'You Take Good Writing Any Way You Can Get It'

“I have a tiny anecdote that I’d like to pass along so that it doesn’t get lost.”

The speaker is the poet Henri Coulette (1927-1988) and the sentiment is admirable. Writing is an act of preservation, a job description Coulette shared with Philip Larkin, who wrote in a letter to Monica Jones: “I feel the only thing you can do about life is to preserve it, by art if you’re an artist, by children if you’re not.” One need not be a documentarian or historian to preserve a sample of life. The triggering event may be commonplace or even fictional, but the will to perpetuate something that will otherwise disappear is almost as strong as the human urge to destroy. Coulette is speaking in 1982 in an interview with the poet Michael S. Harper. Here is the anecdote:

“I was with Edgar Bowers and J.V. Cunningham one night in Santa Barbara, and Cunningham said to Edgar, well, ‘Here’s a book that you might want to read,’ and he gave him that biography of Roethke, The Glass House. I said to Cunningham, ‘I’m surprised that you like Roethke since his best is often in lines and passages.’ ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘but you take good writing any way you can get it.’”

For some readers, this is gossip, and not even interesting gossip. For others – me – it’s an ideal gathering of poets, three of our best in the same room at the same time. The idea that Cunningham would stoop to read Allan Seager’s 1968 biography of Roethke is startling, though in his early work Roethke was a skillful formalist and in 1935 he and Louise Bogan were lovers. Cunningham and Bogan were mutual admirers. More importantly, Cunningham, the toughest of critics, acknowledged that “you take good writing any way you can get it,” even one line at a time. Good writing is always rare. Harper next addresses Cunningham’s importance to Coulette and his work, and Coulette replies:

“Cunningham has been a dominant figure in my thinking. In terms of my teaching career, I owe him a lot, because he has truly a first-rate mind. A marvelous mind. My whole notion of what literature is about derives from him, that a poem is in a sense a statement, that the problem of reading somebody’s poetry is a simplified version of the basic human problem of trying to understand another without imposing your personality or beliefs upon another. But to really hear them and to really understand them. Now that’s the human problem.”

These thoughts circle back to Coulette’s observation about preserving an anecdote. We disrespect people when we fail to listen to them. Granted, plenty of people say nothing worth hearing. But strangers, until they prove otherwise, and those we care most about, deserve dedicated listening. So do the best poems, novels and essays. Coulette concludes the interview like this:

 “More and more I am interested in history. Some popular novelist, maybe a mystery writer, said that the reason he really wrote books was because there weren’t enough of the kind he liked to read. Really that’s why I’ve gone back to writing poems; there aren’t enough of the kind I like.”