We don't care. Why don't we care? I don't know. I don't have an answer for you today on that important question.
Actually, sometimes we do care. In Mary Oliver's New and Selected Poems, Volume 1, which I just bought-because it's time for me to read Mary Oliver, whom I've known only through anthologies all these years-there's a good poem about a time when she sees a woman washing out ashtrays in an airport bathroom in the Far East. The woman has black hair and she smiles at Mary. I want this poem to be the account of something that actually happened. I do care, sometimes, whether it's fiction or nonfiction.
ANTHOLOGY KNOWLEDGE isn't real knowledge. You have to read the unchosen poems to understand the chosen ones.
And you have to be willing to be sad. If you go to the doctor saying that you've experienced some sleeplessness, perhaps some sitting in the sandy driveway late at night in a white plastic chair, accompanied by thoughts of mortality and aloneness-maybe some strong suspicions that none of the poetry you've published is any good-the doctor is probably going to say, Ah, you're depressed. And he's maybe going to want to give you some pills.
And as a result, you may be tempted to think: I'm one of them. I'm John Keats. Or Sara Teasdale. Or Longfellow. Or Louise Bogan. Or Ted Roethke-rhymes with "set key." Or Alfred Lord Tennyson. Or John Berryman. Berryman, who wrote funny poems and then stopped writing funny poems and launched himself off a bridge and, flump, that was it for him. Many suicides. Percy Shelley. Many suicides.
So you might think to yourself, Oh boy, I am one of these great depressive figures. But you're not. Just because a doctor has scribbled a half-legible prescription on a piece of paper and given you some pills, you're not depressed. Not the way a real poet is depressed. You don't even come close.
True poet's depression is a rigor mortis of agony. It's a full-body inability to function. You don't want to leave your room. Louise Bogan summed it up in two quick lines. This was back in I don't know when-nineteen-thirty-something. It was in a poem in The New Yorker called "Solitary Observation Brought Back from a Sojourn in Hell." And the lines went: "At midnight tears / Run in your ears." She's lying there on her back, crying. Her eyes are overflowing, and the tears are cresting and coming around, and down, and they're flowing into her ears. There's something direct and physical and interesting about that. Because it's as if the crying leads directly to the hearing. Her grief leads to something audible-a poem. That's what it does for all these really good poets. The crying and the singing are connected.
Isn't crying a good thing? Why would we want to give pills to people so they don't weep? When you read a great line in a poem, what's the first thing you do? You can't help it. Crying is a good thing. And rhyming and weeping-there are obvious linkages between the two. When you listen to a child cry, he cries in meter. When you're an adult, you don't sob quite that way. But when you're a little kid, you go, "Ih-hih-hih-hih, ih-hih-hih-hih." You actually cry in a duple meter.
Poetry is a controlled refinement of sobbing. We've got to face that. And if that's true, do we want to give drugs so that people won't weep? No, because if we do, poetry will die. The rhyming of rhymes is a powerful form of self-medication. All these poets, when they begin to feel that they are descending into one of their personal canyons of despair, use rhyme to help themselves tightrope over it. Rhyming is the avoidance of mental pain by addicting yourself to what will happen next. It's like chain-smoking-you light one line with the glowing ember of the last. You set up a call, and you want a response. You posit a pling, and you want a fring. You propose a plong, and you want a frong. You're in suspense. You are solving a puzzle.
It's not a crossword puzzle-it's better than a crossword puzzle, because you're actually trying to do something beautiful. But it's not unrelated. The addicts of crossword puzzles are also distracting themselves. They also don't want to face the world's grief head-on. They want that transient pleasure, endlessly repeated, of solving the Rubik's Cube of verbal intersection. But has anyone ever wept at the beauty of a crossword puzzle? Maybe, maybe. I have not.
Rhyming is the genius's version of the crossword puzzle-when it's good. When it's bad it's intolerable dogwaste and you wish it had never been invented. But when it's good, it's great. It's no coincidence that Auden was a compulsive doer of crossword puzzles, and a rhymer, and a depressive, and a smoker, and a drinker, and a man who shuffled into Louise Bogan's memorial service in his bedroom slippers.
ALCOHOL, COFFEE, RHYME, murder mysteries, gambling, Project Runway, anything with suspense. Sending out a letter. Poets who have reached a certain point of depression are great letter writers, because they write a letter, and they send it out, and until they get a response they are in suspense about what the response will be. That helps them through those three days. Or maybe it's a week or a month before they get an answer. I never answer letters, so I keep my correspondents in a state of permanent suspense.
Coffee-cheers you up. Makes you feel like you're a big guy. Beer, wine, spiritous liquor of all kinds. Really helps for a while. It allows you to relax and slump and hang out on the wrong side of your brain. Where everybody wants to have some fun. They want to sway. They want to move. They want to sing. Singing is a desire to warble out something that is beyond words but that relies on words. So poetry and alcohol are what the responsible doctor should prescribe, and maybe letter writing, as well. And chin-ups. Time-honored substances and behaviors, plus rhyme, all those things are fine. In fact, they're necessary. They have a long, long history. You mustn't abuse them. But of course you will eventually-every poet does.
These new drugs that they want to sell you-be wary of them. I've seen them. Some of them are oval, shaped in little boat shapes. And they have beautiful saturated colors, and they're imprinted with various words, corporate trademarks. If the great poets had had pills, would we have had Johnson's Vanity of Human Wishes? Or Tennyson's Princess? Or Elizabeth Barrett Browning's sonnets? Or Longfellow's "Driftwood"? No. Poets are our designated grievers, and if they weren't allowed to be sad, we'd have none of the great moments of Auden. "Tears are round, the sea is deep: / Roll them overboard and sleep." Do you hear the four beats?
Auden is an interesting case. He believed that you should write drunk and revise sober. That was his rhythm. And it worked for him for a while. Then he mistakenly mixed in an alien chemicaclass="underline" speed. The poetry that he wrote on speed is no good. The poetry he wrote in the thirties, before he found speed, is good. Speed hurried him into the realm of the abstract noun. He was stuck fast on speed. Sartre took speed, too-and wrote Being and Nothingness, which is a gigantic smoke generator of abstraction.
So speed is a bad idea. And suffering is a good idea. You have to suffer in order to be a human being who can help people understand suffering.
I have a mouse in the kitchen.
AUDEN SAYS: "About suffering, they were never wrong, the eld mesters." He has a pronounced Oxford accent. The poem actually rhymes, but subtly. One line ends "forgot," and then there's "untidy spot." It's such a famous poem I almost hesitate to bring it up. But I do hope you will read it.
The famous part of the poem is about Breughel's Icarus. About the fact that there's a whole painting of a seaport, with all these people's lives intersecting, bales being loaded and unloaded onto ships, and there off to one side, shploof, is Icarus, plunging into the water with his wings all melted. Not that wax could have ever worked. It was not a good idea and anyone could have told the two flyers that they'd need something stronger than wax. But the myth is poked into this completely real and commonplace in some ways but beautifully sunlit painting of a harbor. That's the famous part of the poem.