Frank Bidart se gedigte werk met selfkonfrontasie. In sy jongste bundel Metaphisical dog skryf hy:
In adolescence, you thought your work
ancient work: to decipher at last
human beings’ relation to God. Decipher
love. To make what was once whole
whole again: or to see
why it never should have been thought whole.
In 'n onderhoud met Shara Lessley verwys Frank Bidart na
Elizabeth Bishop se opmerking dat 'n mens altyd “home made” bly en dat hy deur
sy Kaliforniese jeug in Bakersfield gevorm is. In sy eie woorde:
I think the things that are ‘Californian’ about me
have been modified as I’ve gotten older, but haven’t changed in essence. Though
everything I’ve written has been an argument with the world I’m from, I’m no
less a creature of it. This is an enormous, labyrinthine subject, as it
probably is for any writer who felt wounded but made by the place he or she
began. Think of Joyce and Ireland.
In hierdie onderhoud word daar ook gewys hoe hy ander
karakters buikspreek soos die bekende gedig “Ellen West”, en hierdie optelvers
gekry het van ’n uitspraak deur Heath Ledger ("Poem Ending
with a Sentence By Heath Ledger"):
Once I have the voice
that’s
the line
and at
the end
of the line
is a hook
and attached
to that
is the soul.
Ek haal aan:
SL: “Writing ‘Ellen West’’’ revisits your well-known
poem on anorexia. Like Ellen, you claim, ‘he was obsessed with eating and the
arbitrariness of gender and having to have a body’ (emphasis mine). As a
narrative strategy, why transform yourself into a character via the third
person?
FB: It’s a way of making fact available to art. To
write about oneself as a character — to think about oneself as a character — opens
up space between the ‘I’ and the author. (In this sense, calling the I ‘he’ is
only a way of making inescapable this space. You can write as an ‘I’ and still
think of yourself as a character.) The space is necessary because the work
isn’t going to be any good if it is merely a subtle form of self-justification,
if one is supine before the romance of the self. Not that self-justification is
ever wholly absent.
Hy verduidelik verder in die onderhoud:
Crucial to getting a character to speak in a poem is
hearing in your head as you write the way the character talks. Because a poem
is made up of words, speech is how the soul is embodied. (Ledger asserts, of
course, that even in a movie this is true.) What’s crucial is that how the
words are set down on the page not muffle the voice. When I first began
writing, writing the voice down in the ways conventional in contemporary
practice seemed to muffle or kill the voice I still heard in my head. If I lost
that voice, I knew I had lost everything. I’m grateful to Ledger for saying
more succinctly than I have ever been able to what I had felt since I began
writing.
Bidart beklemtoon ook die belang van die konkrete beeld bó
die abstraksie wat die gedig kan kniehalter.
*
Hierdie uitsprake en bundel neem my na Johann de Lange se
jongste bundel Stil punt van die aarde
wat sopas by Human & Rousseau verskyn het.
Hierin – gedagtig aan Bidart se uitsprake om deur 'n ander
karakter te praat – verskyn die volgende aangrypende vers:
Luciano
Pavarotti (1935 - 2007)
Die groot Luciano Pavarotti is doodstil
71 jaar ná sy eerste asemstoot:
sy volgehoue hoë C, gewigtige register,
voorliefde vir ryk disse & bywywe
tussen bedrywe is vir dié bebaarde bejaarde
vermaarde vermaker verby, sy omvang
imposant, álles groter as lewensgroot,
tot by fyntjies die wit servetsakdoek.
Hy was glo ’n goeie pokerspeler,
maar voor massiewe sokkerskares
het hy hart op die mou áls aan gees
& vlees gegee. Party sê hy’t opera verbaster
maar dis laster: hy’t sy gawe gul uitgedeel,
sy hand bedrewe teruggespeel.
Deur Pavarotti verbeeld die digter De Lange sy eie sieninge oor die kuns. Die digter deel sy gawes gul uit, maar soos 'n pokerspeler "sy hand bedrewe teruggespeel". Terugspeel in die sin van oorspeel, maar ook met dieselfde kleur in kaartspel speel as jou maat. Ook iets terugslaan. Hiermee aktiveer die digter dan sy identifikasie met die digter en verwys hy ook na ander kunsteoretiese gedigte oor bekende figure.
Regdeur sy digkuns gebruik hy bekende figure as "vehicles" vir sy eie lewensfilosofie, maar hyself bly in die agtergrond soos in hierdie vers:
O lig van die
wêreld, dra my
na Mary Oliver
Ingrid wanhopig vasgerank
in die wier & gras van Drieankerbaai
beenaf Ernst veg met fantoompyne nag ná nanag
Barrie met sy pille & sy bottel gas
die stemme in sy kop uiteindelik gestil
Koos in pajamas praat met die dooies om sy bed
Eugène Marais buite in die reën met die dubbelboor
het die slang wat hom in die aar gebyt het opgespoor
Stephan, sy pyn privaat, onverhoeds & alleen
op sy dubbelbed betrap
Casper in ‘n hospies buite bereik van sy antwoordmasjien
Ralph wroeg & wurg eensaam aan ‘n bitter
wattelbos
Ina uit haar verlate tuin verban
waar voëls nie langer sing & onkruid gedy
& Sheila, broos & halfblind, die gelouterde
lyf oplaas bevry,
moet alleen die vlammende oortog maak –
O lig van die wêreld, dra my!
Soos Bidart 'n vers maak van 'n uitspraak van Heath Ledger,
gebruik De Lange 'n ander vers en verwysings na digters en kunstenaars om sy
“dubbelboor”-stelling te maak. Ingrid Jonker, Ernst van Heerden, Barrie Hough,
Koos Prinsloo, Eugène Marais, Stephan Bouwer, Casper Schmidt, Ralph Rabie
(Kerkorrel), Ina Rousseau en Sheila Cussons het alleen gesterf – en deur
hierdie enumerasie identifiseer hy met hul ellende en alleendood. Maar via
Oliver, bekend om haar gedigte wat die natuur besing, klou hy nog kortstondig aan die lewe.
In die digkuns werk selfkonfrontasie waarskynlik beter op 'n
indirekte wyse deur buikspreek of deur die “wisseling van lywe”.
Bronne:
Frank Bidart. 2013. Metaphysical
dog. New York: Farrar, Strauss & Giroux.
Johann de Lange. 2014. Stil
punt van die aarde. Kaapstad: Human & Rousseau.
Shara Lessley. “Interview with Frank Bidart, MetaphysicalDog, 2013 National Book Award Finalist, Poetry”. Besoek 31 Januarie 2014.
Carol Maldow. “Frank Bidart's poetry: The Substance of theInvisible”. Besoek 30 Januarie 2014.
The Poetry Foundation. Mary Oliver. Besoek 9 Februarie 2014.
Mary Oliver. “Poetry by Mary Oliver. The Journey, WildGeese, Morning Poem and Others”. Besoek 9 Februarie 2014.
*
Metaphysical Dog, Farrar,
Straus & Giroux.
Interview with Shara Lessley
Shara Lessley: In an effort to promote a literary event in
Bakersfield, a woman once rented a billboard that read ‘FRANK BIDART IS COMING
HOME.’ Although you’ve been gone from California for some time, there are poems
in Metaphysical Dog that return
there. Is there a part of you that still inhabits the Golden State?
Frank Bidart: The person who did that was a writer named Lee
McCarthy, who taught high school near Bakersfield. She was terrifically gutsy,
independent, courageous. She was angry that I had been left out of a
semi-official anthology of California poets. She invited me to read in
Bakersfield, and arranged for the billboard to startle anyone driving by.
Though I’ve now lived in New England much longer than my
years growing up in Bakersfield, I’ve never thought of myself as a New
Englander. I’m deeply someone made in California, in Bakersfield. Elizabeth
Bishop has a wonderful line, ‘Home-made, home-made! But aren’t we all?’ But if
you make yourself in California it’s different than if you make yourself in
Massachusetts. Class issues and assumptions, racial issues, manners are
different. The things you argue about in your head are different. I think the
things that are ‘Californian’ about me have been modified as I’ve gotten older,
but haven’t changed in essence. Though everything I’ve written has been an
argument with the world I’m from, I’m no less a creature of it. This is an
enormous, labyrinthine subject, as it probably is for any writer who felt
wounded but made by the place he or she began. Think of Joyce and Ireland.
SL: Hunger in Metaphysical
Dog is exhausting but persistent. ‘Words are flesh,’ you write. The
collection’s speakers crave the soul, the absolute. Is desire for ‘the great
addictions’—love, power, fame, god, and art — a flaw? Or, is it simply what
drives what you call the ‘Ordinary divided unsimple heart’?
FB: I think they are what drive the ordinary divided
unsimple heart. Though it’s terrible to give in unqualifiedly to the desire for
them, the notion that one has eradicated them from oneself — or that you should
be ashamed you feel them — is naive, an illusion, one more chimera. No matter
who or what you are, possessing whatever social or economic stature you’ve been
born into or achieved, hunger is universal—hunger for something you don’t
possess, once thought important. Everyone feels grief for the unlived life. But
not every addiction is equal. I tell my students that it’s better to be
addicted to Astaire and Rogers movies than to heroin. The notion that, short of
death, one is going to be totally free of addictions is one more way of
torturing oneself.
SL: “Writing ‘Ellen West’” revisits your well-known poem on
anorexia. Like Ellen, you claim, ‘he
was obsessed with eating and the arbitrariness of gender and having to have a
body’ (emphasis mine). As a narrative strategy, why transform yourself into a
character via the third person?
FB: It’s a way of making fact available to art. To write
about oneself as a character — to think about oneself as a character — opens up
space between the ‘I’ and the author. (In this sense, calling the I ‘he’ is
only a way of making inescapable this space. You can write as an ‘I’ and still
think of yourself as a character.) The space is necessary because the work
isn’t going to be any good if it is merely a subtle form of self-justification,
if one is supine before the romance of the self. Not that self-justification is
ever wholly absent.
SL: Image is often exploited as a means of generating feeling
or propelling the contemporary poem’s plot. Metaphysical
Dog, in contrast, is stark—it draws its energy primarily from abstraction
and pattern-making. Do ideas incite your work rather than concrete details?
FB: What’s crucial for any writer is to understand how your
mind apprehends meaning. How, in your experience, you apprehend significance.
Understand it and find a way to embody it, make it have the force for the
reader in a work of art that it has for you. Images, what the eye sees, is of
course part of this for everyone. But I think tone of voice, situation, the
look in an eye or on a face, are as much part of what make up for me ‘meaning’
as what traditionally people think of as ‘images.’ When Williams said, ‘No
ideas but in things,’ that’s not an image. Pound’s ‘Down, Derry-down / Oh let
an old man rest,’ is not an image. Pound was of course right when he said, ‘Go
in fear of abstractions.’ Abstractions can smother the quick of feeling in a
poem. But reaching for abstractions and conceiving abstractions are not
separable from feeling for a human being. When Williams said, “No ideas but in
things,” he didn’t mean “no ideas.”
SL: I’m struck by how precisely the last ten lines of ‘Poem
Ending with a Sentence By Heath Ledger’ characterize your life’s work:
Once I have the voice
that’s
the line
and at
the end
of the line
is a hook
and attached
to that
is the soul.
How are you able to imagine and sustain such varied
voices—the sweeping dramatic monologues of your early collections, for instance,
versus the more intimate lyric and philosophical poems that populate Metaphysical Dog?
FB: First of all, that sentence really is by Heath Ledger.
When I saw it printed in an interview, it was printed simply as prose. But I
thought there was a movement in it, an iron logic if you will, that would be
apprehended if it was set up in lines. I struggled over and over to do so. I
found that this movement was apprehensible if I used a form that I have more
and more used the longer I’ve written: a single line followed by a two-line
stanza, followed by another single line followed by a two-line stanza. 1
followed by 2 followed by 1 followed by 2. I’ve found this form tremendously
flexible; it reveals the anatomy of many (but not all) sentences that, for me,
are eloquent. One magazine that printed the poem — a magazine that did not send
me proofs — eliminated all the stanza breaks, in an attempt to save space. The
poem was reduced to drivel. It’s how the words exist in space that allows them,
on the page, their eloquence.
Crucial to getting a character to speak in a poem is hearing
in your head as you write the way the character talks. Because a poem is made
up of words, speech is how the soul is embodied. (Ledger asserts, of course,
that even in a movie this is true.) What’s crucial is that how the words are
set down on the page not muffle the voice. When I first began writing, writing
the voice down in the ways conventional in contemporary practice seemed to
muffle or kill the voice I still heard in my head. If I lost that voice, I knew
I had lost everything. I’m grateful to Ledger for saying more succinctly than I
have ever been able to what I had felt since I began writing.
SL: ‘I don’t know the
value of what I’ve written,’ said Robert Lowell, ‘but I know that I changed the
game.’ Your poems — with their typographical innovations, mining of the
paradoxical, psychological complexity — have been game-changers for so many of
us. What about your own work or the process of making poems continues to
surprise you?
FB: Nothing is better about writing than the passages about
writing in Eliot’s Four Quartets. ‘A raid on the inarticulate / with shabby
equipment always deteriorating. . . . The intolerable wrestle / With words and
meanings.’ The solutions that I felt I found aren’t going to be the solutions
that work for someone else. But I’ll be happy if my poems seem to say to
younger writers that you still can be as bold about setting a poem down on the
page as Wordsworth was or Mallarmé was or Ben Jonson was or Pound was or
Ginsberg and Lowell and Bishop were. Getting the dynamics and voice down are
what’s crucial. Whatever it takes to get the whole soul into a poem. An
emphasis on voice isn’t fashionable in contemporary practice. I hope my poems
make people reconsider that.
Shara
Lessley is the author of Two-Headed Nightingale and a former Wallace Stegner
Fellow in Poetry at Stanford University. Her awards include an Artist
Fellowship from the State of North Carolina, the Diane Middlebrook Poetry
Fellowship from the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing, Colgate
University’s O’Connor Fellowship, The Gilman School’s Tickner Fellowship, and a
“Discovery” / The Nation prize. A recent resident of the Middle East, Shara is
the 2014 Mary Wood Fellow at Washington College.