“A man must partly give up being a man with women-folk” —Robert Frost
“This is like taking off a tight dress that I love” —Ruth Lepson
What is poetry? Obviously it is more than the poetry, but to what extent?
To make it a great deal more than the poetry, the poetry is paradoxically diminished—and this is the soul of modern art, which is the mother of modern poetry—whose name is freedom: art is self-sufficient; moral and aesthetic concerns are excluded. Nothing defines the poem except the poem. No standards exist.
The pure intelligence of the reader enjoys the modern poem.
Living With People
Talking is something.
And tables, talking at tables.
Eating and painting and what walls.
What are they asking.
What am I looking at.
A person talking and eating.
I’m looking at the eyes
that don’t look at me.
The foot-tapping,
the hungry person,
what is being eaten.
This is the first poem in Ruth Lepson’s New and Selected Poems. It is a wonderful honor and privilege to review a poet’s selected poems; one needs to be a critic, not just a reviewer, to review a selected; you are not only reviewing poems, but a life.
What do I mean by “the pure intelligence of the reader enjoys the modern poem?”
As I stated, I’m reviewing a life—it might be a tad reductive to say I’m reviewing the poet as a person.
And yet one could answer that age-old question ‘what is poetry’ by saying ‘it’s an expression of what the poet likes.’ And to keep it simple we can include what they dislike as what they wish to be gone and so it all comes under the category of ‘what the poet likes.’
To review a book of poems is to say: here’s what this person likes.
But I do think ‘person’ (and what they might enjoy) is reductive—I don’t think it’s hyperbolic to say I am reviewing Ruth Lepson’s life. A unique life.
It takes “intelligence” to understand a life.
Let’s read this poem, again:
Living With People
Talking is something.
And tables, talking at tables.
Eating and painting and what walls.
What are they asking.
What am I looking at.
A person talking and eating.
I’m looking at the eyes
that don’t look at me.
The foot-tapping,
the hungry person,
what is being eaten.
“Living With People” is full of life.
“Talking is something” nearly defines poetry itself; a poem is a “talking” which is a “something.”
But none of this pedantry exists in Lepson’s line.
Only someone else’s “pure intelligence” could find it, and the line could denote something else entirely; in a dry sort of way it could mean, “Talking is really something. What would life be without talking?” But it doesn’t have to mean this, either.
Yet obviously, and pleasantly, without any coercion, it hints at a life to begin a poem, “Talking is something.”
“And tables, talking at tables” introduces ceremonial life (eating at table)—as well as (and this is rather subtle, I admit) a ceremony of poetry (its tradition of word-resemblance: talking, table.)
After introducing all this in just the first two lines, the poet adds even more: “eating” (biology) and “painting” (art, work).
It now seems reasonable to contain all of it: “walls” and with all that is now going on—“talking” at “tables” in a ceremonial fashion, a consciousness of biological function, of art, of work—it doesn’t feel unusual that doubt and wonder should enter: “what walls./What are they asking./What am I looking at.”
And with these questions, naturally, a bit of alienation (too strong a word, probably—there’s no hyperbole or pretense in the poem) arrives: “I’m looking at the eyes/that don’t look at me.” This could indicate elaborate social anxiety, or rivalry, or could be merely the observation of someone’s eyes at an angle.
“The foot-tapping” introduces the impatience of the world, the worm in the garden, time, ambition, hostility, sorrow.
And finally, the moral question (or is it moral?): “what is being eaten.” And all that involves.
This is what I mean by the “pure intelligence” reading a modern poem.
This poem, like most modern poems, “tells” us nothing. And yet “Living With People” is a history of the world. Not just Ruth Lepson’s world. The world.
One could peruse “Living With People” and think one need not write another poem, again, ever; it says everything.
And yet in terms of poetry and its tradition, it is a marvelously plain and simple poem.
Deceptively so.
If one were just settling into a seat at a poetry reading and were distracted to a slight degree, and one heard “Living With People” read out loud, one’s response might very well be, “Wait? What? Tables. Walls. Eaten. Huh?”
To be honest, “Living With People” would not lend itself well to a recital before an audience. A performance requires the opening bars of the familiar song eliciting cheers from the crowd, followed by the middle of the song continuing at some length until the climax of the expected conclusion.
“Living With People” is an example of modern poetry—it is more than poetry, it is free of ‘having to be poetry’ and to the degree that this is so, as a poem qua poem, it is diminished.
“Living With People” introduces us to Ruth Lepson as an extremely sensitive person who appreciates dining and conversation. It is more than just a poem. The poem quietly shows us the poet. The person. The life.
To understand even more fully what I mean when I say “pure intelligence” is necessary to read modern poetry, it might help to glance at an example of pre-modern poetry.
The classical poem lacks the freedom of the modern poem. The “old” poem tells us exactly how to read it. It cuts a path through the rock—and this is the path we must follow.
Here’s a random excerpt from Bennett Cerf’s An Anthology of Famous English and American Poetry (Conrad Aiken edited and introduced the American side) published by The Modern Library (Random House), the 1945 edition which restored the poems of Ezra Pound (he had been censored in the earlier edition):
Go, dumb-born book,
Tell her that sang me once that song of Lawes:
Hadst thou but song
As thou hast subjects known,
Then were there cause in thee that should condone
Even my faults that heavy upon me lie,
And build her glories their longevity.
This is a completely different world. (One stanza from Pound is enough to see this.)
We wrestle with the syntax unfolding the poem in strict and narrow terms.
Pound’s poem is trying to sing. It is tradition-bound.
This book belonged to my father growing up; I happened to find it recently as I was going through old poems of mine.
Compared to Pound, Lespon is free.
It feels like Pound is imprisoning himself in poetry to get free of life—while it feels like Lepson is looking honestly at the prison which is life—by becoming freer in her poetry.
Here is the most purely “aesthetic” poem in Lepson’s book:
Where Seagulls Fly
It’s good to walk the dog
When he finally meets
The black cat down the street.
Years, each tiny lesson.
The way seagulls seem to fly at times
against the wind and into the clouds.
It’s a white day, white and gray.
It’s good to live where seagulls fly,
thick clouds over the gray house.
Spring wind, first night on the porch,
dandelions white,
close to the end of something.
Even when Lepson rhymes (almost never) she’s subtle; “Seagulls” shows her usual reticence awash in strange joy (“It’s good to walk the dog,” “It’s good to live where seagulls fly”) with her typical socially-charged ambiguity (“dog…meets…cat…tiny lesson”) and Lepson’s characteristic hint of stoic heartbreak (“Spring wind…close to the end of something”).
“Where Seagulls Fly” is from Lepson’s third collection of poems, I Went Looking For You, and from that collection onward, she becomes more voluble, leaving behind the minimalism of her second work, Morphology.
Morphology features charming one-line poems such as
The film is a train
I Went Looking For You contains Lepson’s Anne Sexton poem (Ruth took a class with her).
I quote it in full:
Anne Sexton on the Cover
Your cigarette could be a piece of chalk.
(You were telling us This class was saving your life.)
Bracelets handcuff you, hands raised to heaven.
Puffed up hair, full of smoke. Your eyebrows plucked,
pleading. You’re smiling, shoulders bare,
yet your legs are crossed tightly, snakes coupling.
Your dress: swirls of chocolate and vanilla, mud and snow.
Fingernails short, fingers long,
limbs, long, desire, long, longer than
a garden party at which you are this evening’s star.
Your name, plastered across your lap on the book jacket,
wraps you in a golden bow. Today in Harvard Square,
the statue of seated Sumner wore an apron of snow.
I was tired of the gender of things, you wrote.
A glass of booze next to you, nearly empty.
It’s summer, you’re divorced, the thick ring,
it’s huge stone slid to the side
on your right hand now.
But if I hadn’t known you, what would I see?
A long, thin, woman, hopeful, sad, poised
against rejection. Or a strong one,
politic, sure of her next move.
They want blood, you said after your last reading.
Voyeurs. I’m never going to read again, and it was true—
I immerse myself in your biography; you were
famous for your false self, I’m looking for you.
Lepson mentions a number of poets in her book; memorable, indeed, is this sustained focus on Sexton.
I Went Looking For You might be my favorite section from Ruth Lepson’s Selected. It also has the poem “Motion Sickness, Preoccupation,” of which I’ll quote just a bit:
The woman next door listening
to the Moonlight Sonata and, simultaneously, a soap opera.
****
I felt like a sack of sugar, leaking. Your girlfriend
looked like a cross
between Barbara and George Bush.
I Went Looking For You ends with this poignant poem, which finds the poet more accessibly autobiographical than usual (or at least it feels that way):
The Day Of Our Divorce Hearing
you treated me to lunch, a spaghetti place.
We had never been so kind to each other.
When you said I’m still a slob, we laughed.
After lunch, we stood in the parking lot.
You said, you have the last word,
but I said, No, I’m tired of being
the one who sums things up.
You get the last word.
But you couldn’t think of one.
So off you went to our silver car,
I to our red one.
It’s three years later.
And even that’s just a story now.
Lately I don’t feel as if I lived with you.
But I remember our kindness that day,
when it no longer mattered.
Again, we see the uncanny ability of the poet to say not just a lot—but to rip the veil from life—with a few words.
She has little to say about her relationships—were her partners brilliant, bookish, workaholics who failed to appreciate her? This is from “Another Sunset,” the fifth poem in the book:
You read on the beach
about medicine and art;
you sweat all over the magazine;
you cover your eyes
with it: there is pressure
over the bridge of your nose.
Meanwhile, I am drowning.
You have no notion,
and after I drown,
I walk back and don’t say
too much about it.
“You sweat all over the magazine” at the beach artfully describes an obsessive reader.
Lepson doesn’t “say too much about it.” She doesn’t rant or complain in her poems. Instead we get scintillating poetry like this, also from her first collection, Dreaming In Color:
“now that you left…this is like taking off a tight dress that I love.”
Probably the strongest burst of emotion we get from the poet of almost surreal restraint is this one—from Ask Anyone, her fourth collection—from an untitled poem towards the end of the Selected section, before we get to the new poems:
“I’m peeling carrots and I almost start crying isn’t that funny…I was doing everything for you I’m not really peeling carrots am I isn’t that funny fuckhead”
As we can see from this, she is not always a poet of restraint.
Nine new poems grace the last part of On The Way, New and Selected, including “Motet for Mom.”
From Ben Mazer’s introduction: “Ruth’s mother was a Lithuanian Jew, a mathematician, a sculptor, and a Hebrew teacher…”
To quote briefly from “Motet for Mom,” a delightful dialogue:
“Do you believe in God, Mom?”
“A little.”
Lepson is not quite the pure poet at the end of the book that she was at the beginning; she offers passing opinions on John Kennedy, Longfellow, solitary confinement, and factory farming—she’s earned that right as a poet of brevity, subtlety and grace; I don’t mean to imply that when she speaks her mind momentarily here and there it mars the book in any way—it would be insulting to say it shows “development”—she is at the height of her powers (one that honestly approaches ‘major poet’ status) throughout the book.
Her new poems are more explorative, intellectually forceful, and extroverted, even as they retain Lepson’s beautiful, grounded, melancholy. From “Evenings:”
I don’t want to be original.
Life’s too white these days, it’s
all I can do to concentrate on that.
Comparisons swim by like swans.
They’re too far away.
The publisher, MadHat Press, is to be congratulated for bringing out this volume—for me it puts Ruth Lepson in the company of Creeley and Sexton.
To end my review of this beautiful book, Ruth Lepson deserves the last word. This is how “Evenings” ends:
Flickers of dreams
Surface in the evenings.