shameless with hayden carruth

I found this week’s poem reading through The Seleced Poetry of Hayden Carruth (Macmillan, 1985). In his introduction, Galway Kinnell quotes Carolyn Kizer’s response to the question of what it takes to be a poet: “It is necessary to be absolutely shameless.” There are many things this could mean. For one, Carruth was writing at a time when the term “confessional” was rooting itself into the poetic landscape. But there is more to what Kizer means than gossip, per se. There is a depth of feeling to Carruth’s work that is tapped into indirectly.

[image error]An example of what I mean can be found below. The narrative of “In Memoriam” is straightforward through the first six lines; the stoking of a fire in winter described in these lines grounds the poem in physicality. The repetition of the word “suddenly” in line six, however, marks a turn from the physical to the emotional. The speaker goes on to describe reading the poems of a recently deceased poet in the same straightforward manner as the fire, only this act of reading coincides with an increase of heat in the room. This coinciding blurs the physical and emotional in a shameless way; the heat that overwhelms the speaker is evoked on both levels. Rather than state his grief directly, the poem moves on carrying the charge of these blurred states through imagery. The admission (or confession) in these lines, however, occurs in the clarity of each line, and rings out because of it.

In Memoriam – Hayden Carruth

This warmish night of the thaw

in January a beech chunk

smoldering in my Herald

No. 22A box stove suddenly

takes fire and burns

hot, or rather I suddenly

who was reading the sweet

and bitter poems of Paul

Goodman dead last summer

am aware how my shed

becomes a furnace, and taking

my shovel I ladle

a great mush of snow

into the stove’s mouth

to quieten it

and then step quickly

outside again to watch

the plume of steam rise

from my stovepipe straightly

and vanish into mist.

*

Happy misting!

José