Monday’s Poem: ‘To Poetry,’ by Edward Hirsch

Don’t desert me
just because I stayed up last night
watching The Lost Weekend.

I know I’ve spent too much time
praising your naked body to strangers
and gossiping about lovers you betrayed.

I’ve stalked you in foreign cities
and followed your far-flung movements,
pretending I could describe you.

Forgive me for getting jacked on coffee
and obsessing over your features

year after jittery year.

I’m sorry for handing you a line
and typing you on a screen,
but don’t let me suffer in silence.

Does anyone still invoke the Muse,
string a wooden lyre for Apollo,
or try to saddle up Pegasus?

Winged horse, heavenly god or goddess,
indifferent entity, secret code, stored magic,
pleasance and half wonder, hell,

I have loved you my entire life
without even knowing what you are
or how—please help me—to find you.

© by Edward Hirsch. Printed by permission of the author.

Edward Hirsch is the author of eight collections of poetry, most recently The Living Fire: New & Selected Poems 1975–2010 (Knopf, 2010). His prose collections include the best-selling How to Read a Poem: And Fall in Love with Poetry, and his many awards include fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Guggenheim Foundation, as well as a MacArthur “genius” Award. He has taught at Wayne State and for many years at the University of Houston. Hirsch is currently president of the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation and a chancellor of the Academy of American Poets.

Arts & Academe‘s poetry editor, Lisa Russ Spaar, notes: Not a Sunday goes by since its passing out of tabloid insert print format in February 2009 that I do not mourn and miss The Washington Post Book World, a fixture of my weekends since I first moved to Virginia in the 1970s. For the better part of a decade in the 1980s, when I lived in Texas, I continued to subscribe to and receive Book World by mail. And for a three-year spell, from 2002–2005, I looked forward especially to Edward Hirsch’s column, “Poet’s Choice,” a weekly meditation in Book World on some aspect of poetry to which Hirsch would bring his widely read, articulate, capacious, encyclopedic, and ardent discernment. What Hirsch has elsewhere written of Keats—that he “combined . . . associative drift with a startling openheartedness and a ferocious working intellect, the mind of a maker”—might be said of Hirsch as poet and essayist as well.

By the time Hirsch began presenting his Poet’s Choice column in the years immediately following the September 11 tragedy, I already knew and admired his poems, which I’d been reading since the early 80s. These Poet’s Choice columns—like his poems—always seemed to arrive “on time,” rekindling my interest in poetry if the exigencies of my life had dulled its luster for me, introducing me to new poems and poets that provided solace in time’s dark patches, confirming and enlarging my own responses to and assumptions about language while challenging me to think in new ways .

Hirsch evinces, in poems and essays, an intimate—and rare—empathy for and with his subjects, which range from high and low culture, from insomnia to Jimi Hendrix, from the resonant mythologies and nostalgias of childhood to the work of under-read poets, many of whom—Charlotte Mew, Buffalo Conde, Jane Mayhall, Alfonsina Storni, Blaga Dimitrova, Lam Rhi My Da, Michael Fried, among others—I encountered for the first time through the generous portal of Hirsch’s vision. And at a time when close reading of and forthright enthusiasm for poetry was (and is) often out of fashion, especially in the academy, I have been abidingly grateful for Hirsch’s endeavor. The range and depth of such passionate knowledge might be formidable, but he never makes his intelligence an occasion for proselytizing, obfuscation, or showing off, but rather invites, with a Keatsian “inhabitable awe,” his readers to share in the protean emotions and complications of being a maker and of engaging with what is possible and mysterious, even joyful, in poetry. I miss his weekly offerings, but turn and return to the printed collection of them, Poet’s Choice, published by HarcourtBooks in 2006.

In his ode “To Poetry,” Hirsch joins a long tradition of poets addressing their muses, especially during fallow, confusing, or distracted periods [in “Too Lazy to Write Poetry,” Chu Yün-ming (1461 – 1527) writes, “Spirit of poetry, quickly, come back! / Don’t let the spring go by without any poems”]. Hirsch addresses his Poetry with a mix of wry humor and plaintive need that confirms a long, deep intimacy with his subject. “Don’t desert me,” he pleads with characteristically self-directed and mildly mocking deprecation, “just because I stayed up last night / watching The Lost Weekend.” The meta-nod in the first stanza to the classic 1945 movie pitching a writer against Demon Alcohol, and to the time that writers can waste in all manner of self-indulgent ways, shows us that the speaker already feels a mixture of guilty indictment shot through with an inextinguishable, against-all-odds hope.

The speaker goes on to confess all of the ways he’s betrayed his lover/muse over the years, talking too publicly about her “naked body to strangers” and “gossiping about lovers you betrayed” and stalking her “in foreign cities / . . . / pretending I could describe you.” Hirsch’s narrator is clearly speaking here as both a writer of and writer about poetry, and I admire his chutzpah. The admission that to try to unpack poems, to interpret them, even to “pretend” to understand their meanings involves a violation or impossibility is a brave and uncommon gesture, especially from someone who has devoted much of his life to doing so. Hirsch’s narrator follows his confession with a dazzling, swift pitch of deft rhetorical moves: a plea for forgiveness, an apology (whose punning cannot disguise pain the speaker feels—separation, writer’s block—from his beloved at the same time that it betrays a belief that he just might win her over if he’s winningly clever enough—if he can just find the right words to do so), and a rhetorical question in which the narrator pulls his last trick—divine invocation—seemingly out of the core of his very being:

I’m sorry for handing you a line
and typing you on a screen,
but don’t let me suffer in silence.

Does anyone still invoke the Muse,
string a wooden lyre for Apollo,

or try to saddle up Pegasus?

Winged horse, heavenly god or goddess,
indifferent entity, secret code, stored magic,
pleasance and half wonder, hell,

I have loved you my entire life
without even knowing what you are
or how—please help me—to find you.

In an interview in The Nashville Review, Hirsch states that “The muse, the beloved, and duende are three ways of thinking of what is the source of poetry, and all three seem to me different names or different ways to think about something that is not entirely reasonable, not entirely subject to the will, not entirely rational.” Poetry—whether mythic divinity, oblivious force, whether encoded or magical, “pleasance and half wonder” or “hell”—is a conflation of muse, lover, and Lorca’s beautiful, unappeasable sadness. “To Poetry” is Hirsch’s homage to his version of his beloved Keats’s “demon Poesy.” Just as Hirsch describes Keats’s odes, his own poem represents “the claiming of an obligation, an inner feeling rising up to meet an outer occasion, something owed.” Ode. Owed. This kind of love, that takes us by life force and commands us beyond our capacity to understand, might be seen as a state of grace. Its force accounts, I believe, for the seemingly inexhaustible and continually refreshed power of Edward Hirsch’s sojourn in the vale of soul-making.

(Treated photo by Alexander C. Kafka)