1B: Selected Poets: Gerald Stern, Frank O’Hara, Galway Kinnell, Al Young, Billy Collins & Poets in Performance

The Poems and the Poets
“The Dog” by Gerald Stern (586)
"The Day Lady Died" by Frank O’Hara (587)
“The Bear” by Galway Kinnell (589)
"A Dance for Ma Rainey" by Al Young (630)
"I Chop Some Parsley While Listening to Art Blakey's Version of 'Three Blind Mice'" by Billy Collins (634)

GERALD STERN

Gerald Stern (1925-).  Portrait by Michael Hafftka

Gerald Stern on the web: Academy of American Poets, Poetry Foundation, Poetry Society of America, and The Rumpus.  An excerpt from The Rumpus interview follows.

The Rumpus: Talk to me about political poetry.

Gerald Stern: I don’t know what to say that hasn’t been said already. Not everyone confronts. Not everyone is summoned. It’s you who are “political,” it’s not what you say. Political means so many things. We are political willy-nilly. Political poetry is an easy invitation to disaster. But then so is love poetry. But we are a little more patient with bad love poetry. It might be an evil necessity that we want to get rid of—so we can go back to the other. Oppressed persons, oppressed cultures, tend to be more political, obviously, as are those with a rage for justice, or the crazy messianic desire. Oppressed cultures often envy those which are not, or oppressed individuals do, and sometimes those which—and who—are not envy those which—who—are.  All said before. Some are spokesmen, spokespeople: they can’t help themselves. They can’t think of anything else. Maybe they’re deprived, even depressed. If you don’t have a bed, or a dresser or a wall, or a book or a toy you are oppressed. An African American in a white world.  A Jew in a Christian world. A gypsy. A Native American. A Chinese American. Let’s say, you were born deprived. What then? Some don’t identify; they just don’t. Berryman’s best poetry was not (properly) political. Yet “The Imaginary Jew” (totally political) is his best story. It’s insane—why does a poet have to do it? Can’t he not?  I have left out what I don’t remember or don’t know. Temperament, fear, shyness, obedience, kindness. I use to be better at this!  This is the last time I’ll talk about it.

Rumpus: I want to ask you about caves. You wrote an essay all about caves in What I Can’t Bear Losing. You talked about physical and metaphysical caves, you looked at caves as places of both confinement and liberation, and you said at one point that the artist’s “job” is to be a cave dweller. How is being in the cave—the place of confinement and liberation—useful to the artist?

Stern: The cave is a dark, shadowy place. It’s a place that’s very close and yet distant at the same time, and it’s a place of revelation and isolation. Your form, your body, your writing is your confinement. It’s a kind of liberation to break free in language, if you can break free, but it’s also a confinement, because form confines you—whatever the form. I’m not talking necessarily about rhyme, though that’s certainly confinement. It’s through that form, through that discipline of writing, that you liberate yourself. You come into, through the isolation of writing even, an understanding, maybe of some form of detachment, which is a complicated and ambiguous word. Maybe being an artist is a kind of detachment. You’re in the cave, you’re isolated, you’re apart from everything and it’s there you can find out what you believe in, or what is—what is the nature of being, as you see it, you know?

Rumpus: This sounds very much like Buddhism.

Stern: Well, if the Buddhist’s job is to be detached, I think that the artist’s job is to be both detached and attached. We understand detachment, sort of, albeit in Buddhism it’s a different story than, say, Medieval Christian mysticism. For the Christian mystics, detachment meant to leave attachment so that God could enter you and take over completely and you could climb the ladder to their heaven. Kind of crazy, but what the hell? Attachment has to do with suffering, so it’s really close to Buddhism, because Buddhism wants to relieve you from suffering; you’re supposed to escape from suffering. But the artist’s job, as I see it, is to be both attached and detached.  How can he not embrace suffering?

For the full interview Rumpus conducted with Gerald Stern go here.

For your viewing pleasure watch Gerald Stern: Still Burning. 

Dave Groff conducted an interview with Tony Leuzzi about his new book of poems, The Burning Door in The Brooklyn Rail, June 5, 2014. Leuzzi makes a reference to Gerald Stern, who he interviewed in 2011: "I once asked Gerald Stern about the title of his book Everything is Burning, and he said, '[E]verything is being consumed on a literal level, everything is dying … But another name for burning is living. Everything is alive, everything is turning' (Passwords Primeval 153)." 

An excerpt from Leuzzi's full interview with Stern follows:

Tony Leuzzi: You have often been compared to Whitman. Could you talk about

your relationship to Whitman? In what ways do you see yourself as

his descendant? In what ways do you see yourself as different?

Gerald Stern: Charlie [C. K.] Williams just wrote an incredible book about

Whitman called On Whitman., which has been published by

Princeton. At first, I thought, "God, another book about Whitman?

I've got about ten upstairs in my office. What is Charlie going to say

that has not been said?" But he managed to say something new. He

talked about what Whitman meant to him, and about the music of the

poetry. A little while after the book was published, he got an email

from a woman in Tel Aviv who asked him why so many American

Jewish poets identify strongly with Whitman. Charlie sent the email

to me and I wrote a response to this woman, and explained what I

saw as the Jewish connection with Whitman.

I think Jewish poets easily identify with Whitman because he doesn't

really come out of the Protestant—the Christian—tradition. There is

such a tradition in English poetry whether the poet is an observant

Christian or not. Obviously Donne and Herbert are Christian

poets; and Byron—even Keats—can be seen as non-Christian,

even though the two of them come out of that tradition. I don't

think we've entirely resolved where he comes from; maybe the The

Bhagavad Gita, maybe Transcendetalism. When I talk about the

Christian tradition, I am talking about terms of reference, origin, and

mythology.

I love Whitman, but I came to resent people saying I was "a

reincarnation" of him. It's just not true. There are some surface

similarities. I, like Whitman, use anaphora a lot. I taught Whitman

for years, of course, and read him, but I may have also gotten this

syntactical device from Blake or the Jewish Bible. Parallelisms,

too: the prophets as well as Whitman use them. So I came to resent

people identifying me with Whitman, and I began to resent Whitman

because of it, which is illogical of course, but then what's new? Why

all the focus on Whitman when I also loved Smart, Blake, Milton,

Roethke, late Shakespeare, and Chaucer. Rimbaud as well. Still, in

spite of resentments, I love Whitman. I think he was a great poet.

And I'm more and more beginning to see that he's a mystic, really,

particularly in his middle work, the poems he wrote in his late

30s—a kind of real mystic without realizing it. He thought he was

deriving information from the influence of opera, transcendentalism,

Emerson, Thoreau and such; he thought he was a kind of New

England poet, that his journalism stood him in good stead, as well as

his sympathy with African Americans at the time (though he didn't

take an extreme position), but finally there's something else that

maybe even he wasn't totally aware of and didn't pay much attention

to; even in his last years, when his powers declined, when he was

pushing his fame endlessly, writing letters, living in Camden, NJ,

the grand old man, revising his work. In any case, if you write in

the Protestant tradition, which is the dominant one, it excludes most

Jewish poets.

If the link to the above interview does not work, search Tony Leuzzi, "An Interview with Gerald Stern," Great River Review, Fall/Winter2011, Issue 55, 4-27. 24

Gerald Stern on the PBS NewsHour 

FRANK O'HARA

Frank O'Hara (1926-66)

A good place to start for Frank O'Hara on the web: www.frankohara.org. it has his poetry, audio, video and more. O'Hara worked at the Museum of Modern Art and this essay discusses how his poetry and painting mix. Other websites to visit: Poetry Foundation and Academy of American Poets. Here is O'Hara reading "Having a Coke with You":

O'Hara, as you know, wrote "The Day Lady Died" as a remembrance of Billie Holiday.  Watch and listen to performances of Holiday singing "One for My Baby (and one more for the road)," "Now Baby or Never," and  "Strange Fruit".  More about the original lyrics and the man who wrote "Strange Fruit" can be found at NPR, PBS [i]NDEPENDENT LENS, and The New York Times Book Review; here's the first chapter from Strange Fruit. "Strange Fruit" is considered one of the greatest songs of the 20th Century and certainly one of the greatest about racism in America. If you've never heard Holiday sing, it is about time you take a few minutes and do.  More of Holiday singing can be seen at this video documentary

Billie Holiday singing "Strange Fruit" (mid-to-late1950s)

GALWAY KINNELL

Galway Kinnell (1927--2014) at Battery Park City, New York.  Photo by Mark Woods.

Galway Kinnell on the web: his website, at the Academy of American Poets website. and at The Poetry Foundation website. C.K. Williams remembers Kinnell in The New Yorker, following Kinnell's death. You can listen to him reading a selection of works by poets Blake, Coleridge, Keats, Whitman and Dickinson. More of his own poetry can be found here.

Kinnell reading "The Bear" in the early 1970s.

In the following excerpt from a 2001 Daniela Gioseffi conducted with Kinnell, Kinnell talks about his work in the Civil Rights movement and its connection to his poetry.

Daniela Gioseffi: I know that you worked in the cause of registering black voters during the Civil Rights movement in the 1960's. . . . Can you say something about that work that you did then and what went on around you and why you were involved in it as someone who was really a poet at heart?

Galway Kinnell: Ah, well, it was mostly that I found it unbearable to live in a segregated society. In my childhood in Pawtucket, Rhode Island, I wasn't really aware of the prevalence of segregation because, though practically everybody was an immigrant, they were almost all from Europe. There were no immigrants from the black populations of the South or the Caribbean in my school. In my childhood I saw very few people of color. In my grammar school, there was one Jewish person. I learned about segregation later, when I traveled about the country and spent time in the South. But when I actually came to discover it, I found it shocking and horrifying. I think when I first became aware of it I was at Black Mountain College in North Carolina, near Tennessee. I went down there for a summer on my GI bill. And there was a black writer who came to visit, and I went into town with him. He had to buy a train ticket and I went to the train station with him. Well, the amount of fuss produced by a white and a black man walking together was obvious. He grew worried, but I didn’t, because I just didn’t realize that it was a dangerous thing for us to walk together talking as friends. Afterwards, I talked with him about it and he conveyed the experiences of his life that made him too wary of the situation. Then, I came to know other black people, and heard more of their experiences and read more and more about the history of it all, and realized that it wasn’t a phenomenon confined to just the Southern states, but that it was pretty much a national phenomenon. Certainly New York was a segregated city then, and still is to a significant degree.

Daniela Gioseffi: Yes.

Galway Kinnell: When I went down there to work in the South, I thought it would be unseemly for me to "use" the situation down there as material for art, and I decided not to write a word while I was there. I put aside everything having to do directly with poetry and just did my work as a Civil Rights worker. A couple of years later I realized that was a serious mistake, I had misunderstood the relationship of art and life.

Daniela Gioseffi: It was idealistic, but all the same, the more said anywhere and everywhere, the better, yes?

Galway Kinnell: Exactly. It was ignorant idealism. I should have gone down there thinking that my job was two-fold, one was to do the work of voter registration and desegregation and the other was to write about all this to be as informative as possible through poetry or any other form of writing my pen might have taken. Later, I tried to write about it, but what I wrote lacked the life that it might have had originally.

For all of the above interview, click on this or click on this.

Kinnell in Selma, Alabama, 1965, with student organizer Harriet Richardson.  Photo by Charles Lee Moore. 

AL YOUNG

Al Young (1939--) Over Bay of Naples.  Is this a selfie? Or taken by PC Mack?

Al Young's website you can get lost in the many audio and video podcasts. Young, who served as California's poet laureate from  is featured on an NPR program where he talks about poetry and music.  Since he has written about Ma Rainey and we will read his poem about her, take time to read this biography of her, too.  She was known as the Mother of the Blues (1886-1939).  If the question remains: Who was Ma Rainey? If the question remains a pretty good answer is here.

"Deep Moaning Blues," above, sung by Ma Rainey in 1928. She is accompanied by the Tub Jug Washboard Band.

Al Young spoke at Google in 2009.  He gives a wonderful overview of the nature of poetry

 before he discusses his love of music, sings (he has a beautiful voice), and reads a sample of his poetry.

Young's website has an extensive interview with him.  It appears to be in the style of a FAQ, one that he wrote about himself. He addressed topics related to new technology and storytelling.  Here's an excerpt: 

Question: Haven’t the movies and hi-tech media supplanted books, the printed word, and old-fashioned storytelling?

Answer: Yes and no. Bombarded with graphic and visual imagery, many people, who do their reading on-screen, regard printed matter as an adjunct to watching something. Because it is easy to confound data and information with knowledge, training routinely passes for education. Giving thought to some matter or problem isn’t the same as following instructions or acting on orders or command. The reason I have dutifully hyperlinked so many of my literary references in this biography and FAQ page is that I would be naive to expect viewers who didn’t grow up with books in a bricks-and-mortar library as I did to know much of anything about writers or cultural movements or historical developments to which I so casually and matter of factly allude as I speak. When an unaware viewer clicks into a link, she or who may glimpse a bit of what I’m talking about. We dwell in an age when books are respected (even people who don’t read often ache to write a book), but film and video is revered. I’ve lived long enough to know a lot of stuff I think needs to be passed along to others. Figuring out how best to do this forces me to experiment. The human voice and vibratory frequencies we emit without knowing it play a big role in oral storytelling; not the funded kind. The listener, the reader, the viewer — each of us becomes an irreducible and essential part of the storytelling process. So, re-phrasing this answer to this question, I would say: No and yes. No good story ever needs to wait around for somebody to film it.

Al Young at CalArts, 2006, with pianist Kenn Cox and bassist Edwin Livingston. Photo: Harris Hartsfield

BILLY COLLINS

Billy Colllins (1941--)
painting by JenniferOHcious

To learn about Billy Collins, who served as U.S. Poet Laureate, 2001-03, see these websites: Poetry Foundation, Academy of American Poets, Stephen Barclay Agency and Library of Congress online resources. Paris Review interviewed Collins for its Art of Poetry series.  Here's an excerpt:

INTERVIEWER

What inspires that first line? Is it something you see? Is it a passing thought, a line of someone else’s work?

COLLINS

There can be remote influences, but I think the line itself comes out of talking to yourself. It’s a matter of paying attention to the detritus that floats through your head all the time—little phrases that through your own self-talking, your talk monitor, sometimes pop up. Also, I try to start the poem conversationally. Poems, for me, begin as a social engagement. I want to establish a kind of sociability or even hospitality at the beginning of a poem. The title and the first few lines are a kind of welcome mat where I am inviting the reader inside. What I do with the reader later can be more complicated, but the beginning of the poem is a seductive technique for me, a way of making a basic engagement. Then I hope the poem gets a little bit ahead of me and the reader.

The full Paris Review interview with Collins can be found here.

Billy Collins reads

 "I Chop Some Parsley While Listening to Art Blakey's Version of 'Three Blind Mice'"

Art Blakey and the Jazz Messengers play "Three Blind Mice" (1962)

Art Blakey and The Jazz Messengers - "Blue Moon" Feat. Freddie Hubbard

Collins was the U.S. poet laureate (2001-2003) when American poets were invited by President and Mrs. Bush to read and discuss the work of Emily Dickinson, Langston Hughes and Walt Whitman at The White House.  The planned symposium drew protests of the war in Iraq, so many poets declined the opportunity to appear. Other poets wished to appear and take advantage of the setting to protest the war in Iraq and get their message out. The White House cancelled the symposium.

Collins discussed this controversy with The New York Times, February 23, 2013. 

Q: As the poet laureate of the United States, I assume that you were invited to the White House symposium on poetry that was canceled recently once some poets began planning to use the event to protest war in Iraq.

Collins: Yes, I was. I would have gone if it had been held, to see what was going to happen. Politicizing the event has resulted in its cancellation and perhaps the end of literary events at the White House.

Q: Could it really have that effect?

Collins: I don't know. I've always tried to keep the West and East Wings separate. I think the loss in this particular case was the opportunity to look at Whitman and Dickinson. In the middle of both of their lives occurred the central trauma of our country, the Civil War. And Whitman more or less jumped into action. He served as a volunteer nurse and wrote a poem, ''Vigil Strange I Kept on the Field One Night,'' where he holds the body of a dead boy and buries him. Whereas Emily Dickinson just stuck to her knitting, and her knitting just happened to do with immortality and death and the grave. It is a wonderful demonstration of the choice that poets have, to deal with the world around them in whatever way they think best.

To see the remainder of the interview, click on this.

Collins gives a TED talk, "Everyday Moments Caught in Time." 

He presented it in February 2012. It runs for about 15 minutes. 

The Country

by Billy Collins

I wondered about you

when you told me never to leave

a box of wooden, strike-anywhere matches

lying around the house because the mice

might get into them and start a fire.

But your face was absolutely straight

when you twisted the lid down on the round tin

where the matches, you said, are always stowed.

Who could sleep that night?

Who could whisk away the thought

of the one unlikely mouse

padding along a cold water pipe

behind the floral wallpaper

gripping a single wooden match

between the needles of his teeth?

Who could not see him rounding a corner,

the blue tip scratching against a rough-hewn beam,

the sudden flare, and the creature

for one bright, shining moment

suddenly thrust ahead of his time—

now a fire-starter, now a torchbearer

in a forgotten ritual, little brown druid

illuminating some ancient night.

Who could fail to notice,

lit up in the blazing insulation,

the tiny looks of wonderment on the faces

of his fellow mice, onetime inhabitants

of what once was your house in the country?

"The Country" by Billy Collins, from Nine Horses: Poems. © Random House, 2003. Reprinted with permission.

Colllins reads "The Country" with animation.

POETS IN PERFORMANCE: from Moyers & Co.

from Moyers & Company:

"Over the years, Bill Moyers has welcomed some of America’s best poets to share their works and inspiration. Many of those writers have performed at the Geraldine R. Dodge Poetry Festival, which Bill and his colleagues covered for television specials including Fooling with Words (1999), The Language of Life (1995) and Sounds of Poetry (1999). Below, enjoy a showcase of such poetry from past productions and very recently from Moyers & Company, performed by the poets who dreamed them up, or by other artists who, like Bill, simply adore poetry.

"Coleman Barks | Robert Bly | Lucille Clifton | Rita Dove | Martín Espada | Nikki Giovanni | Maxine Hong Kingston | Galway Kinnell | Stanley Kunitz | Kurtis Lamkin | Li-Young Lee | John Lithgow | W. S. Merwin | Naomi Shihab Nye | Sharon Olds | Adrienne Rich | Christian Wiman| Luis Alberto Urrea| Philip Appleman| James Autry| Kyle Dargan| Wendell Berry"

See Bill Moyers page for more about poetry, including links to the poets named above reading their work.