150+ lucky ears this weekend. In advance of posting our new-and-improved Lighthouse podcast (with jingle*) of this weekend’s incredible Inside the Writer’s Studio with Mark Strand and Eli Gottlieb, I thought I’d tantalize with a little bit of what’s what. First, on Saturday, 100-plus packed into the Jones Theater and learned that a young Mark Strand shared a glass of gin with W.H. Auden, each of them rotating the glass with each sip so that their lips never touched the same spot on the glass. (CORRECTION: Eli points out that Auden turned the glass so that their lips did touch the same part of the glass, where Mark gamely turned the glass for a clean spot. Thanks, Eli!) Second, Strand’s good friend Brodsky could bring thousands of screaming fans out to venues across the world–like a veritable Mick Jagger of poetry. Third, when Strand gets together with the literati in New York, it’s always for dinner or a dinner party (no more than 8 people), the topic of conversation: gossip or politics, and the meal? Well, let’s just say those of us in the audience on Sunday’s Tattered Cover event got recipes from the former Poet Laureate of the United States. One of them involved a raw egg yolk nestled in a bed of steaming pasta. Enough said.
Here’s a tasty vittle from Herr Eli Gottlieb, who was our uberdexterous interviewer on Saturday at the Jones (and don’t forget–podcast plus jingle* forthcoming!):
Mark Strand is that rarest of things, a great poet who’s contitnued to get better over time. Everybody with a set of eyes and ears remembers his early books of poems: the stab of their ironies, their uncanny off-kilter relationship to the authorial self. They performed a kind of emotional chiropractry on readers, and were like the mysterious galleries in the paintings of Giorgio di Chirico in that they obeyed no known laws of physics and yet felt entirely actual and real. Their terseness hid a world of implication. And differently from the so-called “confessional poets” who were in vogue when Mark first began publishing, they seemed to take a more jaunty, European or Continental approach to worldly anxiety. If Wallace Stevens had been baked in the hard American daylight of Robert Frost, they might have produced the wry, sly confection that is Mark Strand.
Diligently, over 50 years, he’s continued to write, while—no easy feat—expanding steadily as a poet. Talent is one thing. Ongoing creative growth through a life of art is another thing entirely, and far rarer. I’ve seen his work process, with its scribbled notebook pages, its endless revisions. The famously casual voice rests on an ocean of craft. The dream-like clarity of the diction as it meditates on the self-in-time, on light, landscapes, women, and the comedy of desire, is the product not only of a mind that thinks and lives in poetry, but of thousands of hours of grueling, solitary, plain hard work.
It’s no accident that of all the cities of the world, Mark would be most comfortable in that one which perfectly represents both the light of the mind, and the mortality of the body: Rome. Mark has been coming to Rome for many years and is deeply at home in its cafes and streets. He’s been beautifully translated into Italian, and is in fact a superstar poet in Italy, where they’re running out of medals to hang around his neck. I’ve had the good fortune to spend time with him there, and in the speeded-up rhythms of acquaintance that exile confers, we’ve become friends.
I remember that when the great Italian poet and filmmaker Pasolini was murdered, his friend the novelist Alberto Moravia attended his funeral and spoke to the crowd. “A major poet has gone,” he said. “There are only a few real poets alive at one time in the world. Perhaps only a handful in a century. They are each of them precious gifts to their home country.”
He was right. And we’re lucky to have one with us today.
Mark Strand.
*Jingle made possible thanks to Jennie Dorris, who knows every musician in Denver, including jingle musicians. I’ll bet you can’t wait to hear it! Or can you?
–AED
May 7, 2008 at 4:00 pm
Kudos to Lighthouse for bringing Strand to Denver. I wasn’t sure whether people would come to see him, but the audience was solid for Saturday’s reading & interview and it was a real treat for those who came. I know I’ll read Strand’s work differently having seen the man in person, heard his take on things. It’s funny how that works.
I’m have to disagree with Moravia and his eulogy for Pasolini, as quoted by Eli in his introduction Saturday–and I agreed with everything else Eli had to say about Strand’s rare ability to stay fresh and alive as a poet over a long, productive life. But I’ve always detested the exclusionary way that members of the literary establishment voice bloated logical fallacies like this one: “There are only a few real poets alive at one time in the world. Perhaps only a handful in a century.” I’ve heard this before–namely from Gary Snyder at the outset of a graduate workshop in ‘88 (he added the phrase: “and none of you are them.”) Perhaps true! but what a brute!
I think it’s piffle–this way of stating such a debatable premise as though it were a commonly held truth. After all, I start counting greats of the 20th century like Neruda and Stevens and Bishop and Milosz and Plath and Auden and . . . well, the list could go on quite a bit further, each of them great by any measure I can find. And that’s the point–some readers might choke on my list and figure I’m annointing all the wrong people. So if we accept that there can only be a few at any time, who gets to say definitively who those few are? Why, it’s those entrenched in positions of authority in the literary establishment, and they secure the doors of their club by making such pronouncements, while genius poets write in real blood out there beyond the edge.
To be sure, there are not too many greats at a time, but the list is larger than a few. We have to draw the line somewhere, I suppose, but it’s all about who gets to do that line-drawing and what their subjective attitudes establish. Quite a number of great poets were themselves rejected by the establishment in their lifetimes and only later discovered and championed by readers, as in the case of William Blake. Still others sank and disappeared for having been ignored or rejected. That they suffered exclusion may or may not have ultimately mattered to them and their work. I don’t think it denigrates a fine writer like Strand to include with him a broader, more generous range of excellent poets whose work has brought great pleasure and meaning to readers. I hope some day we’ll get past suspect pronouncements like this one from Moravia and broaden our appreciation for the variety of voices that ring out at a given time.
May 7, 2008 at 6:57 pm
Wow, sounds like a great event. I miss Denver.
But, Andrea, you make me so proud. LWW is podcasting now? I could cry!
Looking forward to checking it out from afar…
Sarah in NYC
May 11, 2008 at 5:17 pm
So glad I was able to attend both events! K.
May 18, 2008 at 3:59 pm
Mr. Gottlieb’s introduction was one of the most loving and elegant I’ve heard and the weekend events I attended were terrific…thank you Lighthouse! You all are the real deal.
I also want to say that Chris Ransick’s comment above is ’spot on’. As David Rothman said in a recent workshop…We may never be the best poets of our time–the most famous, best at our craft, most favored–but “the point–the only point–is to join the conversation.” That view allows students of all ages and talents to keep trying their hands…it spurs me on to want to learn more and more, write more and more–to not be discouraged when my words fail me or I fail them.