in any depth or detail, whereas many would write about it, if for no other reason than that they have read some of the books and because it is now the thing to do.” -- “Reflections on the Nature of Writing.”

“...I learn more of contemporary life from reading a story by Ray Carver or Richard Ford, more about society and its political arrangements from an interview with Noam Chomsky, than I do from reading any poet I can name at the moment. The reasons for this are probably complex, but may owe something to the perceived position of the poet within society, and which might be stated: ‘Society behaves as if I did not exist. Therefore I will write as if society did not exist.’”

“The essence of modernism, in poetry, as in literature and art generally, has been identified with a clearing away of historical debris and cultural baggage, that the spirit of the age -- mutilated, skeptical of inherited values, but determined in any event to seize from the wreckage something it can hold up as truth -- might find adequate expression and at least a partial fulfillment. And this expression must have at its command a means an potential effect not dispersed or deflected by traditional consolations, whether in terms of an agreeable music or of familiar structures, at least where these would seem to support the illusion of a harmony that no longer exists.” Letter to Hudson Review

“The modernist revolution may be over and, typical of revolutions, has left in its wake mainly confusion and the petty tyranny of factions. But what remains most important is the astonishing variety and richness of American poetry in the first half of the century; an achievement that includes Eliot and Williams, includes Pound, Jeffers, Stevens, Crane, Moore, Cummings, and a number of other people, none of whom resemble each other in either manner or substance.” -- Letter to New Criterion, November 1988

“Learn first to be an intelligent and passionate reader. If you must be ‘successful,’ then find an occupation that will allow you that; and write, if you must, when you can and what you can.” Letter to a girl, July 1988

“To look at the world: and when we have learned once more to look, we see the possibility of renewal, of an implied order, in every aspect of the life around us. In the stillness of leaves floating in a forest pool; in the flight pattern of a flock of birds obedient to an invisible current of air; in the twilight folding of a particular hillside...Sometimes I think that is all we are really here for: to look at the world, and to see as much as we can.”

“When we observe cattle or sheep grazing in a pasture, we are looking at a fallen species. Compared to the alertness of the wild creature, a steer or a sheep is changed, into something less, even while we sense in the dulled gaze of the domestic beast a wildness that is merely slumbering and is never completely converted. And it seems all too likely that as we have tamed and reduced these creatures according to their utility, we have at the same time deformed something in ourselves.”

“What we see depends on an inner, psychic disposition, so that there can be no final and objective view of anything. The world changes before our eyes, and mind, to call it something, is an endless unfolding of many complex relations.”

“It is not so much Christ himself, as personality, as historical reality, that is figured in so many representations in the art of the time, and who looks out from countless nativities, but a new soul in a new man. This new soul may never, except in a few individuals, have come to completeness, but it was there, as promise and potential, and of which we have the lasting evidence in the art that survives.”

And there are so many more, which explains to some degree why I took such time and care in reading this book. I should name the beginnings of disagreements, too: when Haines decries the lack of love poetry, why doesn’t American popular song count for him? Why does he seem to read no women or black poets at all, ever? But these are but quibbles against the very real moral and ethical grounding to reading and writing that Haines offers; I can do much worse than to offer in return my thanks.

The final entry in this book, “Early Sorrow,” offers the deeply personal and exposing story of an early childhood romantic attachment. This is a great surprise after reading so many passages against writing that is entirely subjective or personal or autobiographic. The solution seems to be that Haines presents his memories as something other than entirely subjective. Certainly one passage makes this explicit:

What is missing now is that increasingly rare mysteriousness of departure, and the sense of a whole new adventure beginning, and which I suspect lies near the heart of the human experience of life on earth.

Haines is describing a ferry ride here, but beauty of the idea is that it applies to his first feelings of romantic, sexual attachment to girls just as well. Also, Haines’ keen sense of “what is missing now” refers more often to his own perception than to any universal statement of fact; this idea occurs to Haines himself in the end:

Would we have found anything to say to each other? When I thought of that -- of facing each other and finding the necessary words -- the suppressed memory of my own folly and embarrassment returend with a rush, and with it a stumbling inability to speak. There remained that slim blue question mark in the cold stands, and scattered like dust or pollen over the wrinkled vastness of a continent the improbably elements of a story that no one would ever write. Though, as I say this, it occurs to me that it has already been written many times.

View all my reviews >>
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