 As
Reviewed By: |
Letters to an Old Poet On Corresponding with W. D. Snodgrass |
As
Reviewed By: |
Letters to an Old Poet On Corresponding with W. D. Snodgrass |
I entered into a correspondence with W. D.
Snodgrass in what was to be the last year of his life, and I will always
be grateful for the generosity and guidance he showed me. I will, as well,
always be thankful for the windows, some of them quite intimate, he opened
on his life and work. I had been teaching a class in the confessional
poets—the “big five”: Snodgrass, Robert Lowell, John Berryman,
Sylvia Plath, and Anne Sexton—at Drexel University in the spring of
2008. For our study of Snodgrass, I assigned Snodgrass’s Not
for Specialists, his new and selected poems published by BOA Editions
(2006), and Ernest Hilbert’s deep and wide-ranging interview with him,
“The First Confessionalist: W. D. Snodgrass,” which appeared in the Contemporary
Poetry Review (December 2007). Mr. Hilbert put me in touch with Mr.
Snodgrass and his wife Kathy, and we began to correspond in March of 2008.
I never met Mr. Snodgrass face-to-face, but he was an avid correspondent,
answering all my letters expeditiously and generously. In fact, there were
times I waited before writing back for fear that I would unduly burden
him. Now that he is gone, I regret my hesitance. I
admire the poems of W. D. Snodgrass for many reasons: the sincerity of his
voice, the open human feeling, his lyric grace, his self-deprecating wit,
his troubadour spirit. Many, with their elaborate meters, stanzas, and
rhymes, have the lilt of song. I am stirred when he looses the arrows of
indictment and indignation, exposing the human beast. My students and I
were particularly drawn to Snodgrass in his moments of frank emotion and
self-deprecating humor. But the poet wanted to be read correctly. I once
sent him a student’s essay about “Heart’s Needle” in which the
student praised his voice as “humble and charming.” Snodgrass wrote
back wondering if the “Heart’s Needle” speaker didn’t sound
“snippy and prideful about his own failure.” My students, all
undergraduates in a variety of majors, preferred the poems of Snodgrass to
those of the other confessionals. As one student, Julia Perch, observes,
Snodgrass is different from Lowell, Berryman, Plath, and Sexton because of
“the joy he found in life.” Another student, Deborah Silverman,
suggests that while so much confessional poetry is “rooted in
self-hatred and depression, Snodgrass conveys a sense of natural curiosity
and growth, and even in the darker moments maintains a sense of
optimism.” The students liked Lowell’s work the least. The Lowell
problem had to do with their dislike of the research required to
understand Lowell’s many historical and literary references. These days
Google makes such fact-finding relatively easy; nevertheless, that was how
my students felt. In any case, plenty of Snodgrass poems require research,
especially The Fuehrer Bunker
poems, and some allusions in other poems are outside the bounds of the
present-day reader’s general knowledge. For instance, Mr. Snodgrass
explained to me that the odd-numbered stanzas in “After Experience
Taught Me . . .” are quotes from Baruch Spinoza, the 17th-century
rationalist philosopher. Snodgrass said he’d see to it that future
printings provided a footnote about the Spinoza quote. As
much as Snodgrass wrote about his own life, I think that he stands to the
side of his “I.” No grand self stares out from the verses; the poet
does not pose as if he were at the center of the world, least of all when
he proclaims in “These Trees Stand . . .” that “Snodgrass is walking
through the universe.” The letters he wrote me were newsy mixes about
travel and wildlife, visits to the theatre, and his great poet-teachers,
Lowell, Berryman, and Randall Jarrell. He even offered great advice about
teaching poems he didn’t understand (e.g. Hart Crane). In his letter of
June 19, 2008 he said he would just read the “poem out loud, then jump
out of the way when the fight started. They’d teach themselves, each
other, and certainly me.” Of
the student essays I mailed to Mr. Snodgrass, his favorite was written by
a computer science major. Snodgrass approved of his “straightforward and
direct language,” and though he had some qualms about the student’s
interpretation of “After Experience Taught Me . . .” (particularly the
student’s and my ignorance of the Spinoza quote), he agreed that the
analysis was quite “brilliant and worthy of the highest marks.” The
essay he liked the least was written by an English major, a very bright
student and excellent reader of poems, who used many literary theory terms
she’d picked up in advanced English courses. Snodgrass’s comment was
that her piece was “unnecessarily padded out with academic jargon and
paraphernalia.” He thought she’d do well to pursue “more
straight-forward language and a down-to-earth approach.” Not
only was Snodgrass generous in commenting on my students’ work, he was
very gracious in commenting and advising me on the one poem of my own I
that mustered the courage to send him. It was a short lyric, set in snowy
winter, called “The Fox and the Neighbors.” Looking back, I cringe at
what an undeveloped early effort it was. Mr. Snodgrass numbered the lines
he liked—he liked the fox—and mentioned that he wanted to know more
about the elderly neighbors and what the snow and their illness demanded.
Although I believe this was before the diagnosis of his lung cancer, I
wonder if he saw himself in the snapshot of the neighbors. I followed the
poet’s advice and had my poetic speaker battle the elements to provision
the neighbors and give the poor scraggly fox a snack along the way. The
aid and human connection was exactly what the poem needed. It’s doubtful
that my result is a thing for the ages, but how lucky I was to have
Snodgrass’s direction. At
the start of my spring class at Drexel, Mr. Snodgrass gave me (via Mr.
Hilbert) three brand-new, unpublished poems to share with my class. The
one I chose to teach was a long poem, raw in places, ironically entitled
“Unconfessional.” It was about the break-up of his third marriage, and
a topic that, though three decades past, still rankled. My students and I
were in awe at this privilege. Snodgrass continued to work on the poem. In
December of 2008, about a month before he died, Kathy sent me his
extensive revision of “Unconfessional.” The question was: did I think
that this new work should find a place in a British edition of his poems?
What a glimpse into the poet’s mind this new draft was. I saw how
Snodgrass had eliminated certain digressions and some of the gossipy
detail, rearranged passages, removed some of the bitterness; the poem’s
strength was not, in the process, diluted; in fact, it had grown. Yet the
new “Unconfessional” was remarkably different. I could see the poet
choosing polish and control over unvarnished personal revelation. I found
it very moving to learn that Snodgrass was writing and revising right up
to the very end. My
two favorite Snodgrass poems, “April Inventory” and “Invitation,”
both of which appear in BOA’s Not for Specialists, bookend his oeuvre. In “April Inventory” the young and amorous poet sees
himself whitened by the passing years, then takes stock of his
shortcomings, his personal growth, his strengths and jousts in the ivory
tower. In the love poem, “Invitation,” which is, by turns, wistful,
blissful, and humorous, Snodgrass alludes to Marlowe’s “The Passionate
Shepherd to His Love” as he sings of his love for his wife, Kathy: Come
couch with me mit Freud und Lust As
every evening’s last connection. Talk
to me; prove the day like Proust; Let
what comes next rise to inspection. How
blessed W. D. Snodgrass was to have this great love with Kathy in his
later years. And how fortunate was I to correspond with the poet. |
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