ROBERT PINSKY: ARM IN ARM WITH BALZAC AND DUMAS

How does a straight white male poet in America, of 'a certain age,' find material in a world where inclusion of previously disenfranchised voices is the name of the game?

Arm in arm with Balzac and Dumas. At least according to Robert Pinsky, 2016 poet in residence at the Walt Whitman Birthplace.

Referencing Mark Twain, James Baldwin and WEB Dubois this week, Pinsky argued that every one of us has an opportunity – if we accept the limits of who we are -- to reach toward the ideas and concerns that constitute our common human birthright.

"My notion of culture, of the world, is based on that idea of a birthright that in James Baldwin’s words is “vast, connecting me to all that lives, and to everyone, forever,'” said Pinsky this week, as he prepared to appear at the birthplace for a rain-soaked celebration of poetry, with a couple of hundred young kids under a tent on the lawn of the Whitman house. "But as he says you cannot claim the birthright except through accepting the inheritance which is “particular, limited and limiting.”

“I speak as a white, lower-middle-class straight Jewish male from New Jersey, getting on in years. That inheritance is my avenue or window, it is the limitation through which I approach things. So if I try to talk about jazz, or slavery, I talk about it as who I am, with sensitivity regarding who I am not."

An apt dictum from a man who has been US Poet Laureate and Pulitzer Prize winner, and who has remained a durable enough fellow in the shaky ground of 21rst century American poetry.

Another way to put it, says Pinsky, is the idea of Nature versus Nurture. Literature is rife with stories of children swapped at birth, tales which examine the delicate relationship between what we intrinsically bring with us into life at birth and how the experience of living shapes us.

Pinsky says he first gained his understanding of this as a teenager reading Mark Twain's Puddinhead Wilson. But he sees this message in the ideas of everyone from WEB Dubois to columns in the Atlantic Magazine.

Take Ta-Nehisi Coates, author of ‘Tolstoy is the Tolstoy of the Zulus’ in the Atlantic. The point of Coates’ argument, says Pinsky, is that an individual in any culture around the world has the right to access the art and ideas of any other culture and call it their birthright. So too do we as Americans, says Pinsky.

Or to paraphrase WEB Dubois, Shakespeare is the Shakespeare of black Americans.

Dubois’ argument is worth examining more closely. In his famous 1903 essay Of The Training Of Black Men, he quotes Omar Khayaam: “Since the soul can fling the dust aside /And naked on the Air of Heaven ride,

          Were it not a Shame—were it not a Shame for him

        In this clay carcass crippled to abide?

In Dubois’ case, the clay carcass is a Jim Crow society ‘that held God created a tertium quid, and called it a Negro.’

Dubois recognized the existence – the necessity -- of that human impulse which propels us toward that condition in which 'all men, black, yellow, and white,' are in possession of a soul which seeks to feel 'through contact with living Nations and sleeping hordes a thrill of new life in the world.' Ignorance, he argued, 'can be met in but one way — by the breadth and broadening of human reason, by catholicity of taste and culture.'

So when Dubois writes "I sit with Shakespeare and he winces not," he’s celebrating the acceptance of the inquiring human soul, whatever its ‘inheritance,’ by world culture itself. 

"Across the color line I move arm in arm with Balzac and Dumas, where smiling men and welcoming women glide in gilded halls. From out the caves of evening that swing between the strong-limbed earth and the tracery of the stars, I summon Aristotle and Aurelius and what soul I will, and they come all graciously with no scorn nor condescension. So, wed with Truth, I dwell above the Veil."

For a guy like Pinsky, in today's politically correct world that dwells on calling out privilege and entitlement, there’s an important message in Dubois’ assertion.

"I have as much access to Tolstoy to Balzac and Mozart as anybody in the world," he said. "That's my inheritance.” But Pinsky claims a birthright that goes beyond access to conventional historic voices of his inherited Western culture – to voices not intrinsically his own. Historic and contemporary.

“If I have a friend who is a gay Korean woman and practices Bahai, am I not at least one molecule influenced by that?" he asks. And then answers his own question. Yes, it's his birthright -- as it should be everybody's birthright -- to be empathetic to the world of ideas around us.

'So, wed with Truth, I dwell above the veil,' wrote Dubois.

What does that mean to a man like Robert Pinsky? To fling the dust aside. To seek beyond the limits of our inheritance, to our common birthright.

We're all entitled. Whether you're James Baldwin, WEB Dubois, or a gay Korean Bahai woman. Or a couple of hundred rain-soaked kids on Walt Whitman’s lawn. Or Puddinhead Wilson, for that matter.

All of us, arm in arm with Balzac and Dumas. 

AN INTERVIEW WITH ROBERT PINSKY

Q - PERFORMANCE vs VOCALITY:

You have been quoted as having said that poetry is a ‘vocal art,’ but not necessarily a performative art. Could you elaborate on the differences please? Also, how do you view the advent of Spoken Word, Hip Hop and Performance poetry -- as a force for ‘democratization’ and ‘contemporarization’ of poetry? As an erosion of the art and craft of poetry? As some combination of the two?

RP: Intensely vocal, and not performative in the sense I mean: the videos atwww.favoritepoem.org. Sylvia Plath’s poem in Seph Rodney’s voice, Langston Hughes’ poem in Pov Chin’s voice, Whitman in John Doherty’s voice, Julia de Burgos’ poem, in the original and Spanish, in Glaizma Perez-Silva’s voice— that is poetry as itself, a vocal art. Roethke’s “The Waking” was written with Theodore Roethke’s inward and actual voice: decades later, it lives in the voice of a school custodian outside Chicago.

Performance is a great, noble category of art. So is poetry. For me, the test for being poetry is that the work does not depend on a particular artist’s delivery: no great actor, not the author herself, just any person who loves the poem and chooses to give voice to its words, in imagination, inwardly, or actually.

A performance may be great art, of course. But poetry . . . well, I recognize it when I look at (and listen to!) those Favorite Poem Project videos.

Q - POETRY & JAZZ

I’ve heard your early work was influenced by the “flow and tension” of jazz and that you especially appreciate jazz saxophonists Charlie Parker, Sonny Rollins, and Dexter Gordon. You’ve mentioned how improvisatory music is at once about planning and about surprise. Does the influence of jazz continue to permeate your work—and, if it does, how? In what ways (and why) do you think this very American art form—jazz—continues to inform and inspire American poets?

RP: Yes. American music of many different kinds gets vitality from origins in the blues. And it’s hard to imagine an American writer who doesn’t listen to music. 

On my CD’s with Laurence Hobgood, PoemJazz and PoemJazz II: House Hour (from Circumstantial Productions), I hope our collaborative, improvised performances reveal the musical roots and elements in the poems— and, of course, that what we do is musical: not poetry reading with background music, a notion that strikes me as corny.

Q - LITERARY APPROPRIATION

I have seen it become quite prevalent among many younger (and a few not so young) poets to appropriate lines from other poets into their own work with or without acknowledging it. Can you discuss the nuances of allusion, appropriation, intertextual dialogue and stealing?

RP: All art is at some level translation. Ben Jonson, Shakespeare, Keats, Dickinson all incorporate bits of quotation. Technology has made it into a genre of music. In contemporary work, sometimes, the melodic power of the borrowed element puts to shame the slackness of the context.

Culture is always a melding of impurities, I think. Terms like “appropriation” and “assimilation” are inadequate. Irving Berlin’ wrote “White Christmas.” Roman soldiers shacked up with local women in Gaul and together they improvised the Creole tongue, French.

Q – NEW ‘SETTINGS’ FOR POETRY

As the current generation of American youth utilizes more “settings” of language than any previous generation (twitter, email, text, academic, colloquial, page, stage), have you found that their poetry capitalizes on this linguistic flexibility?

RP: For me, in poetry, the voice is primary. And the voice is on a human scale. Maybe an art based on the single human voice offers respect for the dignity of the individual? All these technological and institutional avenues toward that destination are welcome.

Q – THE IMPACT OF ONLINE, SELF PUBLISHING VENUES

Do you consider the proliferation of online poetry journals and self-published poetry manuscripts a step TOWARDS bridging the gulf between community-based, local poetry circles and the MFA-driven, academic stronghold on American poetry OR as an exacerbating, chasm-widening development?

RP: Hundreds of sonnet sequences were published in England in the 1590’s. Hundreds! All imitating Sir Philip Sidney’s unpublished but pirated imitation of Petrarca. Out of that proliferation, most of it forgotten, we got some wonderful poems by the likes of William Shakespeare, Michael Drayton, Fulke Greville. The more the merrier, in other words.

(Interview questions were drawn from suggestions solicited from a panel of individuals active in the poetry community today, including Lenny Dellarocca, Veronia Golos, Chuck Joy, Ron Kolm, Linda Lerner, Matt Pasca, Robert Peake, Kevin Rabas, Walter Raubicheck, and  John Roche)

SEEING THE ALL: Li-Young Lee, Walking With Walt

                “A flower is one station between earth’s wish and earth’s rapture…it’s just me in the gowns of the wind.” Li-Young Lee, fr. ‘Have You Prayed’

It may have seemed de rigeur to hear Li-Young Lee advise a host of young prize-winning Long Island schoolkids  at the Walt Whitman Birthplace to emulate the Good Gray Poet’s capacity to ‘see the all’ and communicate that vision through poetry.

But the life trajectory by which Lee has found himself in the position to offer that bit of advice to would-be next generation bards, at the annual Whitman birthday celebration in West Hills, LI has not been de rigeur at all. In fact, it’s been decidedly un-Whitmanlike.  

“I struggled with Whitman at first,” said Lee, a man whose family story in China – unlike Whitman and his 19^th century Dutch-English yeoman farmer origins -- is peppered with warlords, generals, gangsters and a short-lived 20^th century emperor. “But I grew up practicing Taoism, and was blown away by how Eastern Walt sounded to me -- his expansiveness, his largeness, his vision of the multitudity of the human soul. I wanted that in my work but I didn’t know how he pulled it off. “

Struggle no more. Reconciling Whitman’s ‘shirtsleeve transcendentalist’ conception to his own world view, emergent from cultural traditions to which Whitman and other American romantics could only allude, is well within the cognizance of this year’s poet in residence at the Whitman birthplace.

Particularly when it comes to yin and yang  -- the concept of duality forming a whole.

 “Whitman’s expansive voice is part of his picture – that’s his yang,” said Lee. “But to understand Whitman is to understand that real power doesn’t come from expanding your ego, it comes from practicing great emptiness, great isolation. That’s what Whitman did – his expansive voice, his yang, exists in the context of his yin. You have to shave your ego to do that. That’s what makes his work different from a slam poet.”

And that’s what makes it possible for a writer like Lee, known for his capacity to ‘craft the atmosphere of silence,’ to find common ground with Walt Whitman and his nominative penchant for exhaustive cataloguing of particularities.

“I’ve thought a lot about how Taoist Whitman really is,” said Lee. “In a sense, many of the Taoist classics, translated into English, sound like Whitman. They’re concerned about the all, the inflected all.”

“Lee reminds me of the saying ‘walking into the river we turn not one ripple; walking into a forest we turn not one leaf,’” noted Gladys Henderson, 2010 Long Island Poet of the Year honoree at the Whitman Birthplace.

Ripples and leaves aside, Lee’s voice has been turning heads, hearts and minds since he emerged in the world of American poetry in the 1980s.

Li-Young Lee is the 34^th poet in residence at the Walt Whitman Birthplace, a list of distinguished figures  that includes William Heyen, Billy Collins, William Stafford, Yevgeny Yevtushenko, Adrienne Rich, Allen Ginsberg, Martin Espada, Sharon Olds and Robert Bly. Influenced by the classical Chinese poets Li Bo and Tu Fu, his poetry is noted for its use of silence and, according to Alex Lemon in the Minneapolis Star Tribune, its “near mysticism” which is nonetheless “fully engaged in life and memory while building and shaping the self from words.”

“When I write, I’m trying to make that which is visible—this face, this body, this person—invisible, and at the same time, make what is invisible—that which exists at the level of pure being—completely visible,” Lee explained at a recorded lecture and reading at UC Berkeley.

The goal? To be one with the cosmos. “I want to get there for real -- not just as a literary experience, but a personal one.”

In a sense, everything a person does can be a way to that goal, from sweeping a floor to mending a shirt.

“But poetry is a way,” he added quickly. “What you feel in a great poem is this pressure to see the all. If you do your homework as a poet, if you try to account for things rigorously, you will be practicing this vision.”

Those who would see the American poetic voice incorporate the ‘great emptiness of yin’ into its well-known capacity for big, expansive utterance may well hope that a few students  at this year’s Walt Whitman birthday celebration in West Hills LI were paying attention to the advice of Li-Young Lee – and are doing their homework.

 

Walt Whitman At Bear Mountain  

           Neither on horseback nor seated

           But like himself, squarely on two feet

                     Louis Simpson, Walt Whitman at Bear Mountain

When W Averill Harriman diverted a statue of Walt Whitman called “Open Road: Afoot and Lighthearted” to an out of the way outcropping of rock in upstate New York in 1940, he said he thought Whitman would’ve wanted it there -- to breathe  ‘the fresh air of the mountains’ -- instead of asphyxiated by the fumes of a million cars a year on Long Island.

To look at the poem written about the statue by Pulitzer Prize winning poet (and long-time Long Island resident) Louis Simpson and published in 1960, there’s certainly logic to Harriman’s point of view.

In his poem, Simpson decries the corrosion of the American myth of the open road. “The Open Road leads to the used car lot,” decries the Jamaican-born poet in one his most famously anti-material progress utterances.  “all the realtors, pickpockets, salesmen and the actors performing their official scenarios…turned a deaf ear, for they had contracted American dreams.”

Yet Simpson offers some hope of redemption in the very loneliness of the statueplaced in an out of the way place and viewed by few. “All that grave weight of America/Cancelled! Like Greece and Rome./The future in ruins!...

The man who keeps a store on a lonely road,

The housewife who knows she is dumb,

And the earth, are relieved!’

The statue – and its placement – support that redemptive hope.  Entitled “The Open Road: Afoot and Lighthearted,” portrays Whitman without regard to placement on highway or outcrop of glacial rock – America’s visionary poet is in full stride, hat in hand, one hand thrust confidently forward and his eyes fixed firmly on a distant destination.

Originally designed with Central Park or Battery Park in mind, but rejected by the New York City Parks Commission, the statue was the handiwork of sculptor Jo Davidson (1883-1952). It was not the only statue of a beloved literary figure sculpted by the man. Over his long career, the New York-born man was tapped to portray many of them – including Carl Sandburg  Arthur Conan Doyle, James Joyce, Joseph Conrad, Rudyard Kipling,  Rabindrinath Tagore and J.M. Barrie, author of Peter Pan.

But Whitman may very well have been the most well-known work of his, at least when it was first exhibited at the 1939 New York World’s Fair. According to one newspaper account, so many visitors reportedly tried to shake the statue’s hand at its location in front of the ‘perisphere’ in Flushing that the soft bronze hand was bent out of shape – and a new one, made of harder material, had to be put on the statue.

After the World’s Fair, the statue faced a new hazard, at least to Harriman’s way of thinking. It seems the influential Robert Moses was intent on having the figure of Walt placed along Grand Central Parkway – but Harriman would have none of it. Instead, the future New York governor succeeded in having placed upstate.

In choosing the spot, Harriman said he was seeking a location visitors have to hike to. “Fifty years ago the rocky hills and lakes seemed of little or no value, but they appealed to my mother and father and it was here they made their home,” he said at the dedication ceremony. He cited his father’s promotion of roads, rather ironically, and proclaimed that whoever should see the statue of Whitman would have to ‘come here by foot.”

That having been said, he set old Walt atop an outcropping of granite, with a sign which reads: “presented to the Palisades Interstate Park Commission by William Averell Harriman in behalf of his brother and sisters as a memorial to their mother Mary Williamson Harriman on the thirtieth Anniversary of her gift to the State of ten thousand acres of land and one million dollars to establish the Bear Mountain – Harriman section of the Palisades Interstate Park.”

While the site today does receive considerably more attention than in 1940 – a park museum and zoo is located very close to the statue – it may be argued that William Averill Harriman succeeded in giving the ‘afoot and lighthearted’ Walt Whitman an appropriate ‘road less traveled’ to call home.  

Or as Louis Simpson put it, a spot where one may imagine an America beyond the ‘used car parking lot, ‘the castles, the prisons, the cathedrals/unbuilding, and roses/blossoming from the stones.”

(nb For those whose 'Long Island Pride' is put off by Harriman’s insistence that the statue not be located on its byways, there is this to consider. Seventeen years later, as the sitting governor of  New York State,it was William Averill Harriman who accepted the petition of local residents to have the Whitman Birthplace designated as a state historic site. )