"..." 38

In John Cocteau's 1950 movie Orpheus, the title character is a modern poet whose poems are dictated to him by a voice on his car radio. He journeys to hell in order to bring back his missing wife Eurydice. While there, he is interrogated by three sinister judges who ask him, among other things what he does. He answers that he is a poet. When one of the judges replies, "What does that mean?" Orpheus says, "It means to write and not be a writer."

This distinction holds generally true, I think. For instance in the title of the contemporary magazine that deals with issues of writing and publishing called Poets and Writers. As it happens, the current number has an article by Ellen Susman about writers should reply when asked at a party, "What do you do?" She says, "You write because it's your passion, your lifeblood, and yet you tell this lovely person that you're an accountant, a house husband, a cowpoke. Repeat after me," Ms. Susman says, "I'm a writer, it's my job, it's what I do."

That's fine if you are a writer, say a novelist like her, but what if you're a poet? You would never reply, "I'm a poet," out of fear that your interlocutor would get up and leave the room. It sounds like you're conferring value on yourself. You can't be a poet who calls himself or herself a poet without leaving open the possibility that you're a bad poet. So you're stuck with the situation of writing and not being a writer.

If this sounds like whining, then let me add hastily that I'm quite pleased with my status in the world of writers. I've been lucky enough to get concrete signs of appreciation over the years. One of them arrived 35 years ago when I got the National Book Award. But even without them, I think I would have continued writing just for the, well, fun of it, because it is fun, although it isn't supposed to be. If it wasn't, I would have taken up some alternate pursuit years ago: needlepoint or designing miniature golf courses. But writing the poetry I write gives me a pleasure I can almost taste, one I can imagine a pianist must feel practicing in solitude, but never alone thanks to the strange experience that is emerging in him. Of course it's hard to write, but somehow the the difficulty is embedded in the pleasure.

Besides the vexacious pleasure of writing and not being a writer, there is a further concern for me in that to many people, intelligent and honest ones among them, what I write makes no sense. It apparently lacks accessibility, a relatively recent requirement.

When I first discovered modern poetry at the age of about 16, I was delighted by its difficulty, a word often used since then in discussions of my work, and in general by what Gates calls the fascination of what's difficult. My first encounter with Gertrude Stein, for instance, inspired me to instant feats of imitation. "She's so great, she's so hard to understand" might have summed up my reaction. Several years later, my advisers at Harvard (they call them tutors just as they call the dormitories houses--a bit of inverse snobbery) assigned me Henry James' The Wings of the Dove, the  first book of his I had come upon. Once again, I tore through it, delightedly. "Wow, this is really difficult," I thought. Contemporaneous was my discovery of the poetry of Eliot, Stevens, and the gnomic, early Auden, all of whom became important influences.

My early poetry, I thought, was in the grand, modern tradition of being hard to understand. Besides, wasn't this what modern art was all about? Picasso painted heads with three eyes and viewers looked on with equanimity. Stravinski had four pianists banging the some chord over and over and audiences were enthralled. It wasn't until I began to publish some years later that I realized I had trespassed. It was okay for those god-like figures to traffic in difficulty, I was given to understand, but my own stuff was just a little too difficult--in fact, a lot too difficult, ranking somewhere near root canal on the pleasure principal scale.

Besides, by then, difficulty was out. Accessiblity was in. These thoughts dawned anew a few days ago when wondering what I would say tonight. I happened to glance at the acceptance speech I wrote on getting a National Book Award in 1976--I didn't happen to glance at it, I searched for diligently on the internet.

For as long as I have been publishing poetry, it has been criticized as difficult and private, although I never meant for it to be. At least I wanted its privateness to suggest the ways in which all of us are private and alone, in the sense that Proust meant when he said, "Each of us is truly alone." And I wanted the difficulty to reflect the difficulty of reading, any kind of reading, which is both a pleasant and painful experience since we are temporarily giving ourselves to something which may change us.

I seem to have been writing out of this situation for many years, including in a fairly recent poem called "Uptick" which has the lines:

To come back for a few hours to
the present subject, a painting,
looking like it was seen,
half turning around, slightly apprehensive,  
but it has to pay attention
to what’s up ahead: a vision.
Therefore poetry dissolves in
brilliant moisture and reads us
to us.
A faint notion. Too many words,
but precious.

So the dilemma hasn't gone away, but then I console myself, neither have I...yet. I'm still writing and still not a writer. The pleasure that comes from writing is a sharp as ever. [...]

—John Ashberry