in afterlife

Sometimes you only catch up to a poet’s work after their death.

poet's grave

[Scene takes place at a ruined monastery that has been turned into a prison camp]

     From all others, Yakov Petrovich Polonsky chose this place as his own and gave instructions that he was to be buried here. Man, it seems, has always been prone to the belief that his spirit will hover over his grave and gaze down on the peaceful countryside around it.
     But the domed churches have gone; the half of the stone walls that is left has been made up in height by a plank fence with barbed wire, and the whole of this ancient place is dominated by those sickeningly familiar monsters: watchtowers. There is a guardhouse in the monastery gateway, and a poster that says, “Peace among Nations,” with a Russian workman holding a little black girl in his arms.
[…, speaking to the warder]
     “Tell me—according to the map, there’s a poet called Polonsky buried here. Where is his grave?”
     “You can’t see Polonsky. He’s inside the perimeter.”
     So Polonsky was out of bounds. What else was there to see? A crumbling ruin? Wait, though—the warder was turning to his wife: “Didn’t they dig Polonsky up?”
     “Mm. Took him to Ryazan.” The woman nodded from the porch as she cracked sunflower seeds with her teeth.
     The warder thought this was a great joke: “Seems he’d done his time—so they let him out . . .”

—Alexander Solzhenitsyn, “The Ashes of a Poet,” Stories and Prose Poems (FSG, 1971), translated by Michael Glenny, p. 249

burned library

Such was his erudition that when he died it felt like a great library had burned.

[Thinking of Borges]

resist the lapse

The best older poets resist the lapse into writing mainly about mortality and death.

black sounds

In his 1930 essay, “The Duende: Theory and Divertissement,” Lorca wrote: “All that has black sounds has duende…. The black sounds are the mystery, the roots fastened in the mire that we all know and all ignore, the fertile silt that gives us the very substance of art.” Lorca goes on to describe the three forces—the Angel, the Muse, and the Duende—that “everyone senses and no philosopher explains.”

According to Lorca, when the Angel sees death on the way he flies in slow circles and “weaves tears of narcissus and ice.” When the Muse sees death, she closes the door. But the Duende “will not approach at all if he does not see the possibility of death.” Lorca writes: “Everywhere else, death is an end.” Death’s possibility—the necessity of its proximity—is that which makes art human and alive.

The omnipresent loom of death—the body and its dangers, the heart and its constancy of harm—is what makes the poetry of Thomas James so powerful. So ubiquitous is this power of “black sounds” that—according to a student who, in earnest, made a list of Thomas’ touchstones, his word-hoard, his lexicon (such easy prey—moon, stone, bone, wound)—over a dozen instances of the word “dark” appear in this one book. But Lorca wrote, after all, that poems are works of art that have been “baptized in dark water.”

—Lucie Brock-Broido, Introduction to Letters to a Stranger (Graywolf Press, 2008) by Thomas James.

only names now

They are names only now, in that sad slow almost silent ten years that precedes a poet’s death.

what a fencer

[Emily Dickinson] is an inimitable poet, definitely not to be emulated. The white dresses and white slippers descending the stairs from a room where she espied Death driving his carriage, vanishing into a dark grove of trees. All those dashes—what a fencer she would have made.

—Elizabeth Smither, The Commonplace Book (Auckland U. Press, 2011)

ultimate enemy of promise

When a clearly gifted poet dies young, of course we miss out on the even greater poetry to come; then again, the quality of the poetry won’t ever slide or fail to exceed the fine early work.

dies in order to rise

In a certain sense the act of writing dies in print, then awaits resurrection by audience reaction.

serious about books

I’m not saying he was overzealous about keeping his library intact, but his bookplate featured a human skull overwritten with the words:
‘Under Penalty of Death
Return this Book to X’.

glistening still

We thought the blood thinned, our weight
lessened, that our substance was reduced
by simple happiness. The oleander is thick
with leaves and flowers because of spilled
water. Let the spirit marry the heart.
When I return naked to the stone porch,
there is no one to see me glistening.
But I look at the almond tree with its husks
cracking open in the heat. I look down
the whole mountain to the sea. Goats bleating
faintly and sometimes bells. I stand there
a long time with the sun and the quiet,
the earth moving slowly as I dry in the light.

—Linda Gregg, from "Glistening"

[My friend the poet Linda Gregg died in the early hours of yesterday.]

at the kitchen table

I have a great affection for the picture of Emily Bronte's loaves rising, but am fonder of Tsvetaeva, one daughter living, one daughter dead, clearing a defiant space on the kitchen table. To be torn apart by births or revolutions or both, and survive at least for a time, is a prerequisite for the fullest genuine genius to flower.

—Medbh McGuckian, from Delighting the Heart: A Notebook by Women Writers (Women’s Press, 1989), edited by Susan Sellers

not going there

An aging writer should resist at every turn writing about death.

hearse chaser

I’m sorry that I only read your work when you were dead.

burying the undertaker

A poem was read at the memorial for the critic who’d declared that poetry was dead.

long view

Borges’ long view of writers and readers:

            We forget that we are all dead men

            conversing with dead men.

[…]

In Alberto Manguel’s short book, With Borges, we can continue in this morbid frame of mind:

For Borges, the core of reality lay in books; reading books, writing books, talking about books. In a visceral way, he was conscious of continuing a dialogue begun thousands of years before and which he believed would never end. Books restoring the past. “In time,” he said to me, “every poem becomes an elegy.”

Quoted in Jonathan Greene’s Gists Orts Shards II (Broadstone Books, 2011)

denatured

Definition of “necropastoral”: The uneasy feeling a professor-poet gets standing at the edge of a woods abutting the campus.

longer grave

The poet was 5’ 9” tall in his life. I’m told his archive, in the basement of the university library where it’s housed, measures 18 linear feet.

no afterlife

Often the poems will die with the poet. And sometimes the poems go first.

flying into himself

One quirk of his [Bill Knott's], which I saw several times, was what I called his "defensive rudeness." For example, someone would approach him and say something like, "I loved your book." And Bill would say, "Then you must have terrible taste in poetry." And turn on his heel, and walk away. In another situation, he replied to the same kind of comment with, "Uh, I'm not from around here, umm, umm, I don't know the streets," and turned away. Needless to say, the people on the other end of this kind of exchange looked as if they were slapped in the face. I remember berating him about this, a few times, and his response was a shrug. He simply did not know how to respond to anything positive.

[...]

In June 2015, Robert Fanning; Leigh Jajuga, a friend of Bill's and an assistant in his last years; Star Black, the poet and photographer, and a friend of Bill's; and I, buried Bill's ashes in Carson City, MI, his hometown. Robert had a small stone made. It says: "William Knott 1940-2014 / I Am Flying into Myself." The line is from a poem called "Death" in his first book:

      Going to sleep, I cross my hands on my chest.
      They will place my hands like this.
      It will look as though I am flying into myself.

—Tom Lux, "Bill Knott: Can My Voice Save My Throat," Knowing Knott: Essays on an American Poet (Tiger Bark Press, 2017), edited by Steven Huff.

[Note: The poet Tom Lux passed away shortly after he edited Bill Knott's posthumous selected poems, I Am Flying Into Myself (FSG, 2017).]