Monday, October 06, 2008

hayden carruth

last summer when geof huth was visiting here he mentioned that one of his former professors was hayden carruth. i didn't have a chance to grill geof about carruth but i would've loved too. because carruth is one of those poets who matters a great deal to me. i was not surprised to find he died late last month, he was after all 87 and lived quite a life, but that he managed to survive and write so very well thru his long years.

unfashionable and crabby carruth's poems range from formalist staccato to the bop of jazz. a list of dedications read like a who's who of 20th c poetry. sort of. but is there another poet who wrote poems to and about raymond carver, adrienne rich, galway kinnell and gregory corso? well, perhaps, but when i read his collected shorter poems published by copper canyon press i discovered a poet who eschewed schools and styles and took them all in while minding his own store.

what was most important to me was parsing his poems such as 'I Tell You for Several Years of My Madness I Heard the Voice of Lilith Singing in the Trees of Chicago' and 'They Accuse Me of Not Talking' which concludes with the lines

You're literate, so words are what you feel.
Then you're struck dumb. To which love can you speak
the words that mean dying and going insane
and the relentless futility of the real?

that here was not just a kindred spirit but also a poet who might suffer from the same malady that struck me with such force at age 19. i don't mean simply depression but my own illness when it strikes literally strikes me dumb. i can't speak or use words during the worst of it. and there is little more terrifying to me than not living in the world of words.

carruth seemed to understand that and wrote his poems no matter the fashion as he holed up in rural vermont away from not simply the madding crowd but the crowd that can trip one into madness too. i would've loved to meet the old poet and hear him read. i think he was one of those poets where the life and the poetry were seamless. that he survived in the midst of his madness while writing his incredible poems is astonishing and is a source of wonder and hope for me.

carruth also wrote eloquently on his attempted suicide. that he failed to die was for him not a failure but a source of happiness in living life as it was granted him. i've nearly worn out my copy of his autobiography reluctantly also published by copper canyon press. and it is in this book where he talks about his illness and how it hit him with such ferocity one night that i know we suffer from the same thing for he was describing my symptoms as well. finally i found a poet who like me suffered from a similar illness. if it sounds that i am making a great deal of it i am because to know someone suffers the same as you is to know you are not alone and that you are not a freak. it matters a great deal in that knowledge.

finally, i'll end with a fragment from carruth's autobiography regarding the happiness he discovered after his suicide attempt.

As we say, I'm lucky to be alive. But the most important result of my new luck is that I am enabled to perform acts of virtue once more. I have moved out of the isolation and alienation of my former life and back into the world, which is where acts of virtue occur. Because of this I am a better writer, whatever the artistic quality of my work from now on may be. Writing is first of all a way of being in the world, a functioning nub of relatedness. Hence, my happiness, that frothy feeling, is now with me almost all the time[. . .]I've reached the time of my life when one's friends begin shuffling away, usually in pain and humiliation, and saying goodbye is a sorrow I find simply overwhelming; yet it is not incompatible with my happiness. I do what I can, everything that I can, so that other people may have good luck and may know it when they do, and in this I'm an average decent sort of a guy.

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