READING POETRY, WASTING TIME

My reason for writing this: to share a few lines of poetry, American and Chinese, with you... and to say what I have to say about them. Poetry is the most economical use to which language can be put. No word ever has greater value than when a poet puts it to work in a poem. If you really want to learn a language, your own or any other, then read its poetry.


1.

Not many Americans read poetry. ‘Poetry doesn’t have anything to do with me. I don't have time for it. There’s no money in it. I can't understand it.’ They say. The loss is theirs, not poetry’s. The poems they are not reading, like the ones I am going to share with you here, will likely outlive them.

James Wright, who died too soon, wrote a poem, ‘Lying in a Hammock at William Duffy’s Farm in Pine Island, Minnesota’, that is still much talked and written about... by those few Americans, like myself, who have read it. It goes like this.

         Over my head, I see the bronze butterfly,
         Asleep on the black trunk,
         Blowing like a leaf in green shadow.
         Down the ravine behind the empty house,
         The cowbells follow one another
         Into the distances of the afternoon.
         To my right,
         In a field of sunlight between two pines,
         The droppings of last year's horses
         Blaze up into golden stones.
         I lean back, as the evening darkens and comes on.
         A chicken hawk floats over, looking for home.
         I have wasted my life.

That last line, ‘I have wasted my life’, is the reason Wright’s poem is still a live issue. Does he mean what he says, or not? Has he wasted his life?

The work ethic has strong and deep roots in American soil. For Americans, like myself, who have European ancestors, it goes all the way back to the Puritan settlers who arrived in the seventeenth century. They had a motto, words they lived by: ‘Work, for the night cometh, wherein no man can work.’ Which I would translate into colloquial twentieth-century English as: ‘We all live and we all die. So let’s get on with it. Let’s work hard. Let’s do what we can while we’re here.’

Americans typically define themselves, who they are, in relationship to their work. They are what they do... their jobs. They are self-directed, goal-oriented, motivated, even driven in their work. I know myself well enough to say, here, that I am not an exception to the American rule. I am hard on myself: I give myself trouble if I don’t get my work – teaching, reading, and writing – done. Alas, too many of us, Americans, live for our jobs and die for our jobs.

Either Wright has wasted his life, in his poem, or he hasn’t. Although he is ‘Lying in a Hammock at William Duffy’s Farm in Pine Island, Minnesota’, his poem’s title and a seemingly lazy – wasteful – thing to do, or not do, I would like to point out that his senses are at work. He is alive and well in that hammock. What Wright does not tell us matters as much as what he does tell us. He invites his readers – you, me – to fill in the blanks that he has, carefully and intentionally, left for us. Make up a story for him, or for yourself. Why not?

I project myself into Wright’s poem. I imagine myself in that hammock. Wright is telling my story. ‘Don’t take yourself so seriously’, he is saying. ‘If you do, you will lose your life by not living it. You will end up, in old age, looking back and asking yourself a hard question, a question that has no easy answer: What have I done with my life?’ Wright has not wasted his life, in his poem, because he has taken time, away from his work, to notice: ‘the bronze butterfly’, ‘the cowbells’, even ‘the droppings of last year’s horses’. He hasn’t missed a thing, and I promise myself I won’t either.


2.

Robert Bly, who was James Wright’s friend, lived at the time on a farm in Minnesota, not William Duffy’s but his own, where he wrote his poems. It has always seemed to me that Bly’s poem ‘Watering the Horse’ and Wright’s poem ‘Lying in a Hammock’ belong together, as if they were written to be read together, because they echo and reinforce each other. Here’s ‘Watering the Horse’.

          How strange to think of giving up all ambition!
          Suddenly I see with such clear eyes
          The white flake of snow
          That has just fallen in the horse’s mane!

What Bly is suggesting in his poem, that ‘giving up all ambition’ is a virtuous thing, is practically unAmerican. What will happen to the Gross National Product and the Balance of Trade if Bly has his way? I imagine Americans worrying. Is he offering himself up, as Socrates did... the unwise man, corrupting the youth of America?

Maybe. But Bly is more than adequately compensated for the sacrifice he is making. Notice how, ‘suddenly’, having decided to make it on his own, not on America’s, terms, he sees ‘with such clear eyes’. As if he were seeing for the first time, as if he had been blind before. There is a syndrome, in America and other over-developed countries, known as ‘professional deformation’, that workers suffer from. We are, all of us, I include myself, deformed by what we do for a living, how we earn our money, our keep. We need to be reminded – we need poets to remind us? – there is more to life than work. We live in more than one dimension.

‘The white flake of snow / That has just fallen in the horse’s mane’, in Bly’s poem, is a good example – as good as any I can think of – of epiphany, the shock of recognition. Let the chicken hawk float over, as it does in Wright’s poem, ‘looking for home’. It will find its home, the one place where it belongs... as Wright himself has, and as Bly has. Wherever else it is, home for them is in their poems.


3.

Not many Americans read poetry... in their own language or any other. But, I must protest, I am an exception to that American rule. I have been reading not only American poetry but also Chinese poetry, especially T’ang Dynasty poetry, albeit in translation, for quite some time – since I was a much younger man than I am now. Tu Fu is my favorite T’ang Dynasty poet. In one of his poems, ‘By the Winding River’, he says:

          All creatures pursue happiness.
          Why have I let an official
          Career swerve me from my goal?

Tu Fu, as I read him, has all the necessary virtues: simplicity, clarity, and directness. I suspect that he always knew what I am still working, hard, to find out. The longer I live, the clearer and more direct I become. There is, finally, no time to be had, no money to be made, that really matters.

The most ancient and honored wisdom of all is to let it be. As Lao Tsu, in his Tao Te Ching, says: ‘If nothing is done, then all will be well.’ Or, as I say, in my own words: Better a life than a career. Read poetry. Waste time.


NOTES

James Wright's poem, ‘Lying in a Hammock at William Duffy’s Farm in Pine Island, Minnesota’ is from his book The Branch Will Not Break, published by Wesleyan University Press in Middletown, Connecticut, 1963. Wright died in 1980 at the age of fifty-two. Robert Bly’s poem, ‘Watering the Horse’, is from his book Silence in the Snowy Fields, published by Wesleyan University Press in Middletown, Connecticut, 1962. Tu Fu’s poem, ‘By the Winding River’ is from One Hundred Poems from the Chinese, translated by Kenneth Rexroth, published by New Directions in New York (no date). And the lines of Lao Tsu are from an edition of his Tao Te Ching, translated by Gia-Fu Feng and Jane English published as a Vintage Book by Random House in New York,1972.

William Slaughter teaches literature and writing at the University of North Florida. His most recent book is The Politics of My Heart, poems and essays having to do with China. He edits Mudlark, an electronic journal of poetry and poetics: http://www.unf.edu/mudlark