Sneak preview

The upcoming summer issue of Oregon Literary Review will contain seven poems by Henry Carlile, a favorite of mine, including this one called "Modern American Poetry":

I loathe poetry, I hate the clotted,
dicty poems of the great modernists . . .
--William Matthews

In 1962, Roethke, smoking a cigar
as he read us Wallace Stevens,
leaned toward a sorority girl
who had wrinkled her nose
and asked her, “Does this
lay an egg for you, Honey?”

And when she answered, “It’s all
these cutesy little words he uses,”
Roethke tipped back in his chair
and said, “That’s it in a pig’s eye.”
And the perfect O of smoke he blew
hung like an indictment above us.

No one said anything, and one
or two nervously giggled, but
in the years since, I’ve sometimes
wondered if Roethke ever guessed
that the Stevens he loved
never liked his poetry that much.

In a National Book Award
committee meeting Stevens asked,
“Who’s the coon?” pointing at
a photo of Gwendolyn Brooks.
And never mind the anti-Semitism
of Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot.

Or the fascism so fashionable among
the unacknowledged legislators of that
time, who should have known better.
I know, I know, the times were different.
William Stafford said you must change
your life, a line that also appears

in a sonnet of Rilke’s. But it’s clear
now, the road to hell being paved
with good intentions, etc., that
some write well despite themselves,
and the less deserving, o Salieri!
might wink like stars above us.

Art saves lives, a bumper sticker claims.
I’d like to believe it, but the devil in
me offers up another point of view:
I think of Hemingway and Berryman,
Plath and Sexton, Kees and Crane,
and a few others I needn’t mention.

Auden, what poetry makes happen
is sometimes catastrophic: the man
who imported starlings because they
appeared in Shakespeare’s plays
couldn’t have imagined starlings
and a Lockheed Electra colliding.

When Williams said, “Erase while
you have the chance,” he wasn’t
kidding. A stray word, like launch
for lunch, could destroy the world.
Plato also had his reasons—not all
of them bad—for banning poets.

And what about Marianne Moore’s
“I, too, dislike it”? She, too, had her
doubts. Still, given the alternatives,
and able to find a name for anything
but a failed Ford venture in tasteless
design, she gave herself to poetry.

When one of my freshmen asked
why poets write so much about death
I tried to answer her without sarcasm:
“Maybe because we can’t imagine it,
only experience it,” and was instantly
ashamed of sounding so pompous.

And a few weeks ago, when my doctor
gave me the news, I knew that poetry
couldn’t save me. “Cancer is strange,”
he said. “Normal cells die and are
replaced (they call it apoptosis)
but cancer cells don’t.”

How could I make sense of this?
Or stop brooding about it? As memory
disturbs the current that erodes it,
wise men practice their non-attachment
and the difficult discipline of letting go.
But I am not wise, and I won’t let go.

What refuses to die kills us--
old ideas, beliefs we cling to despite
good evidence to the contrary, beliefs
some of us would gladly die for.
And that most stubborn belief of all:
that words might make a difference.

A short while before he died, Roethke
stopped me and said, “My doc says
if I don’t lay off the booze I’ve only got
six months,” and a few beats later,
“Let’s grab a beer at the Blue Moon.”
What could I do then but follow?