`Clearest, Purest, Straightest'

I read more poetry than prose, and more nonfiction than fiction, and this comes as a surprise. Without realizing it, my reading habits have evolved dramatically over the decades. I no longer read newspapers though I spent much of my life working for them. Is there something about fiction that specifically attracts adolescents and young adults? Roughly 35 years ago I read almost nothing but novels, current titles and what is now dismissed as the canon. Does anyone remember Tom McHale? I read and admired Principato (1970) and Farragan’s Retreat (1972) as they were published. McHale committed suicide in 1982 and his reputation is largely eclipsed, but he was a superbly funny writer, somewhat in the school of Evelyn Waugh. If a comparably gifted fiction writer appeared today, I probably would miss him, and yet I feel no compulsion to look for the next McHale. What happened?

Age, of course, is part of it. When I read fiction, most often I’m rereading writers deeply familiar to me – Chekhov, Joyce, Flannery O’Connor, Henry James, Bellow, Christina Stead, William Maxwell. I resent wasting time on lousy writers. I’m no longer reluctant to give up on a mediocre book after five or 10 pages, or even one, but I’m less likely than ever to even start a book by a writer new to me. (Recent exceptions include Per Petterson’s Out Stealing Horses and Richard Bausch’s Peace.)

With poetry it’s different. Granted, as with fiction, most of what I read is an old friend – Shakespeare, Donne, Herbert (George, Zbigniew), Whitman, Dickinson, Hopkins, Eliot, Berryman, Geoffrey Hill and so on. Still, I tend to assume that most poetry, even more so than fiction, is rubbish. Among human endeavors, only music (composition, performance) may be more exceedingly difficult than writing great or even good poetry. I trust my ability to recognize bad poems and I close the book without remorse.

In the broadest sense, what attracts me to a poem is precision and concision of language. I like words densely packed with meaning and music, words that don’t surrender their mysteries after repeated readings. A good poem nags even after you read it and read it again. It hints at something sacred, something bigger than the poet and his reader. Try “History as Poetry” from Hill’s second collection, King Log (1968):

“Poetry as salutation; taste
Of Pentacost’s ashen feast. Blue wounds.
The tongue’s atrocities. Poetry
Unearths from among the speechless dead

“Lazarus mystified, common man
Of death. The lily rears its gouged face
From the provided loam. Fortunate
Auguries; whirrings; tarred golden dung:

“`A resurgence’ as they say. The old
Laurels wagging with the new: Selah!
Thus laudable the trodden bone thus
Unanswerable the knack of tongues.”

An e-mail from my brother on Tuesday prompted this post. Earlier I had read Hill’s “Alienated Majesty: Gerard M. Hopkins,” in his new volume, Collected Critical Writings. This passage in particular, in which Hill echoes the Jesuit motto (“Ad majorem Dei gloriam”) struck me as beautiful and acute:

“There are ways of offering up commonplace to the greater glory of God. Hopkins and in his way Whitman can do this; as Lincoln can. Others cannot.”

My brother is not a literary guy, any more than I’m a painterly guy, as he is. I suspect he’s never read Hopkins or Hill, but what impresses me about him is his autodidact’s gift for taking on most anything that attracts him. If he gets around to reading Hopkins or Hill, the results will be worth hearing. He’s not interested in textual history or critical context. He’s a poetic Protestant -- just him and the text. Here’s what he wrote to me:

“Thanks to you I have one more thing on my list of subjects of which I will never know enough, Poetry. Thanks a lot.

“Starting with [Zbigniew] Herbert in the winter of 2006 through [Kay] Ryan last month. Some of their poems have stopped me dead in my tracks and given me pause to observe some of the clearest, purest, straightest lines imaginable. (It's the Welsh in me.) [Our ancestry, in fact, is Polish and Irish.]

“The surge in my graphic output is absolutely linked to you and your daily ramblings.”

Those are some more of the reasons I read poetry.