Poetry in motion: New work flows from writers
Stories by Karin Dienst
Princeton NJ -- Since 1996, the Academy of American Poets
has designated April as National Poetry Month. The goals
include highlighting the extraordinary legacy and ongoing
achievement of poets and introducing more Americans to the
pleasures of reading poetry. In the spirit of this
celebration, the Princeton Weekly Bulletin talked with three
prominent poets who teach at the University. We present
their stories and their work here.
Writing to make sense of life
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Paul Muldoon
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Born in 1951 in County Armagh, Northern Ireland, Muldoon has lived in the United States since 1987. He is the Howard G.B. Clark University Professor in the Humanities and director of the Program in Creative Writing at Princeton. In 1999, he was elected professor of poetry at the University of Oxford.
From a certain angle, a collection of past volumes of poems is a strange product for a poet who says he rarely looks back over his past work. Muldoon is always in the middle of the poem currently under way, glancing beyond to what might come next.
"One has to learn to write each poem on the job, as it were," Muldoon says. "One has to learn how to write a poem just as one has to learn how to read a poem."
What keeps Muldoon writing is his undeniable love of language, his irrepressible inventiveness and, put very plainly by the poet himself, "the possibility of writing something that might work."
"Poems 1968-1998" reveals just how many "somethings" can work. From using traditional forms to the avant garde, from depicting an Irish schoolroom to the oyster bar at Grand Central Station, Muldoon opens his craft to the senses. His poetry is flooded with allusions that come from almost everywhere: Irish folklore, contemporary culture, literary and historical figures and much more. He likes his art to do many things at once, just like life.
"I like the idea of living many places at a time and doing many things at a time," he says. "The new collection covers a lot of ground. Many of the poems are set in Ireland, and many in the United States. Ireland continues to occupy a large part of my emotional life, but I live here now."
Muldoon, who lives with his wife and two young children in Princeton, says he does not feel cut off from his home country because he left at age 35 -- old enough to have established a permanent connection. Indeed, Muldoon is considered to be an Irish poet living overseas -- he was the 1997 recipient of the Irish Times Literature Prize for Poetry.
Muldoon says he is amused by people who think being a writer is romantic. "Just like everyone else one has to learn how to use time, to work steadily and constantly," he says. But that does not mean writing all the time -- Muldoon says he does most of his writing over lunch and that, in fact, "most writers can only do decent work for a couple of hours a day."
Writing and reading typically are solitary pursuits, but Muldoon likes his work to have a public function. He admits to being "delighted to be asked to write public poems," such as the poem he wrote to commemorate the University's 250th anniversary in 1996 ("Taking the Air with James McCosh") and the two poems he wrote last year for an Oscar Wilde memorial in Reading, England ("The Gate" and "The Bed"). Muldoon also writes essays, drama and children's literature.
This month, while Muldoon's collection hits the shelves in bookstores, his students are grappling with their theses. "I just saw some students in the copy room," he says. "They were asking me what they should do when they finish. I encouraged them to continue to write as a way of making sense of their lives."
"Poems 1968-1998" by Paul Muldoon, published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux (2001) includes the collections:
"New Weather" (1973)
"Mules" (1977)
"Why Brownlee Left" (1980)
"Quoof" (1983)
"Meeting the British" (1987)
"Madoc: A Mystery" (1990)
"The Annals of Chile" (1994)
"Hay" (1998)
Building a community of ideas
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Yusef Komunyakaa
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A professor in the Council of the Humanities and the Program in Creative Writing at Princeton since 1997, Komunyakaa continues to build on his impressive body of work. In March, Wesleyan University Press published his newest collection, "Pleasure Dome: New and Collected Poems, 1975-1999." Komunyakaa is a hot commodity -- last year saw the publication of his collection "Talking Dirty to the Gods" and "Blue Notes: Essays, Interviews and Commentaries."
In 1994, Komunyakaa's "Neon Vernacular: New and Selected Poems" won the Pulitzer Prize, the Kingsley Tufts Award and the William Faulkner Prize. His poetry collection "Thieves of Paradise" was a finalist for the 1999 National Book Critics Circle Award.
The title "Pleasure Dome" transports the reader to Samuel Coleridge's classic poem "Kubla Khan," but the collection goes an infinite number of places from there: Louisiana, New York City, jazz clubs, the Vietnam War and the countless nooks and crannies of the mind.
The collection includes 18 new poems that cap the shifting and shaping over 24 years of Komunyakaa's creative force. Even before his first poetry workshop at the University of Colorado in 1973, Komunyakaa used poetry to describe the world around him and to take him beyond that world.
"When I look over the poems in 'Pleasure Dome,' I see how early on I was drawn to the image, to the attention to detail," says Komunyakaa. "I was influenced by classical surrealism and the negritude poets. Now I've been able to embrace a more extensive subject matter. Perhaps I've grown as a person. I've lived a number of places, I've read more and thought more and certainly experienced more."
Komunyakaa says that his curiosity fuels his writing. "A poet needs to be receptive to images and sounds," he says. "Growing up in a small town in the South honed my senses and nerves. I also agree with James Baldwin that one has to know what's happening."
One of Komunyakaa's earliest and most enduring influences is music, particularly jazz. Many of his poems celebrate music and musicians -- indeed "Pepper," one of the new poems in "Pleasure Dome," is a tribute to alto saxophonist Art Pepper.
Komunyakaa explains that jazz helped him understand that it was possible to incorporate almost anything into a poem. The structure of a poem, like jazz, also could be dismantled and rebuilt.
"Initially I listened to jazz, the blues, and gospel music coming through the radio from New Orleans," says Komunyakaa. "Then I turned to the more progressive jazz of Miles Davis, Charlie Parker and Thelonius Monk -- their music made me want to perform as well."
Komunyakaa's music is in his poetry, but it does not stop there -- he wrote a libretto for the opera "Slipknot," and what he calls a "quasi-libretto" titled "Testimony," celebrating Charlie Parker, which will be performed at the Sydney (Australia) Opera House in January 2002.
Another significant early influence for Komunyakaa was the Vietnam War, which he experienced firsthand as a war correspondent. His collection "Dien Cai Dau" revisits the experience, written a full 14 years after his return to the United States in 1970.
"I think that after Vietnam I had to have a dialogue with myself," says Komunyakaa. "Sometimes that happens as a silence. Perhaps I hadn't yet learned how to say what I needed to say. But I had stockpiled in my psyche all the images and observations."
As a poet and a teacher Komunyakaa has a deep appreciation for the creative process. He also knows how to make that process thrive.
"I tell my students that our poetry workshop is a community of ideas," he says. "We're there to grow together. Culture is defined by its creative expression. It keeps us whole."
To feed his own creativity, Komunyakaa works on more than one project at a time, such as a poetry collection, essays (usually commissioned) and a libretto.
"I like to surprise myself," says Komunyakaa. "And I keep thinking back to Phillis Wheatley's poem 'On Imagination,' which reminds me to keep using my imagination."
Books by Yusef Komunyakaa
"Coacetic" (1984)
"I Apologize for the Eyes in My Head" (1986)
"Dien Cai Dau" (1988)
"Magic City" (1992)
"Neon Vernacular: New and Selected Poems" (1993)
"Thieves of Paradise" (1998)
"Blue Notes: Essays, Interviews and Commentaries" (2000)
"Talking Dirty to the Gods" (2000)
"Pleasure Dome: New and Collected Poems, 1975-1999"
(2001)
Respecting the truth of experience
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C.K. Williams
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Coming so close together, these two publications give a good indication of the range of Williams' writing as well as his intense engagement with the theme of hurt and healing.
Williams, born in Newark in 1936, makes his home in both Princeton and Paris. He has been teaching in the Council of the Humanities and in the Program in Creative Writing at the University for six years.
"Repair" touches on topics such as the Holocaust and American race relations (the poem "King" revisits an incident Williams witnessed more than three decades ago after the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., when white police officers harassed a black man walking to a memorial service). But the collection mostly sifts through the experiences and observations of everyday life, catching the details that can so readily lead to the big questions about life and the big emotions of love and despair.
"What inspires me now are tensions, social and personal, and the movements of language which promise to take me places I haven't yet been," says Williams.
Williams says that his most significant influence was the architect Louis Kahn. "He taught me the importance of patience, of not being hasty, which is what undermines inspiration."
He claims he "just started writing poetry, liked it and kept going." His work gained early renown in the late 1960s for its vehemence against the Vietnam War. At that time, Williams wrote in an urgent style, using short lines and minimal punctuation to project his anger about the war.
A decade later, the world and Williams' life were in different places -- the war was over and he was establishing a second home in Paris. Williams' poems reflected these changes; they were now less polemical and employed longer lines, offering the poet more space to write through his thoughts.
Williams continues to branch out stylistically, as represented by "Repair" and "Misgivings." He currently is working on more poems and is finalizing a play. "My writing has changed rather dramatically over time, and I think it continues to," he says. "The way it has changed from the recent past to now isn't really possible to say yet."
Williams teaches Princeton students the guidelines he also adheres to: "Respect the truth of experience, the integrity of language, and how poetry clarifies and intensifies both."
Last year's Pulitzer is only the most recent award for Williams: "Flesh and Blood" won the National Book Critics Circle Award in 1987 and "The Vigil" was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize in 1998.
Books by C.K. Williams
"Lies" (1969)
"I Am the Bitter Name" (1972)
"With Ignorance" (1977)
"Sophocles' Women of Trachis" (with Gregory Dickerson,
1978)
"The Lark. The Thrush. The Starling. (Poems from Issa)"
(1983)
"Tar" (1983)
"Flesh and Blood" (1987)
"Poems 1963-1983" (1989)
"The Bacchae of Euripides" (1990)
"A Dream of Mind" (1992)
"Selected Poems" (1995)
"The Vigil" (1997)
"Poetry and Consciousness: Selected Essays" (1998)
"Repair" (1999)
"Misgivings: My Mother, My Father, Myself" (2000)
"Love About Love" (2001)
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