Sunday Poet: Hayden Carruth

A new collection of Hayden Carruth's poetry was published recently (Toward the Distant Islands, Copper Canyon Press) and reviewed in the New York Times Book Review, so it seems like a good time to make him the Sunday Poet.

Endnote

The great poems of
our elders in many
tongues we struggled

to comprehend who
are now content with
mystery simple

and profound you
in the night your
breath your body

orbit of time and
the moment you
Phosphorus and

Hesper a dark circle
of fertility so
bloodthirsty for us

you in the world
the night breathing
asleep and alive.

*****

Letter to Denise

Remember when you put on that wig
From the grab bag and then looked at yourself
In the mirror and laughed, and we laughed together?
It was a transformation, glamorous flowing tresses.
Who knows if you might not have liked to wear
That wig permanently, but of course you
Wouldn’t. Remember when you told me how
You meditated, looking at a stone until
You knew the soul of the stone? Inwardly I
Scoffed, being the backwoods pragmatic Yankee
That I was, yet I knew what you meant. I
Called it love. No magic was needed. And we
Loved each other too, not in the way of
Romance but in the way of two poets loving
A stone, and the world that the stone signified.
Remember when we had that argument over
Pee and piss in your poem about the bear?
“Bears don’t pee, they piss,” I said. But you were
Adamant. “My bears pee.” And that was that.
Then you moved away, across the continent,
And sometimes for a year I didn’t see you.
We phoned and wrote, we kept in touch. And then
You moved again, much farther away, I don’t
Know where. No word from you now at all. But
I am faithful, my dear Denise. And I still
Love the stone, and, yes, I know its soul.

*****

At Seventy-Five: Rereading An Old Book

My prayers have been answered, if they were prayers. I live.
I'm alive, and even in rather good health, I believe.
If I'd quit smoking I might live to be a hundred.
Truly this is astonishing, after the poverty and pain,
The suffering. Who would have thought that petty
Endurance could achieve so much?
And prayers --
Were they prayers? Always I was adamant
In my irreligion, and had good reason to be.
Yet prayer is not, I see in old age now,
A matter of doctrine or discipline, but rather
A movement of the natural human mind
Bereft of its place among the animals, the other
Animals. I prayed. Then on paper I wrote
Some of the words I said, which are these poems.

*****

Here is some biographical information on Hayden Carruth from The Academy of American Poets:

Hayden Carruth was born on August 3, 1921, in Waterbury, Connecticut, and was educated at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and the University of Chicago. For many years, Carruth lived in northern Vermont. He now lives in upstate New York, where until recently he taught in the Graduate Creative Writing Program at Syracuse University. Noted for the breadth of his linguistic and formal resources, influenced by jazz and the blues, Carruth has published twenty-nine books, chiefly of poetry but also a novel, four books of criticism, and two anthologies. His most recent books are Collected Shorter Poems 1946-1991 (Copper Canyon Press, 2001); Doctor Jazz: Poems 1996-2000 (2001); Reluctantly: Autobiographical Essays (1998); Selected Essays & Reviews; Collected Longer Poems; Collected Shorter Poems, 1946-1991 (awarded the National Book Critics' Circle Award); and Scrambled Eggs and Whiskey (1996), which won the National Book Award for Poetry.

Informed by his political radicalism and sense of cultural responsibility, many of Carruth's best-known poems are about the people and places of northern Vermont, as well as rural poverty and hardship. He has been editor of Poetry, poetry editor of Harper's, and, for 20 years, an advisory editor of The Hudson Review. Carruth has received fellowships from the Bollingen Foundation, the Guggenheim Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Arts, and a 1995 Lannan Literary Fellowship. He has been presented with the Lenore Marshall Award, the Paterson Poetry Prize, the Vermont Governor's Medal, the Carl Sandburg Award, the Whiting Award, and the Ruth Lilly Prize, among many others.

Carruth has always been an outsider in American poetry, despite having edited The Voice That Is Great Within Us: American Poetry of the Twentieth Century, a popular and well-regarded anthology, and having served as editor for some prestigious magazines and journals. His outsider status has allowed him to experiment with form and content, following his own interests rather than worrying about satisfying publishers or an audience.

It also allowed him to maintain his fiercely radical political stance, which may have been watered down had he been forced to work with more mainstream publishers. He did not begin teaching until he was 58 years old, which again, allowed him to enter the classroom as a fully-formed poet.

His body of work reveals a long and varied exploration of his art, his life, and his politics.

THE HERON

Let me tell you, my dear, about the heron I saw
by the edge of Dave Haflett's lovely little pond.
A great blue heron, standing perfectly still, where it had been
studying Dave's rainbows and brookies beneath the surface.
And I too stood perfectly still—as perfectly as I could—
not twenty feet away, each of us contemplative and quiet.
Communication occurred. I felt it. Not just simple
wonder and apprehension, but curiosity and concern.
It was evident. The great bird in its heraldic presence,
so beautifully marked, so poised against the dark green water.
I in my raggedness, with my cigarette smoldering, my eyes
squinting, my cap titlted back. Two invisibly beating hearts.
Then the impetus lapsed. The heron nodded and flew away.
I turned back into Dave's workshop and picked up a wrench.
If goodness exists in the world—and it does—then this moment
was the paradigm of it, a recognition, a life in conjunction with a life.
But why am I compelled to tell you about it? It was wordless.
And why, over and over again, must I write this poem?

*****

On Being Asked To Write A Poem Against The War In Vietnam

Well I have and in fact
more than one and I'll
tell you this too

I wrote one against
Algeria that nightmare
and another against

Korea and another
against the one
I was in

and I don't remember
how many against
the three

when I was a boy
Abyssinia Spain and
Harlan County

and not one
breath was restored
to one

shattered throat
mans womans or childs
not one not

one
but death went on and on
never looking aside

except now and then
with a furtive half-smile
to make sure I was noticing.

*****

Hayden Carruth on the web:

The Academy of American Poets
Poet Hunter
Wikipedia
Hayden Carruth's homepage
The Plagiarist
An Interview at Poetry Daily

Tags: Hayden Carruth, poetry, poems, New York Times Book Review, Toward the Distant Islands