My first post on the Kenyon Review blog, earlier this year, was interested, via a Mark Irwin poem, in poems that begin with lines from other poems—in a kind of call-and-response that also structures my favorite musics. Here, at the end of the year, while everyone seems to be making their best-of lists, I’m brought back to Irwin’s poem by Yusef Komunyakaa’s “Nighttime Begins With A Line by Pablo Neruda” (link with bad formatting), while re-reading The Chameleon Couch, which would be on my best-of list, if I were making one.
Neruda begins, Komunyakaa begins:
So my body went on growing, by night,
went on pleading & singing to the earth
I was born to be woven back into: Love…
I like these poems not just for the play I feel when the young poem swings the elder poem’s line in a new direction and the elder line exists in two places at once, oscillating like a quantum particle. I like these poems, too, because they expose, in their initial gestures, the conversationality of poetry. And here I’m not talking about the tone, but about the involvement of more than one mind, more than one voice. These are poems that talk to other poems, and so they’re also poems that show people talking to other people. These are social poems.
And, so, they’re great poems to share, or just to think of, whenever someone asks What does poetry do?
Too often I’m on a plane with someone I don’t know, or in an elevator with a university colleague from another discipline, with someone whose response to my being a poet is a cocktail of incredulity and pity, a look that semaphores a line about poetry’s uselessness, a privation born of privacy. If the words of Auden’s poem for Yeats were there—“poetry makes nothing happen”—we might have a conversation, but we’re not even there. In a world of protein chains and promotional strategy, it can seem that a poem doesn’t do much of anything. And we poets are apt to respond to the accusation by arguing that poems shouldn’t do anything. But that doesn’t mean that poems don’t do anything or that they don’t have a place in a social—as well as an intellectual or an emotional—world.
Poems say things, and good poems say things in ways that are so singular, they tattoo themselves to your brain. And you keep coming back to those inscriptions, your tongue touching the grooves every time you think to speak. Great poems, if we pay attention to them, can supply a kind of common language, sets of grooves that everyone (or at least several people) can tongue. But against the supposition, so widespread, that poetry is a private language, and that writing and reading it are also private acts, the social space a poem can create often seems a kind of science fiction.
So, I like these poems that make their connections, that make their social (and artistic) networks clear. One might object that one can’t read these poems without knowing Milosz or Neruda, that for a certain audience these poems are opaque in their allusions—but this objection mostly reads as an objection to these poems’ refusals to be entirely self-contained. You could read them as responses the earlier poems, one book open on the right, one book on the left. As Paul Ricouer says, for the reader all books are open at once.
If I were making a list of the books that I kept reading this year, I would include a number of books that make similar gestures. Wayne Miller’s The City, Our City would be on my list, not least because of his “Poem Slipped Between Two Lines by Vallejo.”
But I don’t make such lists, in large part because I always have a lot of open books on my desk, more than a single year’s worth. So the list I’m making again for my coming months includes C. D. Wright’s One With Others, Kathleen Graber’s The Eternal City, and Nicky Beer’s The Diminishing House from 2010, Nathaniel Mackey’s Splay Anthem from 2006, and Reginald Shepherd’s Angel, Interrupted, from 1996. I’ve read these before, but I’ll read them again, because my tongue moves for their phrases, and whatever I have to say back will come together when I read these.
I hope, here at the end of the year, with a new issue of Kenyon Review in your hands or on its way to you, you’ll find such poems, to which you’ll return, ever unwrapping them from the world, and always finding something new within.