Worth Their Salt: Poems Against the Recession
When I deal with poetry, I know what I want. And I’m never disappointed when I get it, since I want what I need and what’s good for me. If I don’t need it, I don’t want it. I can’t speak so boldly outside of literature, where my ambitions, once I decide to express or attain them, undergo trial-and-error for life. Like Kafka’s protagonists, they are barraged by interrogations, accusations, proofs and reproofs that are subject to change and backfire. Unless my desires remain isolated creatures, they’re free to revolt against me, to betray how stale and profitless they are. They’ll never be at peace. I don’t know if I’d have it otherwise. Then again, as I implied, outside of literature—outside of art—I don’t know what I want.
Today more than ever, I’m seeking poems that strike me as true without having to be tried. They must be worth their salt. By that I mean poems embodying the literary virtues of verbal resourcefulness and economy; grounded on a music and intelligence that is alert, poised and resilient. They mustn’t result from brute chance or lethargy, which is also to say that poems relying solely on their good intentions don’t count. Like Yeats’s work according to Auden, the poems must have been “hurt into being.” Don’t give me poetry that wears its heart on its sleeve, but poetry that is “palpable and mute / like a globed fruit” (MacLeish). I don’t want poems to be made fools of; they must be, in Frost’s words, “like [pieces] of ice on a hot stove that ride on their own melting” and run “from delight to wisdom.” Most poems can’t wake me up from the nightmare that’s the US economy, which is all too real—a world that’s too much with me—to be treated as a dream. But if I view the recession as a storm, then I’m bound to find poems that can wait it out with me.
I selected a few works from Poets House to discuss in the coming weeks on Tumblr. I’ll start with modern and contemporary poetry, such as Kay Ryan’s The Best of It: New and Selected Poems (Grove Press, 2010), which was featured in the Showcase opening in July. Ryan’s poems are quick, thin, pure as stones in melody and form; but contain the gravity of a philosophical treatise, and can stab like a shard of wit I wish I’d delivered myself. In the poem “Nothing Ventured,” for example, Ryan unpacks a timeless adage—nothing ventured, nothing gained—and makes it timely and new:
Nothing Ventured
Nothing exists as a block
and cannot be parceled up.
So if nothing’s ventured
it’s not just talk;
it’s the big wager.
Don’t you wonder
how people think
the banks of space
and time don’t matter?
How they’ll drain
the big tanks down to
slime and salamanders
and want thanks?
For the poet, the act of withholding is not only as much of an expense as a blatant act of generosity or speech, but poses a greater risk than the second gesture which is just cheap talk and no “big wager.” How is it possible to ignore what is absent and unfelt when negation—Ryan refers to cleaning up a pollution site or oil spill—often demands more energy than creation? Further, isn’t destruction an inevitable step in the dialectic of artistic creation, and thus deserving of “thanks”?
Deliberate silence is a special element in English prosody, and a form of aesthetic discipline that strong writers strive to perfect. Consider the caesuras in Old English poetry, the volta in a Petrarchan sonnet, the Dickinsonian em-dash and the vigorously logical grids suppressed in modernist masterpieces such as Stein’s Tender Buttons and Joyce’s Ulysses. Ryan draws her poems from the same vein, regarding “the banks of space and time” to be as necessary as solid matter. Her work can be godly without seeming it; and exemplifies making the best of what one has, even if that means starting from zero.
-Sarah Bonifacio
