Available Surfaces: Essays on Poesis

Hard Freight, “The New Poem,” and My Ignorance

133 Hard Freight, “The New Poem,” and My Ignorance About my ignorance the less said the better; and yet it is a major player in everything I do or write or think or fail to think. I am old enough now to be able to discern an arc of evolution in my ignorance: what I once knew, I now no longer do; the ignorance I have lost has not been replaced with knowledge or wisdom but with ever richer and more complex forms of ignorance. I take it that my job as a human being is to accept its development and to observe it to the end. When I die, wherever I go, I will take my ignorance with me; perhaps, at that point, I will enter it fully—­ perhaps that is what death is. When, therefore, in 1973, the year Charles Wright’s book Hard Freight was published, I possessed a good deal of knowledge that is no longer available to me, especially about poetry, which in those days (unlike now) I could define precisely. That definition is lost, along with so much else, but I do remember that it was broad, compendious, and absolute, founded as it was on my superficial reading of Yeats, Wordsworth, Hopkins, and Stevens (whose work seemed to me written in a non-­ terrestrial tongue, but which inexplicably I could not stop reading). And so when some well-­ intentioned soul put Hard Freight into my hands, I hardly knew what to do with it. A typically slim volume, as we say, Hard Freight had the heft of plutonium to me. I labored through the opening section, “Homages,” coming unstuck right away over “Ezra Pound”; I’d read all of three poems by Pound at that point and found his work was also made of plutonium, though with a higher radiation count than Wright’s. The second poem, “Arthur Rimbaud,” was equally impenetrable to me, but at least Rimbaud’s was a name 134 I knew (though I could not pronounce it properly); whereas the third, “Corvo,” left me completely blank, as no quest for a Corvo of any stripe had yet troubled my waters. Strangely, though, the fourth poem, “Homage to X,” rang a small wind chime in my head. “X,” surely, I recognized, not only from algebra class and pirate maps, but from that same Plutonian poet Stevens: “The vital , arrogant, fatal, dominant X” of “The Motive for Metaphor,” territory familiar even to me, if still incomprehensible. My younger self can be forgiven, up to a point, for his thick-­ headedness; new poems always present themselves as strange, like all new things; and if readers (or better, critics) were more honest about the processes of reading, we would admit our gropings more often. I was in the presence of what was, to me anyway, The New Poem. And so, when I turned to the second section of Hard Freight, the first offering riveted me instantly. The New Poem It will not resemble the sea. It will not have dirt on its thick hands. It will not be part of the weather. It will not reveal its name. It will not have dreams you can count on. It will not be photogenic. It will not attend our sorrow. It will not console our children. It will not be able to help us. I say it riveted me; at the same time (like so much else) it baffled me. Utterly straightforward—­ a series of relatively unadorned declarative sentences, all beginning with the same three words—­ it nevertheless left me in a complete state of bewilderment in the strict sense of the word: I was flung into a wilderness. What will the new poem be? X, it would seem. Not part of the natural order of things, nor of the human order—­ not even the Jar in Tennessee, the New Poem will stand before us impenetrable and (evidently) uncaring. It was, of course, that last line that stuck like a burr in my hide. Not help us? But my 135 God, how I needed help! And how I counted on getting it from poetry! It took me awhile to notice that the last line did not say “It will not be willing to help us.” “Will not attend” and “will not console” seemed to point toward an indifference in The New Poem that delayed my understanding of the significance of “not be able to...