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Vol. LXV, No. 18
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Wednesday, May 4, 2011
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Vol. LXV, No. 18
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Wednesday, May 4, 2011
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There was poetry in Richardson Auditorium long before it became a setting for last weekend’s second Princeton Poetry Festival. It’s not just that Allen Ginsberg once read there while a bat made a cameo appearance in the rafters, or that a May 2004 Seminar on Beauty was held on its stage, or even that the biennial festival was launched there two springs ago.
The poetry is in the place itself. After walking around the outer perimeter with its seven entrances ranged along a paved strip quaintly called an ambulatory, you step down into the lap of a space that feels as if it had been built over an open-air amphitheatre in Greece, which makes sense when you consider the scenes from the Illiad and Odyssey depicted in the mosaics that formed a background tapestry for the poets reading their work and discussing such issues as poetry and politics and poetry and philosophy. The first poet, Homer himself, is the figure in the central panel, with Helen, Paris, and Mentor on one side and Telemachus, Penelope, Odysseus, and Achilles on the other. In the panel on the left the Greeks are preparing for war and in the one on the right, the Trojan warriors and their chariot and horses are waiting for the call to battle.
During the two parts of the festival I saw, the heroes were Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844-1889), as read, revealed, and wondered over by guest speaker Mark Doty, and D.H. Lawrence (1885-1930), as sensitively read by festival poet Anthony Carelli, who, according to the program, lives in Brooklyn and works in a savory pie shop.
Introduced by Princeton’s prize-winning poet and translator of Greek poetry C.K. Williams, Doty, a National Book Award winner himself, had the headwind of a long day’s journey behind him, having come all the way from Fairbanks, Alaska. After a brief account of his adventures, which included witnessing the birth of a reindeer, Doty delivered what was formally billed as the Holmes Lecture in Poetry. His subject was “The Art of Description,” which is also the title of his new book, published by Graywolf Press and subtitled World Into Word.
Doty made his points about description by musing over poems by Elizabeth Bishop and Gerard Manley Hopkins. What he achieved with Bishop’s “The Fish” was not so much a reading as a constructive appreciation employed to show “how it feels to be oneself” in the moment of the poem while at the same time discovering “a free floating sense of self” apart from the context. Some readers might have merely declaimed or recited the lines from “The Fish” that Doty treated with thoughtfulness and respect, breathing in the language, his tone true to the pulse of the poem.
The main attraction, however, was his passionate appreciation of Hopkins’s “The Starlight Night,” which he read more than once, poring over its riches, savoring lines like “look at all the fire-folk sitting in the air” or “Down in dim woods the diamond delves! the elves’-eyes!” Even as he inventoried the exclamation points, he was tasting the poem’s “May-mess, like on orchard boughs” and its “March-bloom, like on mealed-with-yellow sallows!”
Taking questions from the audience, Doty used the previous day’s experience, the birth of the reindeer, as an example of something for which the first, fresh description is wordless, just a gasp, an intake of breath, “Ahh” or “Ohh.” To the last question asked, about the presence of “Song of Solomon” in the Bible, Doty’s response seemed to come directly from his reading of Hopkins, the notion of words as erotic nourishment to be mouthed and tasted.
A Lawrentian Moment
Communiversity Saturday was as golden as the Festival Friday was gray. To avoid the gridlock downtown, I walked across the campus from the parking lot behind New South. After going through passages and porticoes, up steps, across lawns, it’s pleasant to stroll into Richardson’s cozy theatre-in-the-round atmosphere from a sunny afternoon only moments before Anthony Carelli begins his finely nuanced reading of D.H. Lawrence’s poem, “The Snake,” in the context of a panel on “Poet as Philosopher.”
It was a good discussion, the six poets read well and enjoyed themselves (as can be seen in the accompanying photo), but Carelli’s Lawrence, a poet philosopher if there ever was one, stole the show. While Lawrence may seem to position himself in the same relation to his snake as Bishop does to her fish, by the end the creature has become a Lawrentian being, a piece of his personal mythology, his cosmos, his world. The only reptile in Lawrence’s volume Birds, Beasts and Flowers, the Lawrentian snake “lifted his head, dreamily,” and “flickered his tongue like a forked night on the air,/so black …. And looked around like a god, unseeing, into the air.”
Carelli’s reading of “The Snake” was as nicely felt and measured an appreciation as Doty’s reading of “The Starlight Night.” But the one statement I took time to scribble in my notebook came from Kathleen Graber. Speaking of Plato in the context of poetry, which “dwells within things” and philosophy, which “dwells on things,” she said, “Plato knew poetry was incredibly potent and that’s why it scared him so much.”
Asked to comment on the event he dreamed up and brought into being two years ago, poet and Lewis Center of the Arts Director Paul Muldoon finds it “inspiring to be reminded that, all over the world, ordinary men and women are attempting to make poems. It reminds me that, though I’ve been writing like crazy for the last couple of days, I may not be completely crazy. When I started writing, I was drawn to the solitary life of the writer. Now it’s the sense of sodality, and solidarity, I love.”