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Oren Izenberg on Allen Grossman ("The Life and Death Kisses")
1.6k Plays2 years ago
What do poems require of the persons who make them, in order for those persons to be known in them? Oren Izenberg joins the podcast to talk about that question and a strange and wonderful poem by Allen Grossman that takes it on, "The Life and Death Kisses."
Oren Izenberg is an Associate Professor of English at the University of California, Irvine. He is the author of a monograph, Being Numerous: Poetry and the Ground of Social Life (Princeton UP, 2012). He is currently completing another book, How to Know Everything, about the philosophical significance of poetry’s engagement with “ordinary” mental actions like believing, desiring, perceiving, remembering, and intending.
Oren's teaching spans the long history of the art (from the Iliad to the poem someone is working on right now). He is the author of many essays on poetry and poetics, which have appeared in a variety of journals and collections (Critical Inquiry, Modernism/modernity, PMLA, Modern Philology, Lana Turner, nonsite, and others). He is a poetry editor at nonsite.org, an online journal of art and ideas. You can follow Oren on Twitter.
As ever, if you're enjoying the podcast, make sure you're following it. Leave a rating or review, and share an episode with a friend. Subscribe to my Substack for thoughts and links to go with each episode.
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Transcript
Introduction and Guest Background
00:00:00
Speaker
Hello, everyone, and welcome to Close Readings. I'm your host, Kamran Javidizadeh, and I'm really excited today to be talking to someone whose work I've admired for many years and whom I've met here and there, but I think this will probably be the longest conversation that we've ever, the single longest conversation that we've ever had. I hope the first of many such, though not recorded.
00:00:26
Speaker
That would be terrible if all our conversations were recorded. My guest today is Oren Eisenberg. And I'll tell you lots more about Oren in a minute, but first wanted to let everyone know that the poem that Oren has chosen for our conversation today is a poem by Alan Grossman.
00:00:46
Speaker
and it's called The Life and Death Kisses. I will, as always, make the poem available to you via a link in the episode notes, so you'll be able to look at it as we discuss it and as Oren reads it, which he'll do, I hope, for us in a few minutes.
00:01:08
Speaker
So look for that link, look also. Of course, though, I've become somewhat laggard about getting these out in a timely way. There will be, I promise there will be a newsletter that comes out with the episode as well. And that'll have not just the text of the poem, but other links and information about Orin's work and about Grossman and some thoughts that I've had about the episode once we've had this conversation.
Eisenberg's Work and Philosophy
00:01:34
Speaker
Orrin Eisenberg is an associate professor of English at the University of California at Irvine.
00:01:41
Speaker
And so he's joining us now from California, from the state where I come from, the state that I miss. He's the author of a monograph called Being Numerous, Poetry and the Ground of Social Life, which was published by Princeton University Press in 2012 and is a really great book, is I think a model for poetry monographs.
00:02:12
Speaker
He's completing another book, which sounds very exciting. It's a book called How to Know Everything. There's a title for you. And at least as I have it, there's no subtitle there, which I also enjoy. Exactly. It is what it is, right? It's telling you everything you need to know right there.
00:02:27
Speaker
That book, Orin tells me, is about the philosophical significance of poetry's engagement with, quote, ordinary, unquote, mental actions, things like believing or desiring or perceiving, remembering, intending.
00:02:45
Speaker
As I enumerate those things that this new book seems to be about, it strikes me, having read the poem a few times now that Oren has chosen for today's conversation, that some of those things might come up, might well come up in our conversation today.
00:03:05
Speaker
Orrin's teaching at Irvine and at his previous stops has had a kind of breathtakingly wide span. So Orrin is interested in teaching poetry not in a way that is confined to any particular period. Though his research seems pretty well grounded in 20th century and 21st century poetry and poetics, his teaching spans the long history of poetry from the Iliad to
00:03:35
Speaker
as Orrin charmingly says, the poem someone is working on right now. So right now, even as I say, even as you have the good luck to be in Orrin's teaching, within hearing of Orrin's teaching voice, you'll hear that kind of interest in the very contemporary art of poetry.
The Role of Poetry in Personhood
00:04:00
Speaker
His essays on poetry and poetics
00:04:03
Speaker
And on poets that range from Shakespeare to Susan Howe have appeared in journals and collections like Critical Inquiry and PMLA, Modernism Modernity, Modern Philology, Lana Turner, and Nonsite, Nonsite.org, where Orin is poetry editor.
00:04:23
Speaker
in addition to having been a contributor. He studied at Johns Hopkins. That's where he got his PhD. And that is something I think we'll talk about more perhaps in a minute or two. And before getting to Irvine, Orrin taught at Harvard and Chicago, at the University of Chicago. So, you know, I was,
00:04:47
Speaker
I've had a copy of Being Numerous I think just about since it came out. It's a book that I've underlined all over and have thought lots about. It has a pleasingly kind of ambitious project in mind. What Oren
00:05:09
Speaker
is interested in, as I take it, is in the project of poetry, which is
00:05:21
Speaker
to reground, in his words, the concept and value of the person. So not thinking only about poetry as an aesthetic art or thinking about poems as literary objects, but in taking seriously poetry's claims to
00:05:45
Speaker
define and ground the person. I want to read just a couple of very brief moments to you that will put some meat on that bone, as it were, and help you see what is so refreshing and exciting about Orin's approach in the book. He says early in the introduction to the book that
00:06:14
Speaker
that the accounts of personhood that he's interested in. Let me just find the line here.
00:06:33
Speaker
He says, when we describe a poem as having a speaker, yes, this was the passage I was looking for, when we describe a poem as having a speaker or as giving voice to a person, and both the word speaker and the word voice are in quotation marks, these are ways that we are almost reflexively taught to think about what poems are doing with respect to personhood. We are not assuming anything about what a person is.
00:07:02
Speaker
Rather, Orin says, we are taking the artifice of voice in the poem to offer something like a model or theory of the person or even a pedagogy of personhood. He says, moreover, that
00:07:20
Speaker
Though this is something poems do, poems and the poets that Orin is most interested in are aware of the kinds of limitations that poems have in realizing that project. So that the poems that Orin takes up in the book and those poets, the poets in the book include people like George Oppen,
00:07:47
Speaker
William Butler Yeats. There's a section here on language poetry. There's a beautiful reading at the end of the book on a poem that has meant a lot to me, A.R. Ammons' tape for the turn of the year. These are poets who are
00:08:04
Speaker
themselves uneasy about poetry's claims to describe or record the experience of what it is to be a person. And one of the things I find most
00:08:26
Speaker
valuable in Orin's work is the seriousness with which he takes the claims that poetry seems to make, I want to say about but about seems like it's too limiting a preposition here, the claims poetry makes on life, for life, in life. Orin is thinking very carefully in the book about those claims and what those claims have to do not just with what in a kind of abstract sense we might take a person to be
00:08:56
Speaker
but on the ways in which people relate to each other in social lives and in political formations, in models of belonging that in the 20th century, in the period that the book
00:09:14
Speaker
mostly covers, those formations have obviously, were obviously, I speak sometimes as though we're still in the 20th century, were obviously fraught and violent and often did not go well. Orin is writing about poetry in a way that seems to be aware of the stakes
00:09:38
Speaker
of its claims on personhood. And that's one of the reasons why I'm so pleased to have him on this podcast.
Alan Grossman's Impact
00:09:46
Speaker
Oren Eisenberg, welcome to Close Readings. How are you doing today? I'm doing very well, thank you. And thank you for that. That was really nice to hear.
00:09:57
Speaker
Well, thank you for your work. And I really do want to thank you for coming on the podcast. I invited you as I invite all my guests to think of the poem that they want to talk about.
00:10:10
Speaker
And when you told me that maybe Grossman was a poet, Alan Grossman was a poet that you wanted to discuss on the podcast, I thought, oh, that's wonderful. And I thought so for a couple of reasons. One is, well, I admire Grossman, though I confess, I don't know his poetry as well as I should, I think.
00:10:27
Speaker
I, like maybe others in our field, know and really treasure his Summa Lyrica, a book of poetic speculations and sort of speculative poetic theory. It's in some ways a collection of aphorisms, but it's more than that too. They build on each other in really moving and trenchant ways.
00:10:54
Speaker
So I was excited to learn more about Grossman from you, but then I was also excited in part because I take it that Alan Grossman is not just someone you've read, but is someone you knew and studied with. And I wonder if for the benefit of our listeners who might not know much about Grossman at all, if you might give us a bit of context about this poet.
00:11:17
Speaker
And I guess I have in mind both the kind of context that might be useful in placing him in a kind of intellectual tradition or poetic tradition in 20th century poetry or poetry more broadly. But then also, if you'd be willing to say a word or two about who the Alan Grossman whom you knew was, like what was he like as a teacher,
00:11:49
Speaker
In what sense, when you read his work, are you thinking also about the person whom you knew personally? Right, so yeah, it's a great question. I knew the first part of the question was coming, the part about situating Grossman in 20th century poetry, and somehow knowing that did not
00:12:16
Speaker
prepare me really to give a satisfactory answer to it. But I think there are reasons why it's hard to answer that in a satisfactory way. And I guess I will get to the second part of the question about what Grossman has to do with me or what I have to do with him. So Ellen Grossman was born in 1932.
00:12:43
Speaker
which is the same year that Sylvia Plath was born. It's funny, that was my first thought. Right. It's four years or so after John Ashbury was born. It's a couple years before Amiri Baraka was born. These are all poets who might represent something like
00:13:06
Speaker
knowable urgency is within the poetic world, right? We could use each or any of those poets to describe
00:13:14
Speaker
positions within 20th century poetry, Plath, has an intense interest in the particulars of the biographical person. And we can think of other poets who belong to that loose school. Baraka has a ferocious engagement with contemporary politics, racial and otherwise. And we can see that as
00:13:37
Speaker
creating a kind of center of or occupying a center of poetic activity. Ashbury is a figure for a kind of experimental or even avant-garde poetry invested in doing new things with language. And Alan Grossman doesn't sound like any of them. There's a way in which he is sui generis. There's a way in which he's a kind of anachronism.
00:14:05
Speaker
And I guess by that I mean something like the scale of his ambition for art derives from
00:14:14
Speaker
an earlier generation. It derives from the modernists, maybe most particularly or directly from Yates, the poet on whom Grossman wrote his PhD dissertation. For the high modernists, art was a kind of wisdom literature, or
00:14:35
Speaker
a way to plumb orders of understanding that aspired to be total, that could get a grasp on the whole and through the whole.
00:14:46
Speaker
the biographical, the political, the aesthetic. But the ambition to totality is something that sets him apart, I think, from other poets of his generation. Well, it strikes me, and just, Oren, I want to hear the rest of this account, but it just strikes me that of the poets you've listed all in their own ways, that is the poets who were born, you know,
00:15:15
Speaker
in a year or two after, within a couple years of him. All in their own way, they might have had some—well, they did have some exposure to the kind of totalizing ambition of the poetry you're describing, but all in the narratives we have in mind of their careers
00:15:33
Speaker
there comes a moment for almost all of them early, typically, where there's a kind of skeptical break from that kind of ambition and a kind of embarrassment about it or something like that, I don't know. So it really is striking to me how the Grossman you're describing for us departs from his contemporaries in this way.
00:15:55
Speaker
Yeah. And I would say, and maybe this is getting a little ahead of ourselves, but there's a lot of skepticism, but no break. That this is a kind of skeptical, fully skeptical, fully invested. Yeah. That's a lovely, lovely way to think of it. Okay. So go on. Yeah.
00:16:17
Speaker
I suppose a couple of other things to say is that although he started publishing poetry as a young geishman in the late 50s and early 60s, the first book in which he really starts to sound like himself was The Woman on the Bridge over the Chicago River, which came out in 1979, so he was close to 50 years old. So his most distinctive poetry really is
00:16:44
Speaker
the poetry of someone who's been around for a while and learned a lot, right? So who in a sense doesn't belong to the generation into which he was born because he started writing after schooling himself out of it or something like that. Oh, say more about that schooling himself out of it.
00:17:03
Speaker
Well, so when you say, for example, that your engagement with Grossman comes through the Sumo Lyrica, I think that you're not alone. He is much more fully known as a teacher than he is as a poet. Those two things for him go completely hand in hand. Yeah, yeah.
00:17:29
Speaker
the way in which he has exerted force on other thinkers, on other poets, is largely through his teaching. He taught all that time when he wasn't writing or publishing in any of the books. He was teaching at Brandeis University, where he taught for something like 30 years. And he was a, by all accounts,
00:17:50
Speaker
completely legendary teacher there. And what he was teaching was the core sequence in the humanities that extended from the very beginning of recorded text up until, well, I suppose up through modernism, really. And so
00:18:13
Speaker
that for him was his school as much as going to school in poetry. He was going to school in the tradition of what has been
00:18:26
Speaker
thought and said in and somewhat beyond the West. And it is through a kind of complete immersion in that, that his poetry arises and is legible. And really, in a certain sense, only legible. If you're willing to submit yourself to those obligations, the obligation to know those things.
00:18:54
Speaker
So we'll have to talk a little bit, I think, about what's entailed in that obligation.
00:18:58
Speaker
Yeah, absolutely. Great. So this poem, I'll just say a couple other things and bend toward the second part of the question that you asked me. So this poem comes from a collection called The Ether Dome, which came out in 1991. He was almost 60 years old, which was also the year in which I met him, which was my first year of graduate school. I met him on the page
00:19:25
Speaker
somewhat earlier when I as a Calo undergraduate read an essay.
00:19:34
Speaker
called On the Management of Absolute Empowerment, Nuclear Violence, the Institutions of Holiness and the Structures of Poetry by Alan Grossman in the pages of a literary magazine and was completely astonished and bowled over and transformed and wrote a letter to the magazine in the hopes of it reaching him. I don't think it ever did because years later when I asked him if it had,
00:20:03
Speaker
maybe kindly professed a complete lack of knowledge about any such thing. But I went to graduate school to work with him. That is, he was the reason why I went to Johns Hopkins. And it was to
00:20:22
Speaker
to understand what was going on in that essay and to understand what I thought were the very urgent questions it asked about what our ways of making things, what our ways of making culture might have to do with the preservation of human life against its own capacities for destruction. So the
00:20:51
Speaker
The idea of the essay was that we had made nuclear violence as an artifact of culture. And that in a certain sense, only we could defend against the absolute erasure of not just some minds or many minds, but all minds. And the imperative to preserve
00:21:13
Speaker
not lives, but the accounts of value that would lead to the preservation of lives that would short circuit our capacity
00:21:24
Speaker
for total violence was the urgent question that one had to wrestle with.
Complexity of Poetry and Violence
00:21:30
Speaker
And I suppose on some level, I still think that's so. And while I have two very different questions, the first is I take it that for Grossman in that essay and just more broadly speaking, poetry was an essential part of that project of
00:21:52
Speaker
that project of articulating a kind of appropriately calibrated valuing of the human. Yes, poetry is one of the places where both the impulse to preserve is lodged, but also
00:22:13
Speaker
a complete open-eyed confrontation with the fact that those same impulses are the ones that give rise to the capacity and the imperative to violence. Right, right. So my other question quite different was,
00:22:36
Speaker
Can you give us just a quick sense or I don't know how one does this adequately? So I'm glad I'm the one asking the question and not having to answer it.
00:22:45
Speaker
What was it like to be in a classroom with him? I mean, you refer to the stories of him at Brandeis as having been a legendary teacher. You caught him somewhat later in his career, of course. And maybe the classroom wasn't the crucial space for you to receive his teaching, but perhaps it was his office or some other space where you got a different kind of
00:23:11
Speaker
experience with them. What was it like to be in a room with him? I guess I'd want to know. Yeah. In terms of the space of instruction, it was sort of all of the above, right? I mean, the fact that I was also someone who could sit in his office didn't mean that the office replaced the classroom as the real site of instruction. But
00:23:36
Speaker
How to answer that question? I think that most people who knew Alan or who had met him would begin with his voice, which I will not try to do, although every one of his students, there's a sort of cottage industry in trying to do the voice of Alan Grossman. But he spoke in this very large, oracular
00:24:04
Speaker
perfected sentences in a just a kind of inhumanly prophetic
00:24:14
Speaker
voice. And he spoke that way, at least as far as I think his students could tell all the time. There was no other register, right? So you'd be sitting and eating a hamburger with him on which you would pour just massive amounts of salt. And you would be having a conversation in that register. There was no small talk, there was no chitchat
00:24:41
Speaker
It all really mattered to him. One gets that sense that it was not BS, the urgency in the writing about poetry. That's right. And in that sense, again, right or wrong, true or false, complete or partial, that there was no other scale on which he lived life. Yeah.
00:25:08
Speaker
was what was available to his students. And it was powerful. It was intimidating because one often felt like one was preoccupied by trivial things that for which he had no time and just which did not affect him. But
00:25:34
Speaker
But it was also elevating and ennobling, I think, to be asked to match it or to try, to enter that conversation, that space of seriousness. And
00:25:55
Speaker
And so that was a very important experience for me to aspire to, to sometimes, and maybe not infrequently fall short of, or to measure other ways of being against.
00:26:11
Speaker
Yeah. To see what value could be found in them, that I didn't know how to value. Well, that's a lovely tribute in a way. I know this
00:26:30
Speaker
I did not have the same kind of relationship that you're describing now with the poet I'm about to name, but I studied a bit with John Hollander when I was a student in college mostly. And I remember when he died, what I wished I could have access to again was his voice.
00:26:52
Speaker
you know, the way of talking quite apart from anything he might have been saying. And I remember going to a memorial service given for him, which gathered together many, many former students, almost all of whom were older than me.
00:27:13
Speaker
and hearing them talk about him, I realized, oh, it sort of is true that that thing that Auden says about Yeats, you know, the words of a dead man are modified in the guts of the living, that sort of thing, you know, like it seems still that that voice seemed to be populating the room, seemed to be filling the room in some sense. I remember feeling a great worry, like, oh, there are all these brilliant things he'd said in class and they're gone now, you know,
00:27:41
Speaker
And I do think in some sense they were simply kind of diffused into the kind of network of teaching that he created.
00:27:51
Speaker
And it sounds like something very powerful in a similar kind of spirit is at work for you as a teacher and reader of poetry with respect to Alan Grossman. Well, Oren, I don't want more time to go by without our attending to the poem that you've chosen for us, which is such a strange and interesting and beautiful poem, and our listeners should hear it. So would you please be so kind as to read the poem for us?
00:28:19
Speaker
Absolutely. Maybe just a word before I do about voice because it's a hard poem to read. Reading any poem aloud is kind of a tricky business, or it should be a kind of a taxing business. So when you take a poem into your mouth as your own speech, you're being asked to entertain
00:28:47
Speaker
as a function of your own utterance, a certain experimental attitude toward what being a person is. One way to say that is to ask yourself, what could even in theory be the situation in which saying these things that I'm about to say seems like the right thing to say or a plausible thing to say?
00:29:11
Speaker
So we could understand that in dramatistic terms, what kind of person would say these things in this order. I think maybe someone like Stephanie Burt spoke really movingly about the player piano in something like dramatistic terms. She's looking in the mirror. She's addressing herself as an other. She's being kind to herself.
00:29:29
Speaker
so that actions or mental actions or linguistic actions take place in that poem on a plausible human scale, right? They might be like mine or they might not be like mine, but they're in any event at the same order as mine. And being unlike mine but of the same order as mine is an injunction to a kind of sympathy.
00:29:49
Speaker
We have to think about it differently when the words and their order are words for which there is no plausible life-size situation to which they could possibly be appropriate. Yes. Not all poems, in other words, sound like dramatic monologues. Exactly. And I think this is very much a poem like that. And so we're being asked to think about or enact
00:30:13
Speaker
or think about by means of enactment. What would a person have to be in order to know this thing or to want this thing or to think this thing or to say this thing? And that's what I mean by a theoretical attitude toward what a person is. We have to be open through speaking to being something other than what we are. And that's why it's hard to read this poem, but I'm going to try. Thank you.
00:30:43
Speaker
It has an epigraph. The epigraph is Ibant Obscuri. I think we'll have to talk about that. Yeah. But the poem is called The Life and Death Kisses. The chroniclers ceased. They ceased until I arose, out of the infinite unborn, one of the born who lived, and out of the number of all who have lived and died, one of those yet alive.
00:31:13
Speaker
and among all who are yet alive, one of us not in the greatest pain, not demented, not buried and awaiting rescue without hope under a cruel weight, and not mourning inconsolable losses night after night, or enraged by the treachery of women, or subjected, not for this moment, thank God, by the evil power of Jay,
00:31:41
Speaker
arose in truth because it was time. Punctually, at three in the afternoon, from where I was sitting without thought on an obdurate, bright bench of varnished rattan, in the last car of a train, leaning and slowing, as on a curve, beside a honey-blonde woman of indeterminate age whose eyes were strange.
00:32:08
Speaker
amidst the blandness of air and the thin light of destination. It was in the middle western state of X, land of lakes, somewhere on the western unbuilt limb of the central city, where lordly factories and highways and nursing homes were transparent with hesitation between then and now in sunlight, whiter than it should be.
00:32:36
Speaker
Because the foul windows of the old train were crowded with papery faces, like bleached leaves fall into the bottom of an empty pool, one upon the other, or like ocean waves blown down white by the silent hurricane, waves breaking out of sight of land, unsurvivable by ships, human beings with the faces of leaves or fallen water.
00:33:07
Speaker
Near at hand, the faces that can appear, and behind them also the ones that cannot appear in their multitudes, white faces receding into the whiteness of the light and the flat landscape of the great plains of the dream. I rose to get down.
00:33:29
Speaker
for the train had stopped and it was leaning in the light. And I looked on my right hand to the woman who sat beside me, the stout blonde woman with strange eyes, thinking, she will know the way. This is her country. But I saw she was blind. She was blind. I knew by the hesitation of her body as she lifted it like something very large with separate intentions in another world.
00:33:59
Speaker
She took hold of me, and we entered the dark end of the car. And then she kissed me with life and death kisses amid a great rush of air mingled with odors of metal and the slamming of doors. And out of her mouth, a stone passed into my open mouth. This is the stone of witness, she said, that stops every heart.
00:34:29
Speaker
Thereafter, I turned to the left hand and went down. In the sunlight, a spring snow was rising and falling on the plain, and the rails where the train had been were brimming with silver. I would have lingered in the light for the interest of the empty scene, but I was wearied out by the silence of life and death and the kisses of the fate, and I lay down among the leaves.
00:34:57
Speaker
like a young soul bewildered beneath a sun that was as a stare of the finest eye. And then the life stopped in me, and the witness stone divided my throat.
00:35:15
Speaker
You've just heard Orrin Eisenberg read The Life and Death Kisses by Alan Grossman. Orrin, thank you, it's an extraordinary reading. It's an extraordinary poem.
Analysis of the Poem's Themes
00:35:24
Speaker
I have so many questions for you about it, but you've predicted my first, which is to ask you to say something about the poem's epigraph, which I suppose
00:35:36
Speaker
seems a bit like a teacherly gesture to help guide or orient a reader. Say something about Obscuri for those who don't recognize the reference or who are rusty with their Latin. Help us with that epigraph, Orin. Well, yeah, if it is a teacherly gesture to translate it or to situate it, it's because it's a teacherly gesture to have it there, right? So an epigraph
00:36:06
Speaker
does a certain kind of pedagogical work of telling you you need to know something, if not exactly telling you what it is that you need to know. Ibanthobscuri is a Latin
00:36:22
Speaker
phrase from Virgil, and in particular from the sixth book of the Aeneid, the whole line from which it is drawn. It's a piece of a line, Ibanthobskuri sola subnukte per ombram. They walked in the darkness. That's the Ibanthobskuri part. They walked in the darkness of that night with shadows about them, of that lonely night, sola subnukte.
00:36:52
Speaker
para umbra with shadows around them. So they walked in darkness, I guess, to hive off the piece that leads the poem.
00:37:06
Speaker
And for Virgil, the context here is of the classic kind of epic trip to the underworld, is that right? Exactly, yeah. So book six is the book where Aeneas, accompanied by the sibyl of Cumae, a fate, a woman who is a seer,
00:37:36
Speaker
who has witnessed things that no mortal person could possibly know, accompanies him into the underworld to visit his father, who has died in the aftermath of their flight from Troy. Yes, this is a poem that is prefaced by a line from
00:38:06
Speaker
Virgil from the sixth book of the Aeneid, but it also in a certain sense reenact in important ways the
00:38:16
Speaker
story of book six of the Aeneid. That is, we find the speaker of the poem on a vehicle for Virgil, it was Charon's boat. Here it's a train accompanied by a seer, by a woman who
00:38:40
Speaker
is called a fate later in the poem and who has some knowledge greater than the knowledge that he has. So this is a poem that's very conscious of its tradition, of its belatedness within that tradition, of its situatedness within that tradition. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, and while it occurs to me also as you say so that
00:39:09
Speaker
belatedness and tradition, those ideas are already present for Virgil. Not to make this an episode about Virgil rather than about Grossman, so Virgil is writing a kind of epic that is belated with respect to the story of the Iliad. So if the Iliad tells the story of the Trojan War from a kind of Greek point of view, the Aeneid
00:39:36
Speaker
tells the story of the founding of Rome from the ashes of Troy, the sort of Trojan story.
00:39:42
Speaker
written many years after the Odyssey and the Iliad were conceived of or recorded, if not quite written. And then Virgil, of course, will show up again in the epic tradition as a guide to Dante through his own trip in the underworld. And so Grossman must be thinking of all of that tradition in a way and more besides. Absolutely. And the repetition of this story of the
00:40:12
Speaker
descent into an underworld of the ability to speak to the dead and emerge with wisdom greater than you could have had by ordinary means is very much what the poem is wrestling with. And maybe another way to say that is to say that this is
00:40:34
Speaker
a vocational poem. That is, it tells the story of how a person becomes a poet, or how this person became a poet. Lots of poets write vocational poems because
00:40:46
Speaker
they involve wrestling with some fundamental questions, maybe most centrally, what to make of a life that's given over or dedicated to making this kind of thing. So the word vocation comes from Latin, vocare, to call. And the idea of having a vocation, as opposed to a job or a pastime, is that you are called to it. You're called to service.
00:41:16
Speaker
by some power greater than yourself, and that calling confers on you in obligation. And that's clearest when we use the word, as we sometimes do, to describe being called to the service of God in the priesthood. That's a vocation. Sometimes we talk about teaching as a vocation.
00:41:37
Speaker
In part, we mean that we're not doing it to make a lot of money because we don't. But less cynically, we mean that we're called to represent a commitment to the idea that knowledge is good, or that among the things that we transmit when we transmit knowledge is an account of what is good.
00:41:56
Speaker
Yeah. So is that sense of vocation, of being called or... I mean, as I read the first lines of the poem, this business of... And I suppose I'm skipping over the very first line, which maybe you want to say something about, so please feel free to if you'd like, but this business of out of the infinite unborn, one of the born who lived.
00:42:23
Speaker
and out of the number of all who have lived and died, one of those yet alive. It's as though he's, one gets the sense he's describing these ever narrower sets and somehow wondering at the fact that he has been elected of
00:42:47
Speaker
out of the sort of unlikeliness of his being called upon in this way. Are you getting the sense of vocation present in those first lines? Absolutely, and I think what you're seeing and saying is just how much contingency is involved in the coming to pass of
00:43:14
Speaker
being able to speak. I could have never been born. I could, having been born, have died. Not having died. I could be forced to speak or not speak, but cry out in ways that are not comprehensible because in
00:43:38
Speaker
terrible pain, or I could have to only discourse on the sources of my pain. That's the, I suppose, the language of the person who is enraged by the treachery of women is the person who can only complain about all of the pain that love has caused him. That's a whole genre of poetry that this is not.
00:44:01
Speaker
or a kind of Job-like poetry of lamentation, the poet who is oppressed, subjected by the evil power of J and who can only speak about the sources of their subjection. So not just how unlikely it is to be able to speak, but how unlikely it is to be able to speak about anything other than your particular situation, which is usually understood as a kind of painful one.
00:44:28
Speaker
Yeah, right. Well, on that note, it seems to me that one of us, not in the greatest pain, does do the kind of work that you were just describing, but it also seems to imply that he is, after all, in some pain. Yes. Aren't we all? Well, are we? I don't know. I mean, I wonder what the kind of implied relation is there for you
00:44:55
Speaker
between pain and speech or pain and poetic speech. Can you say more about that, Oren? Well, sure. I think that pain is an imperative to speech.
00:45:23
Speaker
speak in order to communicate our pain or to communicate it en route to the possibility that someone could either help or in any event share in the experience of our pain and make us less isolated within it. And there's a way in which four Grossman
00:45:52
Speaker
singular embodiment that is the fact of being one person in one situation, the situation of your life where you live in the state of X and the land of lakes is a kind of profound solitude because it is without meaning.
00:46:22
Speaker
Meaning is a collective enterprise. So the more fully and singularly located you are, the less something like a possibility of understanding or sympathy is possible. Pain is both an imperative to articulation, but it is also something like the result of
00:46:48
Speaker
radical individuation and it is only the possibility of
00:46:54
Speaker
being with others that could make, might not make pain go away because what on earth could, but it makes pain mean something. There's pain and then there's the pain in which your pain has no greater significance than itself. And that meaning is a way of making pain not go away, but making it signify and therefore making it bearable because felt in the interest of something.
00:47:24
Speaker
suffered in the interest of something. Yeah. Well, that's very moving. You know, as you were setting up the poem and describing ways we have of making sense of poems, and you referred to the conversation that I had with Stephanie Burt about the player piano, the Jarell poem,
00:47:43
Speaker
And it seemed to me that you were trying to distinguish. I mean, you're saying that the poem, you use the phrases, asks you to take on in its reading a kind of experimental attitude, and later you use the phrase theoretical attitude. Under what conditions would a person want to say these things or be able to say these things? But you were distinguishing a kind of
00:48:09
Speaker
dramatistic version of that question from other versions of that question that might be asked. Because I was thinking, as I was reading this poem and preparing for this conversation, the thought occurred to me, and the word dream comes up in the poem. One way to help domesticate the poem or something, tame it, and make it feel manageable would be to think, well, what we're getting is an account of a dream.
00:48:36
Speaker
But it seems to me, I have a feeling you will think that that would be to diminish the poem in some important way or to underestimate the kind of utterance that it is. And maybe, sorry, the reason I bring that up now is because in what you're saying about pain,
00:49:00
Speaker
You know, it seems so vitally important that pain be, these weren't precisely the words you use, but I think I'm getting at the same idea, that pain be witnessed or acknowledged and made meaningful in kind of genuinely social relations. And a dream is not like that, you know.
00:49:27
Speaker
unless you have some truly kind of mystical account of what dream life is, a dream is a kind of solitary endeavor. And in the epic tradition, a trip to the underworld is not that, it was not all a dream, right? So say more, Orin, and feel free to take us anywhere in the poem where you feel this issue comes up, but say more about who the,
00:49:58
Speaker
If this is a poem about vocation and we hear the poet being sort of elected or providing an account of his vocation, who are the other people in the poem?
Poetry's Solitude and Tradition
00:50:10
Speaker
Or what is the status of other persons in this poem? It's a real question because,
00:50:26
Speaker
I take it that's what's driving the question is that there's a real sense in which there are no other persons in this form. There is this woman who is sitting beside him on the train, but it turns out.
00:50:43
Speaker
But it's going to turn out that she is not a person in the ordinary sense. And there's a way in which the speaker is not a person in the ordinary sense. So all of the marks of
00:51:08
Speaker
biography or of historical location are rendered here in highly ironized or X-doubt or symbolized ways. So we know what the middle Western state of X is, the land of lakes, it's Minnesota. We know that that's the state where Alan Grossman, the man, was born.
00:51:38
Speaker
But why not name it but why not name it right? So there's you know, there's there's The possibility. Oh, this is a Ramana clay, right? All you have to do is decode this and then you'll be getting crucial secret facts But that's clearly not the right way to think about this. Yeah, I mean right What does it mean that we only get
00:52:01
Speaker
the actual geographical place under its somewhat romanticized symbolized name, the land of lakes. What does it mean that we only get another person as this fate?
00:52:19
Speaker
that we only get her physical embodiment as the mark of a kind of transpersonal knowledge. She has this heavy body, but the heaviness of her body is the mark of her belonging to another world rather than this one. What do we make of her honey-blondeness? It's one of those
00:52:49
Speaker
moments where you remember that you're dealing with an actual person, both as a writer and that you yourself are trying to figure out what your livable relationship to this story could possibly be. So a dream
00:53:11
Speaker
you can appreciate someone's dream, you can decode someone's dream, but you aren't really asked to take on someone's dream. And what distinguishes this from a dream is that it is offered by being a vocational poem. It's offered as an account of the reality of the world that is meant to apply to you too, even though you're not in it.
00:53:41
Speaker
So that's why I think it's taxing to read because you're being asked to locate yourself or to think about the implications of the world that is intended by this poem for you, for your life, for your historical personhood.
00:54:04
Speaker
You know, Grossman is really clear about why the call to poetry is terrifying. And the reason for that is that you can't make your own meanings. You can't make the meaning of your own life. Meaningfulness.
00:54:21
Speaker
or maybe especially the meaningfulness of your individual experience is only available when you see it unfolding within some story or system of meanings that's larger than yourself and that you didn't make. And it's on behalf or in the service of that system of meanings, that way of meaning making that the poet speaks, whether he wishes to or not. So as much as we want
00:54:48
Speaker
poetry to push back at the boundaries of the known or the knowable. And so many of the poems I think that you have been talking about over many of the beautiful weeks of your podcast. I do want to push back against those boundaries. There's a part of even the most radically experimental poetry that is conservative, that offers a brief for an account of the world, some account of the world that it did not author.
00:55:14
Speaker
So it's in order to make individual experience comprehensible to another person or even to yourself, you have to re-see it or re-make it as experience within some system of meaningful actions or events. That's why this is a reenactment of a certain kind of epic journey. I see. So one of the ways in which this poem is enacting
00:55:41
Speaker
what you've just been describing is by allowing us to recognize it as participating in the kind of literary tradition that we alluded to when talking about the epigraph to the poem and Virgil's place and so forth. Can you help us see other places in the poem, Orin, where that
00:56:06
Speaker
that what you just described a moment ago is what is terrifying about being called upon in this way is like in the sense that meaning resides or depends upon, you know, a systems that exceed the personal. Yeah. Where do you get that idea here specifically?
00:56:34
Speaker
So I think I can point to some of the terrible
00:56:40
Speaker
will come if I'm persuasive enough about it. So one of the things that might not be totally obvious about the poem just from looking at it or even from hearing it is that the form of the poem is in hexameters or something as close to hexameters as you can get while writing in non-grotesque English. Right. So tell our audience more about what hexameters are and what their place in the history of poetry is.
00:57:08
Speaker
Absolutely. The hexameter is a six-foot line where a foot is a sequence of
00:57:16
Speaker
stressed relatively long and relatively short syllables. So the lines of this poem, if you count them, hover for the most part around somewhere between 14 and 17 syllables. And that's because they're divided into six feet, each of which has two or three syllables. But one stressed syllable. Right, in each foot. One accented syllable in each foot. Right. So the hexameter is the meter of Greek and
00:57:43
Speaker
Latin epic of Homer in the Iliad and in the Odyssey and a Virgil in the Aeneid. Epic hexameters were made up of
00:57:52
Speaker
dactyls, which were long syllables followed by two short syllables, like infinite or obdurate to choose two remarkable words from this poem. Or if a foot wasn't a dactyl in an epic poem, it was a spondy, two long syllables next to each other, like blown down or strange eyes.
00:58:14
Speaker
So you could write verse of great fluency and variety in Greek and Latinx amateurs because those languages, or at least the literary versions of those languages, encouraged thinking about syllables about verse in quantitative terms. So each syllable took a certain amount of time.
00:58:32
Speaker
A short syllable was half as long as a long one. So a dactyl, like a long and then two shorts and a spondy, two longs and a row, just counted the same quantity. They just divided it up slightly differently. Two longs and one long and two shorts were the same quantity of time. English doesn't really work that way. We tend to think about language not in terms of quantity, long and short, but in terms of quality, stressed and unstressed.
00:58:59
Speaker
more than that, right? Even when we're writing verse, we tend to think about stressed and unstressed in English, not as fixed qualities imposed by a pattern or imposed by our metrical scheme, but as relative qualities, determined in part by the rules of pronunciation, in part by the word's position in the line, but maybe ultimately, and this is kind of where I was trying to get to, maybe ultimately by the particulars of what you want to say.
00:59:28
Speaker
Yeah, by the sort of demands and conventions of speech, of idiomatic speech. Exactly. So if you say unborn, for example, you might stress the born part if you were contrasting it to some other state. Undying because unborn. Undying because unborn. But here, where you're contrasting being born to its opposite,
00:59:54
Speaker
Right, being unborn. Out of the infinite unborn, one of the born who lived, you've got the opposite way of stressing it. So why does any of this matter? Well, it matters because this is a poem that is on the one hand, it matters because it's a poem that's thinking with or wrestling with the Indian in a particular moment in the Indian, right? But it also matters because this is a poem about
01:00:22
Speaker
how it is that you could possibly articulate the significance of your own life, of your own experience, without subordinating it to some order, some system, some frame of value and of meaningfulness and hence value that you did not author. In order to be recognizable, in order to be audible,
01:00:49
Speaker
in order to speak at all, we submit ourselves to rules that we did not make. They might be rules of meter. They might be rules of grammar. They are rules of civilization. To appear in the world, to appear in history in a meaningful way means to rearticulate yourself, the things that you feel might matter most about you, in languages that other people can recognize.
01:01:19
Speaker
That's both the way in which we can come to care about our own experience and which others can come to care about our experiences. And so it is a profoundly humanizing thing to do, right? To give voice to your pain, to give voice to your experience. But it is also, and this is the terrifying part, a kind of death because you have to remake yourself
01:01:47
Speaker
terms that you didn't author. In order to count, you have to rewrite yourself as belonging to the order of things that count.
01:02:00
Speaker
So I'm going to state a position naively, because I think I know what you'll say, but I think I think it'll be important for our audience to hear it. Yeah. There's nothing that compels me to write a poem in hexameters, right? Correct. I hope not. Yeah, right. I mean, I've never done it. Right. So maybe it's maybe it's just worth pointing out that it's it seems to have become conventional in English for reasons that are maybe too not relevant enough to get into here.
01:02:31
Speaker
for poets who want to write epic in English to do so in pentameter rather than hexameter. It's become the sort of English approximation of hexameter. Yes, when Seamus Heaney translates book six of the of the Indian, which he did, it was the last thing he published. It was actually published posthumously. It's in it's in pentameters.
01:02:51
Speaker
Sure. Or I mean, when John Milton writes, anyway, okay. So yes. So sorry, the naive point, which which I think you'll have something useful to tell me about is, is, you know, I might object to what you've said about the kind of compulsion that I'm under to conform to a system not of my making if I want to be legible.
01:03:18
Speaker
by saying, well, I don't have to speak in the kind of formal tradition that you're describing here, Grossman is following. So in what sense is my ability to express my pain, if that's what I want to do, or to ask for recognition in one way or another?
01:03:44
Speaker
contingent upon my submission to some system not of my making. Yeah. Um, I think the, maybe the important word that I want to pick out of what you just said is some system, right? Right. It does not, in other words, have to be, um, examiners, but it's got to be something legibility, um, to another is
01:04:14
Speaker
only legibility if it is embraced or recognizable by another. Here's an example. I think you had pointed to the first line, or at least you had suggested that I might point to the first line of this poem.
01:04:35
Speaker
which is also a quotation, or maybe even more directly, this is the line in the poem that is actually literally a quotation. The chroniclers ceased, they ceased until I arose. But it's not a quotation from Virgil. It's a quotation from a 16th century Jewish historiographer named Josepha Cohen, who wrote a book
01:05:01
Speaker
that was meant to be a sort of history of the world written in Hebrew. This is the preface to the book in which he announces himself as the inheritor of the task of chronicling from the biblical chronicles. There have been no chronicles until now. I'm picking up the thread.
01:05:24
Speaker
And that story, the story that he told began with the fall of Rome. That is to say, it began with the story that is, with the end of the story that is begun in the Book Six of the Indian, which forecasts the founding of Rome. Right, from the fall of Troy. From the fall of Troy, right. So what's the point? The point is that maybe there's a Jewish tradition of valuing that isn't
01:05:50
Speaker
stuck inside this endless fall and rebuilding and fall again, a way of articulating value that is not so wrapped up in violence.
01:06:05
Speaker
this poem wants to imagine, right, wants to propose that, right, we have, you know, you've pointed us to the sequence in which we move from Homer to Virgil to Dante, right, to the movie inside the Christian story, we move inside the Christian story, and it tells the same story over and over again. Is there another story? Is there another chronicle?
01:06:32
Speaker
the poem sort of wants to find or wants to imagine or begins by wishing for an alternate language in which to lodge my being, my value. I'm not a part of this Christian story. I'm a Jew in history. So these faces outside the train, these faces that look like leaves,
01:07:01
Speaker
suddenly one realizes, right, start to look like the kinds of faces that one sees through the windows of the trains that are on their way to the death camps. Right, so the languages of value, the ways of articulating personhood,
01:07:21
Speaker
that the West has produced, have produced for this kind of person, nothing but suffering, nothing but pain, nothing but exclusion, nothing but extinction. Is there another way? Yeah, go on, please. But it is this poem's view, and it was, I think, Alan Grossman's view that there was no other way, that
01:07:45
Speaker
This quotation, the chroniclers ceased, they ceased until I arose that that longs for another language of value, another way of articulating identity, another way of placing a value on experience that might not result in violence is itself a quotation from judges in which the
01:08:09
Speaker
Prophet Deborah right helped to lead the Israelites in battle against the Canaanites in founding Israel as a kind of militant nation and she says the inhabitants of the villages ceased they ceased in Israel until I Deborah arose I arose a mother in Israel right so that story is also a story of
01:08:35
Speaker
inter-civilizational violence. It's the story of the founding of a kind of person through a primordial act of violence in which a certain language of value is possible, the recognition of one fellow to another in which a certain articulation of the value of the world is possible. This is what holiness is. This is what the story of life is. This is the direction a life ought to take. This is what is good.
01:09:03
Speaker
But those acts of value making are always mounted on foundational exclusions. There is no other way to make value, to make meaning that does not produce for itself a limit, that does not produce for itself an outside.
01:09:23
Speaker
And it is the vocation of the poet to speak on behalf of some order of value, ideally incrementally better, to push back against the ones that are unsatisfactory and that produce pain and that produce violence and that produce damage. But in fact, there's no other way to do it.
01:09:46
Speaker
that pain and that violence and that damage can be deferred, or they can be relocated, or they can be hopefully pushed ever outward, but never dispensed with because of the demands of closure. Because the imagination stops somewhere.
01:10:07
Speaker
the point at which you encounter something that you don't know how to value or that you cannot recognize as a person or that you cannot hear as a voice or that you cannot love. So is that what's happening or in the encounter that seems to be at the center of this poem between
01:10:30
Speaker
the speaker, and I'll use that term advisedly since maybe we're not to think of this really in dramatic terms, but nevertheless, the poet. And this honey blonde woman who at first seems to be just an ordinary woman and then quickly, you know, but a little strange and then seems soon enough to be anything but ordinary.
01:10:53
Speaker
And at the center of the, I mean, it's not maybe, it's past the midpoint of the poem, but in a sense of the poem structure, it seems to me in some ways to be the center of the poem. It's what gives the poem its title. She took hold of me and we entered the dark end of the car. And then she kissed me with life and death kisses.
01:11:19
Speaker
amid a great rush of air mingled with odors of metal and the slamming doors, and out of her mouth a stone passed into my open mouth." Can you help us make sense of that? Maybe making sense is a little too much to ask, but can you help us think about or take in those lines in the context of the
01:11:47
Speaker
the recognition that you were just explaining a moment ago as Grossman's kind of concession to what one has to do in order to be meaningful. Anyway, I want to know what is going on in the encounter between the poet and this woman. What are the life and death kisses? What kind of
01:12:13
Speaker
interpersonal encounter, are those kisses performing or enacting? And what of the stone that passes from one mouth into the other? So, right, that's a lot. Yeah. It is.
Symbols and Meaning in the Poem
01:12:38
Speaker
So remember, right, that it turns out that this woman is blind. And blindness in poetic terms, Homer was also blind. Blindness is the mark of someone who can see more than an empirical person can see, can know more than a historical person can know.
01:13:06
Speaker
And that entails or involves a certain kind of...
01:13:14
Speaker
death because it involves an indifference to one's own life. An indifference to one's own perspective in being able to move beyond it. Being able to situate your life, your experience in some larger story means that you can't care about your own life and experience in the same way as the person who is bound to it, who owns it, who's restricted to it.
01:13:43
Speaker
you become instead the person whose job it is to speak the big picture. That's both a form of eloquence and a form of muteness, right? This stone that's in your mouth is both the basis of your articulation, the thing that's empowering,
01:14:07
Speaker
But there's also a way in which, literally, if you had a stone in your mouth, you wouldn't be able to speak at all. You wouldn't be able to say what you thought. All you'd be able to do is to offer the stone, that kind of bedrock of what is. Why it's an erotic encounter.
01:14:29
Speaker
Well, you think about Rilke, I guess. Every angel is terrifying. And if one of them, he says, were to press me against its heart, I would be consumed in that overwhelming existence. I would be consumed in that overwhelming being. There's a way in which in order to
01:14:51
Speaker
really enter the vocation of the poet, again, is to cease to be, at least in the history of poetic utterance, is to cease to be a historical person. It's to become a trans-historical person. It's to become a speaker who can say more than you know.
01:15:07
Speaker
Yeah, you often need help to do that, right? That's why you invoke the muses. But, but here, the muse or something like a muse, or a symbol or a wisdom figure is passing on that empowerment to you. Right. And so that you can do it without the invocation. So you can do it without help so that you can do it on your own, but in order but to do that is to
01:15:37
Speaker
lie down and die, right? And then rise up again as a different kind of speaker, as a speaker who can say
01:15:46
Speaker
not what Sylvia Plath wants to say, not what Robert Lowe wants to say about, you know, this is what it is to be me. This is what it is to be a person like me. This is what is to have my historical being and my gender and my located class and my particular genealogy and my mother and father and to suffer in the particular way that only I suffer, but to be
01:16:16
Speaker
someone who is marked by the systems of value that make all of those things count.
01:16:27
Speaker
Well, so that maybe the self that gets made in the poem is no longer the one that made the poem, and its existence somehow depends upon the extinction of the one who did the making. The poet that I'm thinking about as you describe this is one that we've not named yet, but is Eliot.
01:16:51
Speaker
um where who doesn't invoke the muse but who does seem to you know goes on and on and now we've we have newly uncovered evidence that suggests that maybe he's being somewhat disingenuous about the as which is of course we always knew he was but at some level but but um that the poet um that what poetry is is that what poetry requires is the extinction of
01:17:16
Speaker
the personality of the poet. And I don't know what Grossman would have thought of Eliot or of that strand of modernism in particular, it's not the one that you've named in Naming Gates, but nevertheless, it's what comes to mind for me, what replaces the muse
01:17:35
Speaker
is a kind of sense—this does seem in the spirit of the poem—a kind of sense of literary and cultural tradition that sponsors speech. So for Eliot,
01:17:50
Speaker
That was what one ought to do, right? One ought to extinguish oneself so you are not supposed to aspire to originality. You're supposed to aspire to devoutness, right? And a poet that, and what you should aspire to be what he called, to write what he called a minor poetry. Minor poetry is minor because it is subordinate to doctrine.
01:18:18
Speaker
because it unabashedly and unconflictedly articulates, ultimately, Anglican theology. Grossman is here doing something like describing the logic that
01:18:41
Speaker
that someone like Eliot is in the grips of, he saw meaningful utterance, valuable utterance as being utterance that is completely circumscribed by, bound to, a particular way of understanding what good is, what the human story ought to look like, how it's going to end in the end, what we're all on our way to,
01:19:06
Speaker
For Grossman, that is just one instance of a recurrent story, the same story that is produced by, say, Virgil in celebrating the founding of Rome. The same story, it turns out,
01:19:24
Speaker
much against his will that was produced by the Jewish prophets in the establishment of Israel. Is there another story? Is there a way of producing a meaningful orientation to a life that doesn't reproduce forms of exclusion of other kinds of lives, that that particular set of values doesn't know how to value
01:19:56
Speaker
and the violence that then follows from those exclusions. The answer that Grossman came to was no, there is no other way. So if the answer is no, then
01:20:16
Speaker
I guess what I want to know and what I wonder how, as this poem moves towards its conclusion, how Grossman
01:20:31
Speaker
lives in the recognition of that answer as being no, right? He's taken this gift, if that's the right word for it, as though without any choice out of her mouth a stone passed into my open mouth. This is the stone of witness, she said, that stops every heart.
01:20:59
Speaker
and he moves on, the eye moves on here from that point. So talk to us about what seems to you to be distinctive, Oren, about the way, we've talked so much about Grossman as teacher, but the way Grossman's eye here receives this lesson somewhere.
01:21:23
Speaker
You know, a few minutes ago, you asked about the, we were talking about the voice, we were talking about the meter in this poem. And we were talking also about the indices of
01:21:46
Speaker
historical life. Again, the ways in which biographical facts are things that did happen or that seem like they could be the kinds of things that might happen to you or me or the kinds of places that you and I have been in Middle Western states on the Western unbuilt
01:22:03
Speaker
limb of the central city, we've seen the factories and the I've been to Minnesota and the nursing homes, right? Right. So what is the status of of, of those facts, the facts to which our lives adhere, and that give us the texture of our own being. And all of that's in here. Right? It's in here in
01:22:31
Speaker
strangely marked ways. It's in here in a way, in transformed ways. Help us see it. Help us see it as the poem ends. Well, so, you know, as I, you know, the things that I'm pointing to here, right, the Middle Western state of X.
01:22:48
Speaker
We can know what the X is, but it has to be X-ed. We can know what the land of lakes is, but it has to be symbolized and turned into a kind of value-bearing term, but a funny one. That's a joke on some level. And so is the fact that
01:23:14
Speaker
You know, you sit, you find your body on this obdurate, bright bench of varnished rattan. There are moments in this poem that are obdurate, that are hard to transform into elevated forms of value whose interest, whose power, whose appeal seems to be in their empirical
01:23:44
Speaker
factuality, the fact that when you are sitting on a train and it's on a curve, you can feel your body lean as it travels through space. So there are ways in which this poem speaks
01:24:00
Speaker
of the life that you and I lead, that is on the scale that you and I lead it, speaks about them in the aftermath of not really knowing how to value those things, looks back as if from a height on the life that we once all led, the individual life that we once all led.
01:24:22
Speaker
through which language it's still discernible. So this is what I want to call or want to understand in the language of the poem.
01:24:35
Speaker
as speaking with a divided throat, as speaking on the one hand with a human throat, the kind of throat that you and I are using right now to talk about our own life, to talk about the fact that I knew this person and loved this person and had a relationship with this person in my own life, and to talk about the fact that I found it ennobling and transformative and that it has changed my orientation to what a life is to know him.
01:25:03
Speaker
Yeah. And that those two things are of different orders, but that somehow I speak both of them at the same time. Yes. And that's what this Yeah, sorry, go ahead.
01:25:14
Speaker
Well, sorry, no. I mean, I really want to hear what you were about to say, but I think you'll still have a chance to say it if I ask you to read the final lines of the poem for us again one time, or begin wherever you like. You refer to that divided throat. That's the image the poem ends on, and I want to
01:25:36
Speaker
I'm so moved, yeah, by the sense of, right, there's the man you knew, and there's the poet or something that is implied by, that seems to have created the text we've been thinking about for the last hour or so, and somehow they're the same person, and yet they seem not to be.
01:26:01
Speaker
I suppose that might be one thing that is gestured towards with the idea of the divided throat. But I want for you to read those lines again, since it's been so long since we've heard the poem, just so that those lines are fresh. And then to say what it is you'd like to say about the idea of the divided throat at the end. So I'll read just a chunk of this last stanza, our verse paragraph. In the sunlight, a spring snow was rising and falling on the plain.
01:26:30
Speaker
and the rails where the train had been were brimming with silver. I would have lingered in the light for the interest of the empty scene, but I was wearied out by the silence of life and death and the kisses of the fate. And I lay down among the leaves like a young soul bewildered beneath a sun that was as a stare of the finest eye.
01:26:59
Speaker
And then the life stopped in me, and the witness stone divided my throat.
01:27:11
Speaker
image of the rails where the train had been brimming with silver. For me, cuts in both of those directions. That silver is real. We've seen it. The way in which depending on where you stand, some metal train rail might produce for you a sensation that seems like it was intended only for you because it depends entirely on
01:27:41
Speaker
your life having brought you to that moment, to standing in that particular place in relation to the sun. That's an effect of your life. That's an effect of the light. Yeah. And I want to just say very quickly too, like the thought of the train that must move along the rails, right? And the vision one has of the rails, it sounds to me not unlike the way we've been describing, say, hexameter or something else, right? For sure. This kind of scheme that must be followed in order for
01:28:08
Speaker
You know travel to do its job, but okay, right so go so it means that on the one hand silver is that thing that we recognize that that effect that we recognize right so it's an effect that is as it were intended for you and only for you because you came to you at that moment based entirely on where you stood and where you've been right and silver is
01:28:34
Speaker
a common currency that is valuable, or if it is valuable, not experientially, not because of what it means in my life, but because we all accept it, because it is imprinted by the language of value that we did not make. So we don't get to determine the value of our silver.
01:28:57
Speaker
Right. It's formalized in our political arrangements. Exactly. And that those political arrangements are on the one hand the basis upon which you and I can recognize and credit one another. And on the other hand, they are the source of tremendous acts of exclusion and violence, both at the same time, life and death kisses. One and the same.
01:29:23
Speaker
and that this poem speaks both things at once.
Art and Sacrifice in Poetry
01:29:28
Speaker
It speaks both of a person from the perspective of a person who is real, but who has in a certain sense recognized the demand to sacrifice his reality in the interest of his significance or in the interest of the ability to articulate significance for others.
01:29:49
Speaker
But is that sacrifice total, or does the fact that the throat is divided suggest that something is left over? I don't know. Yes. Well, it's why there's more than one poem.
01:30:07
Speaker
It's why on some level, Grossman was not a writer of an epic which aspires to be the total poem once and for all to tell you what is valuable and in the interest of what it speaks. But to have to feel empowered to, to feel it is necessary to redo, to rearticulate,
01:30:34
Speaker
one's life over and over again because there is something that is unaccounted for, because there is something residual, because there's something that remains, because there's something about your own experience that is not exhausted by the stories that we have for crediting experience. That's beautifully said. To have a poem tell us in its final line, and then the life stopped in me,
01:31:03
Speaker
I mean, something strange must be being said there because of, you know, well, where is this voice coming from if the life has stopped in it? But I think you've given us just now an account of how that might be. The very last words of the poem and the witness stone divided my throat, perhaps point a way out.
01:31:23
Speaker
I like what you said a moment ago about how, well, you don't just write one poem. And of course, it also seems to me, moving all the way back to the beginning of our conversation, you don't just write poems, but you, you know,
01:31:37
Speaker
eat hamburgers with your students and pour tremendous amounts of salt on those hamburgers. There seems to be a life outside of the poems, even as the poems themselves are making these claims that seem to come from this.
01:31:56
Speaker
I don't know, terror inducing, totalizing kind of view. And he is a figure for me of someone who, again, is both
01:32:10
Speaker
real, a part of my life and someone who is larger than life. And part of the story of what makes my life significant, what makes it meaningful. And how to reconcile those two things, how to reconcile the way in which the person who gave you orientations to the meaningful was also
01:32:37
Speaker
a person like you is hard and necessary and compelling. And I think it is part of what drove me to try to present this poem to other people, to think about that experience.
01:32:57
Speaker
Well, I was going to say not to not to be too self congratulatory about it or anything, but, you know, I like to think that what you've done is to make some of that. Available as an experience to other people in in talking about the poem and in and in sharing your own brilliant thoughts about it with us or an Eisenberg. Thank you so much for coming on the podcast. Thank you for sharing the poem and for sharing
01:33:27
Speaker
Two ways of thinking about the person who wrote it with us. I really do appreciate it and I'm going to be carrying it with me once this conversation is through. So thank you again for coming on. Thank you. And thank you listeners. Please do follow the podcast.
01:33:54
Speaker
We'll have more episodes for you soon. And it's been a real pleasure to get to have these conversations. I hope that pleasure is there for you as well. Take care, everyone.