The Game Changed: Essays and Other Prose

Hayden Carruth

Hayden Carruth Hayden Carruth’s Collected Shorter Poems 1946–1991—as the poet tells us in a prefatory note—includes about two-thirds of his published shorter poems, as well as a section “New Poems (1986–1991).” Written during a contentious period of American literary and political history, Collected Shorter Poems 1946– 1991 is monumental in its scope. Carruth is a poet of ambition. Positioning himself within various American poetic traditions, he aggressively explores our times, our places, our language. Knowledge and reality become not only sources of poetic expression, but also objects of poetic desire: Carruth is never afraid to think about what is happening around him; he feels no imaginative discrepancy between thought and emotion, and he feels deeply. On one level, the poetry is personal, arising out of the responses of an actual self; on another level, the poet is always alert to American collective consciousness . Among the poets of his generation, Carruth—perhaps more than any other—has comprehended the profound aesthetic shifts in American modernist poetics. Take a look, for example (which I often do) at Carruth’s 1970 anthology, The Voice That Is Great Within Us: American Poetry of the Twentieth Century (which is still very much in print). Carruth was the first poet anthologist to question post–World War II poetic orthodoxies, displaying, by example, the critical landscape of American poetry from Robert Frost (born in 1875) to Jim Harrison and Dianne Wakowski (both born in 1937). The Voice That Is Great Within Us (a title taken from Wallace Stevens) includes—among many other as aesthetically diverse poets—Mina Loy and Elinor Wylie, Charles Reznikoff and John Wheelwright, Langston Hughes and Lorine Niedecker, Theodore Roethke and Louis Zukofsky, Elizabeth Bishop and Charles Olson, Robert Hayden 89 and Muriel Rukeyser, Thomas Merton and Gwendolyn Brooks, Robert Duncan and Marie Ponsot, Denise Levertov and William Bronk, Cid Corman and Carolyn Kizer, Jack Spicer and James Merrill, Stanley Moss and Edward Dorn, Adrienne Rich and Gary Snyder, Sylvia Plath and LeRoi Jones, Jean Valentine and Clayton Eshelman. “Yet still the emotion that beckons me on is indubitably the pursuit of an ideal social self, of a self that is at least worthy of approving recognition by the highest possible judging companion, if such companion there be,” Carruth quotes William James in an epigraph to The Oldest Killed Lake in North America. Carruth’s work has been defined, in part, by two primary realities of American politics since World War II: the imperial power of the state and violence. In one of his earliest poems, “On a Certain Engagement South of Seoul,” the poet presents his political morality: “The nations undertake / Another campaign now, in another land, / A stranger land perhaps. And we forsake / The miseries there that we can’t understand / Just as we always have. Yet still my glimpse / Of a scene on the distant field can make my hand / Tremble again . . . I know when I walk out-of-doors / I have a sorrow not wholly mine, but another’s.” The poetry directly confronts the destruction caused by the military-industrial state: One night the water lay so deathly still that the factories’ constellated lights on the other shore, the mills and refineries, made gleaming wires across the surface, a great fallen and silent harp; and the moon, huge and orange, shuddered behind the trembling many-petaled efflorescence on the stalks of the chimneys, white mortuary flowers. Really, from the nearer shore on the highway to Liverpool, one saw the kind of splendor that lasts forever. Listen to a voice speaking of liberty from “Paragraphics,” a poem in sequence in Brothers, I Loved You All: “I am a fanatic lover of liberty, considering it the unique condition in which intelligence, dignity, and human happiness may develop and grow; not the purely formal liberty 90 conceded, measured out, and regulated by the State; an eternal lie which in reality represents nothing more than the privilege of some founded on the slavery of the rest; not the individualistic, egoistic, shabby and fictitious liberty extolled by the school of J. J. Rousseau and the other schools of bourgeois liberalism.” Or this, from Carruth’s Sonnets: “All revolutions in modern times have led to a reinforcement of the power of the State.” Cindy, this is the stunner. Granted, what we, being rebels, must do is easy (fed to our ears): decline, disacquiescence. Our head is straight. But...