The Loose-Fish

The books just get better and better. Or is it me? Finally understanding what I'm reading? I will give you that. But let it not detract from Edward Hirsch who is absolutely brilliant and WONDERFUL TO READ. An extraordinary guide to the magic and meaning of poetry! Indeed!!

The Preface
is tantalizing, promising to "unpack" his favorite poems to teach us to be readers..

"The nature of the poems I write about in this book has certainly affected the way in which I write about them. I have tried to be as clear as possible, to sound what James Wright calls "the pure clear word," and I have also tried to give my prose the wings that poetry deserves. I have sought to restore the aura of sacred practice that accompanies true poetic creation, to honor both the rational and the irrational elements in poetry. I would restore the burden of the mystery. I would illuminate an experience that takes us to the very heart of being."

I dare you to NOT read this book. I mean, excuse me? How could you resist? I couldn't.

Message in a Bottle

This is a delicious, absolutely gorgeous tribute to the very essence of poetry and why every living human should be immersed in it. I swoon at Hirsch's ability, like a carnie barker, to reel me in--a rube in the audience, my nickels burning a hole in my pocket and his palm extended. Just a few tidbits.

"Paul Celan said: A poem, as a manifestation of language and thus essentially dialogue, can be a message in a bottle, sent out in the--not always greatly hopeful--belief that somewhere and sometime it could wash up on land, on heartland perhaps."

"There are people who defend themselves against being "carried away" by poetry, thus depriving themselves of an essential aspect of the experience. But there are others who welcome the transport poetry provides...they are so taken by the ecstatic experience--the overwhelming intensity--of reading poems they have to respond in kind. And these people become poets.

"The reader exists on the horizon of the poem. The message in the bottle may seem to be speaking to the poet alone, or to God, or to nobody, but the reader is the one who finds and overhears it, who unseals the bottle and lets the language emerge. The reader becomes the listener, letting the poem voice and rediscover itself as it is read."

A Made Thing

Hirsch, in this chapter, analyzes three poems ("unpacks them" for us) by Elizabeth Bishop, Pablo Neruda, and the young Czech poet, Jiri Orten, who died at the age of 22. His insights into the structures used for the lyric message (in a bottle) are priceless.

"Poems communicate before they are understood and the structure operates on, or inside, the reader even as the words infiltrate the consciousness."

This is important. He is telling us HOW the STRUCTURE as well as the language and content of the poem affect the reader. The choice of structure is an integral part of delivering the poem.

A Hand, a Hook, a Prayer

A chapter about connection (poet to reader, reader to life, life to poet) with the metaphor of "hands" as a theme. Three poems: Keats' untitled 8 line fragment
that starts with "This living hand..."; James Wright's wonderful poem "Hook" (about a young Sioux who had a hook instead of a hand); and a prose poem by Baudelaire which is about the DISconnection from the social realm in order to connect more fully with oneself and using poetry to do so. (Hirsch says this poem says "unhand me.") There is again a wonderfully exciting analysis of each poem

"The vocation of poetry ecomes the outstretched hand of transfiguration.
"...each of these three poems charges us with its vital energy, its furious electricity. It asks us to open up to its experience, it urges us toward a reckoning. Each asks us to be accountable to its dark wisdom."

Three Initiations

Wonderfully engaging, this chapter revolves around three "initiations" into poetry.
The author's first poem at the age of eight which impacted his life--"the poetry of trance"; then a delicious poem by Christopher Smart (not to be missed) which Hirsch says initiated him into the "poetry of praise"; and finally a tribute to the "poetry of grief," (from The Iliad). This is just magical prose. Hirsch has a way of ennobling poetry by recounting personal history and observations in prose language as rich and textured, as moving and inspiring as the poems themselves.

At the White Heat

A look at some unflinching and ruthlessly authentic poems -- that live in white heat. Love poems, poems that yearn with desire. unrequited love poems, joyful and sad. I am loving this book, and these poems especially grabbed me. Here is one of my many favorites in this book: A love poem by Israeli poet Yehuda Amichai translated to English by Assia Gutmann.

A Pity. We Were Such a Good Invention

They amputated
Your thighs off my hips.
As far as I'm concerned
They are all surgeons. All of them

They dismantled us
Each from the other.
As far as I'm concerned
They are all engineers. All of them.

A pity. We were such a good
and loving invention.
An aeroplane made from a man and wife.
Wings and everything.
We hovered a little above the earth.

We even flew a little.

The entire chapter is fascinating. Hirsch explores lyric poetry in ways that
open many doors in my mind. He quotes Sharon Cameron:

Lyric speech might be described as the way we would talk in dreams if we could convert the phantasmagoria there into words." The loss of literal voice in lyric is more than compensated for by a celebration of textuality, by the triumph of written imagination.

Five Acts
This is a complex (rather rambling) chapter likening aspects of lyric poetry to theater, to the stage, to the dramatic 'acts' of life. Poem as scene of language; the dramatic poem; the personas used to tell the poet's truths; the masks that hide the poets; dramatic monologues from voices that are not the poet's, and the final soliloquies, elegies; the curtain coming down (for us all). Hirsch investigates Anna Akhmatova's theatrical work among others as well as giving a wonderful account of Sylvia Plath's poem "Edge" written a week before she died.

Beyond Desolation

Three poems of desolation: Frost's "Desert Places," a sonnet by Hopkins from his "Carrion Comfort" series, and Nazim Hikmet's poem "Some Advice to Those Who Will Serve Time in Prison." This is terrific stuff and Hirsch's insights again make each poem all the more wonderful. He quotes the Austrian poet Ingeborg Bachmann:

"whoever writes poetry engraves forms in our memory, wonderful old worlds for stone or leaf, tied to or released by new words, new signs of reality. And I believe that whoever inscribes these forms also disappears into them with his own breath, which he offers as the unrequited proof of these forms' truth."

Hirsch says:

The poet disappears into the poem, which stands mute, like an idol, until the reader breathes life back into it. And only then does it shimmer again with imaginative presence.

The lyric poem breathes in the most intimate form of literary discourse. It is the social act of a solitary maker. I feel, in many of the poems I love best, as if I am in the presence of the heart's voice arguing with itself.

Poetry and History: Polish Poetry after the End of the World

What a strange detour! And such an interesting one. Hirsch explores the Polish poets who endured WWII and the holocaust, witnesses to an era and the horrors that many did not not experience. I love this chapter and my heart opened to that whole set of writers who dealt with the guilt of survival and the loss of innocence and hope.
Hirsch says:

I admire postwar Polish poetry for its unfashionable clarity, its democratic ethos, its committment to an idosyncratic individuality, its suspicion of absolutes and rejection of tyranny...Milosz has sought a ground for transcendence; Rozewicz endores what has been called a "qualified humanism;" Herbert stubbornly maintains allegiance to "uncertain clarity;" Szymbonka rejoices in what she calls "commonplace miracles" and the gaity of art; Zagajewski becomes a rapturous skeptic, an ecstatic ironist...here is a poetry that takes history into account even as it seeks to transcend history, to find the stability of truth.

Re: Form

It's not exactly what you think! Fascinating exploration of how poetry comes out of the 'form' of life. Hirsch starts with politics in poetry and how the poetry of the disenfranchised (in wide interpretations) relies on the forms of old spirituals, chain gang work songs, the witnessing and remembering of war times, blues, and prison songs. He goes further to show historical forms (like odes) and how they have survived in modern hands (ex. Neruda). This is a wonderful, loose chapter embracing all the styles and forms without the pedantic explanations of just what poetic form is--as is the bent of so many poetry theory books. He quotes Neruda:

Poetry is a deep inner claling in man; from it came liturgy, the psalms, and also the content of religions. The poet confronted nature's phenomena and in the early ages called himself a priest, to safeguard his vocation...Today's social poet is still a member of the earliest order of priests. In the old days he made his pact with the darkness, and new he must interpret the light."

A Shadowy Exultation

Hirsch addresses the mysteries of "epiphanies" in poetry - as Wordsworth called the visionary power--"a shadowy exultation." He examines various works including Elizabeth Bishop's "In The Waiting Room" (I can read it over and over), several Dickinson poems about the elusive subject of "Pain" and a fascinating poem by Freud called "The Hill" where he addresses a repressed experience that returned.

The epiphanic moment is a radical attempt to defy the temporal order and dramatize an intense moment of monumental change. Such moments defy continuity...the compensation is a new knowledge and consciousness. The everlasting splendor of dramatizing epiphanies may well be the mystery of communicating moments when the self is both lost and found.

Makes ya' wanna write a poem, doesn't it?

Soul in Action

Needless to say, what would a book on poetry be without a discussion of 'soul.' Hirsch says lyric poetry is one of the soul's natural habitats. He uses several Dickinson poems on soul, and a wonderful Wallace Stevens' poem "The House Was Quiet and the World Was Calm" to address the phenomena of soulful awakening via poetry between poet and reader. A very short poem by Walt Whitman expresses a wistful notion of what soulfulness represents:

A Clear Midnight

This is thy hour O Soul, thy free flight into the wordless,
Away from books, away from art, the day erased, the lesson done,
Thee fully forth emerging, silent, gazing, pondering the them thou lovest best,
Night, sleep, death and the stars.
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Hirsch states that "the lyric poem rejuvenates the capacity for wonder within us. We cannot live what we cannot feel. It instills the culture of the soul back into us. And it speaks to what Stevens calls "the substance in us that prevails." It gives us the precise words for a clear midnight. For a reader leaning late and reading there. For a soul in transit, a soul in awe."

To the Reader at Parting

There is always an element of secrecy and the occult in the relationship between the writer and the reader. The poem is an appartus that requires a collusion. It is a message in a bottle...everything depends on the reciprocity, the strange interrelationship between the poet, the poem and the reader.

In closing, a late poem of Whitman's called "The the Reader at Parting," because Whitman was such an advocate for his poems and sought readers as "comrades" and felt affectionate and intimate with them, though strangers. This playful poem is a fleeting final gesture of the affectionate, vehement, and soulful participation that is the heart of lyric exchange, according to Hirsch.

To the Reader at Parting
Now, dearest comrade, lift me to your face,
We must separate awahile--Here! take from my lips this kiss;
Whoever you are, I give it especially to you;
So long!--And I hope we shall meet again.

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There is a wonderful glossary of the 'devices' of poetry at the end, plus a reading list by country of the Who's Who in the poetry world. This is a book I wish I had purchased instead of borrowing from the library (over and over) all summer. It's taken me a long time to get through it because it is a book to be savored, not read--much like poetry.
I am smitten with Edward Hirsch's ardor, his sheer unabashed love of poetry and it is contagious. Any thinking person with this book in her hand will go on to read more poetry thereafter.

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