The Light Within the Light: Portraits of Donald Hall, Richard Wilbur, Maxine Kumin, and Stanley Kunitz Book

Jeanne Braham offers brief biographical sketches of four major U.S. poets, Donald Hall, Richard Wilbur, Maxine Kumin, and Stanley Kunitz. I especially appreciated finding out who were some of their major literary influences, contemporary collaborators, and students whom they influenced. It's like reading a poetry genealogy of sorts. Jeanne interweaves quotes from her interviews with the poets along with a few poems or lines from poems. The book contains beautiful engraving portraits of each poet by renowned artist, Barry Moser.

In her introduction, I especially liked her quote of a poem by Gary Synder, "How Poetry Comes to Me," where Gary "describes the mysterious interplay between poet and poem in this way:

It comes blundering over the
Boulders at night, it stays
Frightened outside the
Range of my campfire
I go to meet it at the
Edge of the light.

Jeanne notes that it is "perhaps because of New England's harsh climate and famously dark winter, [that] its poets explore the "edge of the light" more than most. From the Puritan allegorical debates pitting the light of moral rectitude against the dark of moral chaos, to Dickinson's efforts to "Grow Accustomed to the Dark," to Frost's narrators who claim to be "Acquainted with the Night," the narrators in many New England-situated poems find themselves surrounded by a dark world, one set in startling juxtaposition to the "clearing" a poem makes. That circle of light assumes its definition in a complicated dance with the dark.
If the act of creating a poem makes a clearing in the dark, there is another glow embedded within the poem, the light within the light, the long half life of the poem's impact on the reader. Against the backdrop of a dark world, Donald Hall, Richard Wilbur, Maxine Kumin, and Stanley Kunitz create poems that are illumined from within, holding a vision of human possibility steady in the light."

(Jeanne Braham, The Light Within The Light: Portraits of Donald Hall, Richard Wilbur, Maxine Kumin, & Stanley Kunitz, engravings by Barry Mosher, Boston: David R. Godine, Publisher, 2007, pp. IX-X)

While exploring the places, people, events, etc., which have influenced these writers, Jeanne is able to get each poet to, at least briefly for this format, offer some sense of what poetry means to them, how they go about the art and craft, as well what a poem's purpose is or can be.

From her interview with Donald Hall, the poet comments on his poem "Witness", which "underscores the rich and unsettling history through which Hall has lived":

"It's a poem about old age, about remembrance, about being a witness to so much in the last century. I remember as a child sitting on the couch and listening to Edward R. Murrow on the radio, describing London burning and I began to think about this arc of history: from World War II to 9/11 to Iraq. As a poet it's not my obligation to take a political position. But as a citizen I have views, I have feelings, and they will come out. I feel my responsibility as a citizen, as a human being to speak my mind when our government is leading us in the wrong direction.
Poetry isn't, after all, a bully pulpit, a place to preach. It's not even a forum for sharing information. It operates in a different way, as a location where the emotions of being human can be put out, can be received. Poetry allows readers to exercise their own emotional possibilities through the words of others." (pp. 18-19)

Jeanne notes Richard Wilbur's "love of form, his ability to use rhyme, meter, and stanza to empower the arguments in his poems [which] made his work immediately recognizable. The former cryptographer's love of puzzle (and delight in solving it), the former seventeenth-century scholar's appreciation for intricate word play and competing arguments within the complementary envelope of the poem, the lover of Frost's surface-and-deep meanings all register in the unique figure a Wilbur poem makes." On the topic of his love of form, Richard says, however, "A good poet is never one coerced by form, but a good poet needs to have turns, climaxes, joints - or he's left floundering in infinity. Robert Frost had a wonderful way of putting it. He said: "Bad poets rhyme words; good poets rhyme phrases." That's central to my way of composing a poem. I want the rhyme to happen inevitably, as a part of the flow of argument - not as a way of completing an arbitrary pattern. The latter thing is just ornamentation: doily-making." (pp. 30-31)

Maxine Kumin highlights, from her perspective, the importance of form and sound in her poems:

"Sound is of particular importance in my poems. And I know I write better poems in form - with demands of a rhyme scheme and metrical pattern - than I do in the looser line of free verse. Without form I'd feel like I was abandoned in flat Indiana with my eyelids sewn open." (p. 50)

Another favorite quote of mine from Maxine, regarding how a poem comes into being under her watch:

"Whatever the world situation, whatever the poet's role, I think it is almost impossible to identify what steers my poems: probably an inner compass that I'm not even conscious of. I see the direction a poem will take only as it's taking it. My job is to be open, attentive. I love that line from Rilke, "Await the birth-hour of a new clarity, keeping holy all that befalls, even disappointment, even desertion." I try to keep that in my mind, even when "keeping holy all that befalls" is difficult." (p. 59)

A great quote from Stanley Kunitz comes from one of his former students, Marie Howe:

"Stanley once said: "I dream of an art so transparent that you can look through it and see the world." (p. 73)

In this quote from Marie, she goes on to describe some of the highlights of what Stanley emphasized about the craft of writing poems:

"He taught us to love this world,
to learn the names of the rocks and plants and animals.
He taught us that we are not alone
that the world is noisy with a breathing chain of being,
a web in which we live,
and that every molecule of it matters.
He taught us to love the places we had come from,
places many of us were trying to forget,
Pittsburgh or Rochester or the streets of New York,
the very meadows and backyards
we had struggled to get out of once and for all.
He taught us to love that geography,
the "testing-trees" of our own childhood,
the original dirt and water and matter of our first lives.

And in that way he taught us to love our own stories,
what we had hidden,
what we had been ashamed of.
He taught us to turn into those obsessions that haunted us and hurt us,
to turn into their "deeper dark."
And we looked at his own work and saw that he had done so,
and that he had made of those turnings, poetry.
And we took courage and tried." (p. 73)

When Jeanne asked Stanley, in a phone interview, "how he would describe the role of the poet as witness," she notes that "there was a long pause. I could hear him thinking. He cleared his throat several times and then replied in one seamless paragraph:

"Poets in any culture inherit a common tradition. What makes them separate and distinctive is the use they make of their own past, which cannot be the same as anybody else's. My first sense of what it meant to be a poet in the modern world was that it required a search for my own identity. To ascertain who I was and then to bear witness to it is at the heart of my poetry. Sometimes I feel perturbed that I've written so few poems on political themes, particularly on the causes that agitate me. But then I realize that being a poet at all in the modern world is a political act." (pp. 79-80)