'Poetry Instructs by Delighting'

“There are persons in society with whom we put up and others for whom we pull up a chair by the fire; there are volumes of poetry that we pore through dutifully and others to which we return with a sociable pint of beer and a chunk of Stilton.” 

That’s the late Fred Chappell’s way of saying that with some poets – and I would widen the category to include writers other than poets – we form a lasting companionable bond. Their work we read and reread, perhaps memorize, and read yet again. Seasoned readers may have dozens of such reliable relationships -- Shakespeare, Yeats, Robinson, others.

 

Sometimes such bonds take years to mature. With others, it’s instantaneous surrender. That’s how, about twenty years ago, I fell for the poems of Helen Pinkerton. The book was Taken in Faith: Poems (Swallow Press/Ohio University Press), published in 2002. The fourth poem in the collection, “Red-Tailed Hawk,” was the first to grab me:

 

“Your hawk today floated the loft of air

That lifts each morning from the valley floor.

Dark idler, predator of mice and hare

And greater vermin, as I watched him soar

 

“Out of my sight, taking a certain path,

Knowing from ancient blood, instinctive might,

How to survive beyond the present drift,

He seemed to shift from nothingness toward flight.

 

“Yet it was real, the warm column of air—

Like being, unrecorded, always there.”

 

The shift in the final couplet, like the hawk’s effortless course correction, is breathtaking. No longer is the bird the focus, but the thermal, “the warm column of air,” the invisible shaft of energy buoying the bird. Hawks, like all creation, move from nothingness to being, invisibly. All of Helen’s work carries a similar philosophical charge.

 

In early 2011, a package arrived containing Étienne Gilson’s Being and Some Philosophers, the second edition, “corrected and enlarged,” published in 1952 by the Pontifical Institute of Medieval Studies in Toronto. Helen sent the book and an email:

 

“I had three copies including an unmarked second copy of the 2nd edition, which I include. Reading this book when I was about 21 and at Stanford changed my life, I found in it the philosophical grounds for believing in God’s existence, which delivered me from youthful atheism and have sustained my faith ever since. Though [Yvor] Winters recommended reading Gilson’s histories of philosophy, he did not mention this book. When I asked him in later years about it, he confessed that he had not read it. I wish that he had.” 

 

Helen’s emails were always surprising, often legitimate works of literature in their own right. Once she wrote to say she had just finished reading Vasily Grossman’s great novel Life and Fate. She went on to liken certain passages to others she had marked in The Gulag Archipelago, and that started an exchange on Solzhenitsyn. She was a scholar of Herman Melville and the Civil War, which always gave us something to talk about. We shared an admiration for Ulysses Grant's Personal Memoirs. She had studied with Yvor Winters at Stanford and befriended Janet Lewis, J.V. Cunningham and Edgar Bowers. Here is another of her poems, “Visible and Invisible”:

 

“In touching gently like a golden finger,

The sunlight, falling as a steady shimmer

Through curling fruit leaves, fills the mind with hunger

For meaning in the time and light of summer.

 

“Dispersed by myriad surfaces in falling,

Drawn into green and into air dissolving,

Light seems uncaught by sudden sight or feeling.

Remembered, it gives rise to one's believing

 

“Its truth resides in constant speed descending.

The momentary beauty is attendant.

A flicker of the animate responding

Shifts in the mind with time and fades, inconstant.”

 

Helen died December 28, 2017, age ninety. Chappell writes, “Poetry instructs by delighting. So says our ancient wisdom, and I’m not yet fool enough to attempt contradiction.”

 

[The Fred Chappell passages are taken from “Attempts Upon Delight: Six Poetry Books,” published in the Summer 1990 issue of The Kenyon Review.]