'I’ve Been Setting the Table for the Dead'

“Sometimes the what takes over so much that the how disappears. I think poetry works best when these are indistinguishable, when they keep such good balance that you don't feel you're being preached to or grasping at the abstract.” 

Back in the early 1990s I had a chance to meet Robert Creeley. A friend was a graduate student in English, and he and his doctoral adviser were meeting the poet for coffee. I was invited but I couldn’t come up with a good reason to meet Creeley. “Celebrities” had lost their attraction years before. As a reporter I occasionally had to interview a writer whose work didn’t interest me. I knew how to enter that professional mode, but why waste my time and his? Creeley’s poems had always seemed anorexic, pale and underfed, barely holding on to life – scrawnier versions of William Carlos Williams’ poems. In a word, boring.

 

The passage quoted at the top is spoken by the Dominican-born American poet Rhina P. Espaillat in a 2015 interview. She identifies precisely the reason so much contemporary poetry is unreadably dull. The what dominates, as in strident adolescent diary entries – or poems. The how gets ignored into non-existence. Creeley’s lines are instantly forgettable. They don’t register as they grasp at the abstract.  Contrast his work with “Workshop,” a poem by Espaillat:

 

“‘Where have you been,’ says my old friend the poet,

‘and what have you been doing?’ The question

weighs and measures me like an unpaid bill,

hangs in the air, waiting for some remittance.

 

“Well, I’ve been coring apples, layering them

in raisins and brown sugar; I’ve been finding

what's always lost, mending and brushing,

pruning houseplants, remembering birthdays.

 

“The wisdom of others thunders past me

like sonic booming; what I know of the world

fits easily in the palm of one hand

and lies quietly there, like a child’s cheek.

 

“Spoon-fed to me each evening, history

puts on my children’s faces, because they

are the one alphabet all of me reads.

I’ve been setting the table for the dead,

 

“rehearsing the absence of the living,

seasoning age with names for the unborn.

I’ve been putting a life together, like

supper, like a poem, with what I have.”

 

Plenty of content there -- “history / puts on my children’s faces” – accompanied by plenty of how. Is it a “domestic” poem, an account of caring for family? The most important of jobs. “I’ve been setting the table for the dead.” Espaillat continues in her interview:

 

“Many poets today have been confused into believing that adherence to forms is for minor works. William Carlos Williams ‘blessed’ us with that idea: that if you’re really a grown-up poet you throw out the sonnets. I think he did us a great disservice.”