Lately I’ve been fortunate to get to know Henry Carlile (b. 1934), a keen keeper and producer of our literary culture. Last semester he came to our campus to read, and we have spoken on several occasions. He is a kind guide through a world we can never know well enough. From his time at the University of Washington (where he studied with Theodore Roethke and Elizabeth Bishop), to his work as a visiting lecturer at the Iowa Writer’s Workshop, to his many years of service teaching at Portland State University, he has been gathering up meaning in our often, if not always, chaotic world. He has also been quietly creating poems that disclose more meaning in this chaos than might have seemed possible.
One poem from his Oregon (2013) that provides a vision of the world is “Davanti a la Ruina,” the title of which comes from the fifth canto of Dante’s Inferno:
When they come up against the ruined slope,
then there are cries and wailing and lament,
and there they curse the force of the divine.
Carlile translates the grand solemnities of Dante’s verse into the gravity of an American vernacular:
Where the speechless arrive and are given names.
Where the names arrive and are given numbers.
Where the poor remain poor and the rich are
passed through a needle’s eye and become the meek,
the sere the spiritually emaciated wandering
insatiable obscenities tending the furnaces.
In the role of Vergil to his inner Dante, in the role of Dante to his contemporary readers, Carlile discloses the spiritual emaciation of the world’s “senile reek of poverty and spiritual dis-/ease” in the midst of which he puts the question central to his art: “How do you redeem Chaos except by writing to it?” And write he does, to, into, about, and out of the chaos, making order of a world that often remains indifferent if not hostile to our better energies. In this ordering work of his art, he no doubt follows in the steps of his great teachers. He recalls, for example, how Bishop stressed the importance of precision, always precision, in the writing of poems. The compassionate precision that Carlile brings to his art reminds us that in all the chaos, something like humanity, companionship, and love are after all possible.