Reflections on a Year in Harvard's Woodberry Reading Room

ESSAYS REFLECTIONS ON A YEAR !N HARVARD'S WOODBEERY READING ROOM / MichaelMilburn LAST SUMMER a bronze sculpture by Henry Moore was installed in a corner of Harvard Yard outside the Lamont Library. For a month workers rehearsed placements and then roped off a small area to direct the sinking of the base. Two forms were set down, securely but not permanently, and the ropes removed. In the sculpture's first hours, passers-by approached, inspected, and cautiously touched as the placers watched from a distance. In its first year the work has become an extension of the scenery. AU fall and spring students have studied and sunned there, casually hugging the forms. On the fifth floor of Lamont, with a wall of high windows facing this corner of the Yard, is the Woodberry Poetry Room, where I have worked for a year assisting the curator, Stratis Haviaras, in editing and anthologizing Harvard's collection of recordings by writers. The day the sculpture went up I was standing at the window listening to Randall Jarrell address a summer school conference on poetry in the same room thirty years before. He was concluding his lecture, "The Obscurity of the Poet," by quoting Marcel Proust on another work of art: "the patch of yellow wall painted with so much knowledge and skill by an artist who will forever remain unknown and is barely identified under the name Vermeer." These words and the students lying among the bronze forms represent for me two purposes of my work in the Poetry Room—first, to define the connection between artists and their art in light of those comparatively recent phenomena, the recorded reading and the interview ; and second, to assess the presentation of art. Is the bronze better because it is round, smooth, and comfortable to sit on, located conveniently on a path to class? Similarly, should our opinion of a poem change because it is well or dully read, with profound or irrelevant comments, composed with a pencil or on a typewriter? What matters? It is impossible to know what matters. In dozens of recorded and written interviews I heard the question "How should a writer earn his or her living?" The answers were as varied as the experiences that prompted them: "Ship out on a steamer," "Teach," "Never teach." An impressionable writer is lost when confronted with all the jobs that might result in poems as good as their recommenders'. There is a similar range of reaction to the two spoken genres. Most people agree upon the value of poetry and prose readings, praising the interpretive aid of the author's voice and the revival of literature's The Missouri Review · 215 spoken heritage. Some writers are more comfortable recording their work in a studio with a minimum of comment. Two of the most effective sessions 1 heard were Philip Larkin reading from 7"Ae Less Deceived'and James Tate reciting The Lost Pilot. Larkin has this to say about public readings: I am not keen on poetry readings ... I think they belong to the demi-monde of poetry . . . and I am inclined to think that unless one is extremely impressive in the flesh (like Bernard Shaw or Rupert Brooke), one gets more dividends from keeping out of sight, as people's imaginary picture of you is always so much more flattering than the reality. Nor do 1 think that new poems— unfamiliar poems—reap the full benefit of public reading, as people don't know them and find it hard to follow them. Generally, the extemporaneous comments are the most controversial parts of the performance. One has only to listen to an early studio tape of Allen Ginsberg, Robert Creeley, or Robert BIy, on which the poets read thoughtfully through their first books, to realize that the pompous "happenings" sought by these poets in recent years have little to do with poetry. When the format works, however, one feels closer to poet, process, and poems. W.D. Snodgrass interweaves personal anecdotes with poems they inspired and gives nothing away. Here is a major poet, I found myself saying, and here is his life and I see how he has created effectively from his...