January 16th, 2009
[0:00:00]
[Music]
Curtis: This is Poetry Off the Shelf from the Poetry Foundation, January 16th, 2009. I’m Curtis Fox.
This week, W.D. Snodgrass, rest in peace. W.D. Snodgrass died earlier this week. Snodgrass was perhaps best known for his first book of poems, Heart’s Needle, which came out in 1959. He was thought of as a confessional poet, and, though he despised that label, he will probably always be associated with the other so-called confessional poets: his teacher Robert Lowell, his contemporary Sylvia Plath, and his student Anne Sexton.
With his death, it feels like an entire era of American poetry has come to a close. In this program we’re going to listen to a few poems by W.D. Snodgrass with Ernest Hilbert.
Ernest Hilbert is a poet and the editor of Contemporary Poetry Review. He’s also the host of E-Verse Radio, a blog/tv/radio show about poetry and the arts. He joins me by phone from Philadelphia.
Hi, Ernie.
Ernest: Hi.
Curtis: So, why do you suppose Snodgrass despised being called a confessional poet so much, because he put so much of his own biography and some autobiography into his poetry?
Ernest: Well, certainly he does, and many did long before the term confessional became a tag that we would hang on people, but he actually showed an incredible range of subject matter and style and forms. The confessional mode is really only one part of even his first book, Heart’s Needle.
Curtis: Yeah. And you say form, he was actually writing often with rhyme even though the feeling that goes into his poetry is often very raw, it’s often framed formally.
Ernest: Oh, certainly, I mean he had a great technical grasp of various traditional forms. He also wrote in free verse when that suited him. He sometimes combines the two. He tended to range around and do what he wanted to do. He was a true artist. He was a very, very good poet.
Curtis: Now, I recorded these poems that we’re about to hear two years ago, and I was struck by his passionate reading style, and people don’t read this way anymore. And, I want to play his reading of his poem “A Locked House.”
It’s about a painful divorce or a separation from someone that the speaker seems to have assumed would be with him for the rest of his life. Is there anything else you want to say before we hear it, setting it up?
Ernest: Well, I wanted to mention that it seems a rather sort of mundane subject matter. We can all relate to that sense of what’s happening to the house: did we leave the gas on? It’s a wonderful psychological device for the way the characters are not quite addressing the fact that they have a problem with their intimate relationship and instead they project these things, if you will, outward onto things. Is the house going to burn down while we’re away, thieves break in? In a strange way, it’s a love poem, I think. So, let’s go ahead and listen to that.
WD Snodgrass: “A Locked House”
As we drove back, crossing the hill,
The house still
Hidden in the trees, I always thought—
A fool’s fear—that it might have caught
Fire, someone could have broken in.
As if things must have been
Too good here. Still, we always found
It locked tight, safe and sound.
I mentioned that, once, as a joke;
No doubt we spoke
Of the absurdity
To fear some dour god’s jealousy
Of our good fortune. From the farm
Next door, our neighbors saw no harm
Came to the things we cared for here.
What did we have to fear?
Maybe I should have thought: all
Such things rot, fall—
Barns, houses, furniture.
We two are stronger than we were
Apart; we’ve grown
Together. Everything we own
Can burn; we know what counts—some such
Idea. We said as much.
We’d watched friends driven to betray;
Felt that love drained away
Some self they need.
We’d said love, like a growth, can feed
On hate we turn in and disguise;
We warned ourselves. That you might despise
Me—hate all we both loved best—
None of us ever guessed.
The house still stands, locked, as it stood
Untouched a good
Two years after you went.
Some things passed in the settlement;
Some things slipped away. Enough’s left
That I come back sometimes. The theft
And vandalism were our own.
Maybe we should have known.
[0:05:14]
Curtis: That was W.D. Snodgrass reading “A Locked House.” Ernie, the poem is moving to me because I believe the guy’s pain. I believe he’s in anguish.
Ernest: It is convincing because he sets it up: first, he disarms us and talks about a typical little phobia that we all have from time to time, and then he talks of our good fortune—and he does something that he’s always done well, when he says it’s bit of a momentum or, you know, all things past, but then combined with a lovely sentiment when he says maybe “I should have thought.”
WD Snodgrass: Maybe I should have thought: all
Such things rot, fall—
Barns, houses, furniture.
Ernest: But, then he turns and says.
WD Snodgrass: We two are stronger than we were
Apart; we’ve grown
Together. Everything we own
Can burn . . .
Ernest: There’s a sense of menace under there, but also it’s a very nice sense of the strength of relationship that was worthwhile at one point and the love was very much a real thing, and that comes through in this poem.
WD Snodgrass: Enough’s left
That I come back sometimes. The theft
And vandalism were our own.
Maybe we should have known.
Ernest: As if to say we didn’t even notice this, did we learn anything from this, is there any wisdom to take away, but also, again, it’s just the question, how did we not know this, how could it have hidden in plain sight?
Curtis: I want to play another poem. It’s a very different poem. It’s called “After Experience Taught Me.” Here Snodgrass explains how he constructed it.
WD Snodgrass: When I was in the navy during World War II, one morning a man came and took about thirty five of us out and gave us a lesson in how, should you get caught out without any weapons at all, you can kill a man with your bare hands. You’ll hear his voice here, you’re also hearing another voice that I learned at the same time and that was the voice of the great Jewish philosopher, Baruch Spinoza.
First two lines from him, then two lines from the combat instructor, then Spinoza, then the combat instructor. And then, at the end, there’s a man who’s trying in his own head to make sense out of these two voices.
Curtis: So, here’s W.D. Snodgrass reading “After Experience Taught Me.”
WD Snodgrass: “After Experience Taught Me”
After experience taught me that all the ordinary
Surroundings of social life are futile and vain;
I’m going to show you something very
Ugly: someday, it might save your life.
Seeing that none of the things I feared contain
In themselves anything either good or bad
What if you get caught without a knife;
Nothing—even a loop of piano wire;
Excepting only in the effect they had
Upon my mind, I resolved to inquire
Take the first two fingers of this hand;
Fork them out—kind of a “V for Victory”—
Whether there might be something whose discovery
Would grant me supreme, unending happiness.
And jam them into the eyes of your enemy.
You have to do this hard. Very hard. Then press
No virtue can be thought to have priority
Over this endeavor to preserve one’s being.
Both fingers down around the cheekbone
And setting your foot high into the chest
No man can desire to act rightly, to be blessed,
To live rightly, without simultaneously
You must call up every strength you own
And you can rip off the whole facial mask.
Wishing to be, to act, to live. He must ask
First, in other words, to actually exist.
And you, whiner, who wastes your time
Dawdling over the remorseless earth,
What evil, what unspeakable crime
Have you made your life worth?
[0:09:57]
Ernest: Well, that was quite a dramatic reading. I have not—I had not heard him read that before. And I think that reading brings out the sense of the poem very well. I mean you have the leering vicious instructor and then you have the calm ethical philosopher.
The first of each pair gives us a sense of high philosophical possibilities, contemplation quite literally overlaid onto the brutal and very practical instructions that follow, which explains how to kill another man literally with your bare hands.
Curtis: By pulling off his face basically.
Ernest: It’s terrifying.
Curtis: Yeah.
Ernest: The disruption one experiences between sets of these couplets emphasizes the distance between thought and action, for one thing.
Curtis: Right.
Ernest: Underneath this veil of altruistic behavior and consideration there is the rudimentary will to live, a sort of instinctual preservation. You know, he asks a question at the end in a voice that’s a very different voice, which I suggest may be the voice of God Himself. He asks at the end, what are you prepared to do to realize this will to live?
WD Snodgrass: And you, whiner, who wastes your time
Dawdling over the remorseless earth,
What evil, what unspeakable crime
Have you made your life worth?
Curtis: And, you think that’s God talking? I thought it was the poet accusing himself of . . .
Ernest: It could well be.
Curtis: Can you imagine if God called you a whiner?
Ernest: [Laughs] It’s a higher force looking down. If they want the meaning, it is a challenge, it is a disarming of you as a thinker. When confronted with the stark reality of killing or being killed, one does not enjoy the opportunity, I suppose, to ask larger questions. You’re grappling for survival.
So, the poem is about both distance and immediate mental states and needs. And the final question he leaves us with is this, is your life worth the taking of another?
Curtis: Which could apply to any of us, not that we’ve committed great evil, but basically it’s asking what is your life worth? We all do damage in life and so, what—is your life worth it?
WD Snodgrass: You must call up every strength you own
And you can rip off the whole facial mask.
Ernest: The grisly removal of the “whole facial mask.” surely it shows us something else. We would only imagine that in an extreme horror movie. But it has other significance. It is perhaps symbolic of the violent removal of the mask of civilized behavior in matters of extreme danger. All the things we take for granted, even ethics, may be called into question in dire circumstances.
I also wanted to point out as with much of Snodgrass’ poetry there is here too a subtle kind of humor, a dark humor.
Curtis: I didn’t catch it, so explain it to me.
Ernest: The V for victory when preparing the two fingers to poke out an enemy’s eye. There’s always a glint in Snodgrass’ eye when—even when he’s writing about such terrible things.
Curtis: Ernest Hilbert, thanks so much.
Ernest: Okay. Well, thank you very much for having me.
Curtis: You can hear, watch, and read Ernest Hilbert on his most interesting website, E-Verse Radio. His collection Sixty Sonnets will be issued by Red Hen Press in February.
W.D. Snodgrass died earlier this week. He was 83 years old. You can read both poems you heard on this program and many others by Snodgrass on our website, PoetryFoundation.org.
Let us know what you think of this program, e-mail us at podcast@poetryfoundation.org. The music used in this program comes from the Claudia Quintet. For Poetry Off the Shelf. I’m Curtis Fox. Thanks for listening.
[Music]
[0:13:47] End of Audio
No Comments