Rilke's "Letters to a Young Poet": Letters 2 and 3

There's almost too much digest in these two letters--not least, my curiosity about what on earth Kappus wrote in his own letter that prompted Rilke to launch into such a disquisition about sex. I found those paeans rather tedious, but that may simply be my own predisposition to dislike the way in which men love to imagine that they understand what it's like to live in a woman's body . . . which is to say: although his idealistic ecstasy about human intimacy is not necessarily a fault, it's also not very attractive to me personally.

I'm more interested in certain passages that I find extremely alluring but that I'm convinced are not entirely true. This one, for example:

And let me promptly make a request: read as little as possible of aesthetic criticism--such things are either partisan views, petrified and grown senseless in their lifeless induration, or they are clever quibblings in which today one view wins and tomorrow the opposite. Works of art are of an infinite loneliness and with nothing so little to be reached as with criticism.

So much of the passage seems exactly right. Yes, criticism is often "petrified and grown senseless," often nothing more than "clever quibbling." Yes, yes yes, "works of art are of an infinite loneliness." But what about a poet's urge to draw together the "partisan views" that she has gathered from her own intense engagement with literature? What about this very letter that Rilke is writing to Kappus, in which he is telling the young man how to think about poetry and books and sexual desire? It seems to me that Rilke is writing exactly the sort of prose that he is warning Kappus not to read.

But I will stop talking now. What attracted or repelled you about these two letters?

The Years

Dawn Potter

            Dreamy as Tarzan, the years murmur

their old tune as we stride away from them

into our spotlit lives. Like fathers, they armor

themselves against loss, hawking phlegm

into coffee cans, scratching their scaly pates,

though a Nehi odor lingers in their cough,

faint as sour cream. Behind their rusty agate

stare slides a slow-rolling map of sloughed-

off days along the river. Scabby grapevines

grip the porch rails, courting light. A peahen

chitters in the weeds, and on the clothesline

the half-yellowed shirts of sweating men

sag like idle hands. The years hum our quavered names.

We clench our fists: panicked, ruthless, dumb, ashamed.

[from Same Old Story (CavanKerry Press, 2014)]

***

Baron Wormser tells me that he is planning to use "The Years" as a prompt poem in a workshop, and I keep wondering exactly what his writing prompt will be. I know he'd tell me if I asked, but for the moment I'm enjoying the curious sensation of pretending that I'm an outside observer of my own poem. What would you take as a writing prompt from this sonnet? I am having trouble thinking of anything at all . . . mostly because all I can focus on is what prompted me to write it in the first place: reading Woolf's The Years, reading Ford's The Sportswriter, copying out all of Shakespeare's sonnets, remembering my great uncles sitting in the grass on a Pennsylvania hill in the twilight, meditatively spitting chaw juice into old dog-food cans. . . .

Thank you all for your sweet and generous responses to yesterday's post.

I also noticed new comments on the Rilke's letters; so if you're keeping up with that conversation, you might want to check in.

Today I'll be prepping for a workshop I'm team-teaching tomorrow afternoon: a writing session with a local domestic-violence support group. I'll be working with a social worker who is is also one of my dearest friends in the world; but we've never taught together before, so everything will be new. I'm excited, though, to get my visiting-writer shtick out of the English classroom, and anyone who's followed this blog for a few years knows I myself been grappling with the fallout of a particularly loathsome household murder that destroyed the family of an old friend . .  the very friend whom I am meeting this morning: to walk together up a dirt road in the humid fog; to watch woodchucks and partridges scuttle ditch to ditch; to listen to the distant rumble of logging machinery in the forest; to talk in circles around what remains of her ragged, damaged heart.

Sometimes, out of the blue, people write to me about my books. It always, always feels like a miracle. And when the letter is like this one . . . well, I don't even know how to respond. Every time I try to speak, my eyes fill with tears.

Finally, this weekend, I received my copy of Same Old Story and finished it last night. Truth in advertising, Dawn, because this ain't the Same Old Story at all. This strikes me as a real departure for you, a real act of bravery, a real willingness to forego the earlier virtues and write very new Dawn Potter poems. There seems to be twists and turns in the language and in the push of the poem that you would not have made, or dared to make, before. I could give you lots of examples, but the individual cases are not to the point, it is the whole way of working and talking that I believe you are shifting. And change in and of itself is not great shakes, but these changes are changes in authority, in vision, in the desire to make language a different tool and they work remarkably well. 

I love the sheer balls of White Bear and the fact that it is in the same book as Spring on Ripley Road. I love the assertion and counterassertion of Ugly Town, the poem that absolutely undercuts itself as the light undercuts the ugliness of the town. There is a daring here and then an execution that is really remarkable. 

You were a remarkable poet, Dawn, before but you are reaching and pulling down new things that are very, very powerful. I admire this book and your enterprise in it very deeply.

It's already midsummer, and I've yet to post anything about food. To remedy that error, I will describe yesterday's impromptu romantic meal. Halfway through the morning, Tom and I realized that no boys would be home for dinner. Golly, what should we do with ourselves? Eat seafood was the obvious answer, so I drove to the fish market in Skowhegan to see what I could find. What I brought home was a dozen Taunton Bay oysters, which Tom shucked and served on the comical enameled tin pie plate that my Great-Aunt Joan once mailed me for reasons that still seem unclear. However, as you can see from the table setting, it goes charmingly with the 50s-era diner table that we found in a garage as well as the red-striped drinking glasses from the Goodwill and the pale blue plates that my grandmother bought in the early 60s on piece-by-piece special from a New Jersey grocery store.

After we ate the oysters and finished listening to a Stevie Wonder record, I made scallop ceviche. I quartered the scallops (a pound of big fat fresh ones from New Bedford, Massachusetts, via the Skowhegan fish market) and mixed them with a pint of halved cherry tomatoes, three minced garlic scapes, a handful of chopped infant leeks, a sprinkle of cayenne, and a half cup of freshly squeezed lime juice. I let all of that sit in the refrigerator for 45 minutes, stirring it occasionally as I emptied the dishwasher, cooked Indian black-pepper rice (recipe available on request), listened to a Charlie Parker record, and giggled at Tom, who was in a silly and insouciant mood all evening. Just before serving the ceviche, I added a diced avocado, salt and pepper, and a handful of finely chopped mixed herbs: parsley, cilantro, and basil. And voila.

Rilke's "Letters to a Young Poet": More Responses and a Reading Schedule

I am overwhelmed by the beauty of what you all wrote in response to yesterday's post. Everything you said made so much sense to me, but Teresa's comment seemed to come from inside my own heart. That conundrum--doing the writing versus living the life--lies at the heart of my anxiety. Without living fully in my world, what material will I have? What morality will I have? Without stepping away from that world, what poems will I have? The sensation is perpetually distressing, and reading Rilke's letters does not make me feel any better. What I have to remember is that Rilke's world and my world are not identical. Neither is our poetry identical. A poet's life intersects with her writing: one feeds the other, and the key is learning to balance the needs of each. Easier said than done, of course. Jean says that "young writers typically dismiss their own experiences as not exciting enough," but I would argue that we all do this, at least to some extent. Why can't I be Shakespeare? Why do I just have to be me?

Carlene's response to the letters also moved me--in particular, the way in which she shifted so seamlessly from her teacher mind into her reader mind. That gives me so much hope for all of us: that no matter what we need to do for others, we have this fount of literature--of deep and engaged reading--to sustain and strengthen us. Carlene made this point much better than I am doing, but I think it goes back to another Frost Place conversation. Our students, co-workers, and family members have to put up with us, no matter what. So why not give them the "best us" we can? In other words, spending time on our own inner lives is not a waste of time, for either ourselves or our compatriots.

Ruth's recollection of some of the writing advice she received at the conference is also pertinent to these letters. "Gentleness of response" does not mean that the reader is shying away from acuity of perception or intensity of demand. Nicholas, I know you thrive on the vigorous language of revision, but in the mouths of many teachers, that flaying word choice works to manipulate and destroy rather than lead an apprentice poet to notice and construct. (You were very fortunate to have the teachers you worked with in your graduate program, but others are not so lucky. There are too many careless, self-aggrandizing, power-hungry teachers in the poetry world.) Anxiety is a blinder: when a student is cringing, she's not all that likely to be able to open herself to new ways of entering her own work. She may manage to follow what she perceives as teacher or classmate instructions, but that's not really useful in the long run. It seems to me that a good teacher's goal is to teach herself out of a job: that is, to bring the student to a sense of confidence in his own ability to make decisions about his poems. That's what I hear in Rilke's tone in these first two letters.

Both Nicholas and Maureen zero in on the way in which Rilke reveals his humanity as well as the challenge he makes to himself as an artist. Nicholas notes that "Rilke bleeds his heart right down onto the page." Maureen identifies "the great test" of Rilke's words: "what we are willing to forgo, give up, neglect, to write." This all goes back to what Teresa said about the tensions between writing and living. Rilke gives so much to Kappus, but what does he retain for himself? Is the unspoken also a lesson for us as teachers, mentors, compatriots, and solitary strivers?

Feel free to keep commenting on yesterday's post and to add your thoughts to today's, but let's also set a schedule for the next letters. How about letters 3 and 4 by Wednesday, July 17? If you all prefer to move more quickly (or more slowly), let me know.

Rilke's "Letters to a Young Poet": Intro and Letters 1 and 2

One thing that struck me about these opening letters was Rilke's complete disinterest in sugarcoating the flaws of apprentice writing. "Your verses have no individual style, although they do show quiet and hidden beginnings of something personal." Off the top of my head, I can think of several people who, if I wrote such words to them about their poems, would flare into name-calling fury or collapse into a swamp of depression. Yet, of course, Rilke's words are simply honest. So my first curiosity is about the kind of person who is able to receive such words, accept them, and continue to strive as a student and a human being. What was it like to be Kappus, a man who thought he wanted to be a poet but never became one?

I'm also struck by sentences in these letters that seem to recall our conversations at the Frost Place this year. For instance: "If your daily life seems poor, do not blame it; blame yourself, tell yourself that you are not poet enough to call forth its riches; for to the creator there is no poverty and no poor indifferent place." This seems like a more a beautiful version of "you've got to use your stuff," and I find the instruction both very comforting and very demanding.

What did you notice in these first two letters? What were your reactions to Kappus's introduction? Did anything seem pertinent to your own life as a writer or a reader? Did anything worry or puzzle you? Leave your thoughts in the comments or, if you prefer, email them to me or share them as a Facebook message and I will post them for you.