The Game Changed Lawrence Joseph The Game Changed essays and other prose THE UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN PRESS Ann Arbor Copyright © 2011 by Lawrence Joseph All rights reserved This book may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, including illustrations, in any form (beyond that copying permitted by Sections 107 and 108 of the U.S. Copyright Law and except by reviewers for the public press), without written permission from the publisher. Published in the United States of America by The University of Michigan Press Manufactured in the United States of America ϱ Printed on acid-free paper 2014 2013 2012 2011 4 3 2 1 A CIP catalog record for this book is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Joseph, Lawrence, 1948– The game changed : essays and other prose / Lawrence Joseph. p. cm. — (Poets on poetry series) ISBN 978-0-472-07161-6 (cloth : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-0-472- 05161-8 (pbk. : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-0-472-02774-3 (ebk.) 1. Joseph, Lawrence, 1948– Knowledge—Poetry. 2. Poetry. I. Title. PS3560.O775G36 2011 814'.54—dc22 2011014828 For Laurence Goldstein Acknowledgments “The Poet and the Lawyer: The Example of Wallace Stevens” was presented as a talk at the Eleventh Annual Wallace Stevens Birthday Bash, sponsored by The Hartford Friends of Wallace Stevens, at the Hartford Public Library, on October 7, 2006. “Michael Schmidt’s Lives of the Poets” originally appeared in The Nation, December 13, 1999, under the title “New Poetics (Sans Aristotle).” “A Note on ‘That’s All’” originally appeared, in slightly different form, in Ecstatic Occasions, Expedient Forms, edited by David Lehman (Macmillan, 1987). “Tony Harrison and Michael Hofmann” originally appeared, in slightly different form, in The Village Voice, March 20, 1990, under the title “Men of Irony.” “Frederick Seidel” originally appeared, in slightly different form, in The Nation, September 24, 1990, under the title “War of the Worlds.” Parts of “Enzensberger’s Kiosk” appeared, in different form, in Jacket #4, and in the “Preface” to Kiosk (The Sheep Meadow Press, 1998). “‘Our Lives Are Here’: Notes from a Journal, Detroit, 1975” origi- nally appeared, in slightly different form, in Michigan Quarterly Re- view (Spring 1986). “John Ashbery and Adrienne Rich” originally appeared, in slightly different form, in The Nation, April 20, 1992, under the title “The Real Thing.” “James Schuyler’s The Morning of the Poem” originally appeared, in slightly different form, in Poetry East (Fall 1992). “Word Made Flesh” originally appeared, in different form, in Com- munities: Contemporary Writers Reveal the Bible in Their Lives, edited by David Rosenberg (Archer Books, 1996), under the title “Jeremiah and Corinthians.” The first two parts of “A Few Reflections on Poetry and Language” originally appeared, in different form, in “Theories of Poetry, The- ories of Law,” Vanderbilt Law Review (Volume 46, 1993). “Hayden Carruth” originally appeared, in slightly different form, in The Kenyon Review (Winter 1994), under the title “Journeys to Love.” “Marilyn Hacker” originally appeared, in slightly different form, in Voice Literary Supplement, February 1995, under the title “A Formal Life: Marilyn Hacker’s Deep Structure.” “Aspects of Weldon Kees” originally appeared in Verse (Summer 1997), under the title “Aspects of Kees.” “Smokey Robinson’s High Tenor Voice” originally appeared in Michigan Quarterly Review (Fall 2000). “Joyce Carol Oates’s Blonde” originally appeared in The Nation, May 8, 2000, under the title “Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?” “Marie Ponsot” originally appeared, in slightly different form, in Commonweal, December 18, 2009, under the title “Between Silence & Sound.” “Conversation with Charles Bernstein” is transcribed, in slightly dif- ferent form, from A New Close Listening and Reading and Conversation with Lawrence Joseph, PENNSOUND, July 7, 2008, http://www.writing .upenn.edu/pennsound/daily/200807.php. “Working Rules for Lawyerland” originally appeared in Columbia Law Review (Volume 101, 2001). “Being in the Language of Poetry, Being in the Language of Law” was presented as the Colin Ruagh Thomas O’Fallon Memorial Lec- ture, University of Oregon Humanities Center, April 16, 2009, and published, in different form, in Oregon Law Review (Volume 88, 2010). The selections in the “Poets on Poets and Poetry” sections are also included in “Notions of Poetry and Narration,” Cincinnati Law Re- view (Volume 77, 2009). My thanks to Andrew Simons, William Manz, and, especially, Mari- lyn Hacker and Peter Oresick. viii Contents Poets on Poets and Poetry The Poet and the Lawyer: The Example of Wallace Stevens 3 Michael Schmidt’s Lives of the Poets 10 A Note on “That’s All” 18 Tony Harrison and Michael Hofmann 21 Frederick Seidel 26 Enzensberger’s Kiosk 33 “Our Lives Are Here”: Notes from a Journal, Detroit, 1975 42 John Ashbery and Adrienne Rich 50 Poets on Poets and Poetry James Schuyler’s The Morning of the Poem 59 Word Made Flesh 68 A Few Reflections on Poetry and Language 78 Hayden Carruth 89 Marilyn Hacker 95 Aspects of Weldon Kees 99 Smokey Robinson’s High Tenor Voice 104 Joyce Carol Oates’s Blonde 106 Poets on Poets and Poetry Marie Ponsot 115 Conversation with Charles Bernstein 120 Working Rules for Lawyerland 129 The Game Changed 133 Being in the Language of Poetry, Being in the Language of Law 140 x Poets on Poets and Poetry Adrienne Rich, in Poetry & Commitment: An Essay: “Poetries are no more pure and simple than human histories are pure and simple.” Thomas Merton, in his 1967 essay “Day of a Stranger”: “There is a mental ecology, too, in living balance of spirits in this corner of the woods. There is room here for many songs. Vallejo for in- stance. Or Rilke, or René Char, Montale, Zukofsky, Ungaretti, Edwin Muir, Quasimodo or some Greeks. Or the dry, discon- certing voice of Nicanor Parra. Here is the reassuring compan- ionship of many silent Tzu’s and Fu’s; King Tzu, Lao Tzu, Meng Tzu, Tu Fu. And Nui Neng. And Chao-Chu. And the drawings of Sengai. And a big graceful scroll from Suzuki. Here also is a Syr- ian hermit called Philoxenus. And an Algerian cenobite called Camus. Here is heard the clanging prose of Tertullian. Here the voluble dissonances of Auden, with the golden sounds of John of Salisbury. Here is the deep vegetation of that more an- cient forest in which the angry Isaias and Jeremias sing. Here are voices from Angela of Foligno to Flannery O’Connor, Theresa of Avila, Juliana of Norwich. It is good to choose the voices that will be heard in these woods, but they also choose themselves, and send themselves to be present in this silence. In any case there is no lack of voices.” The Poet and the Lawyer The Example of Wallace Stevens I “The slight tobaccoy odor of autumn”—Wallace Stevens begins his introduction to Williams Carlos Williams’s 1934 Collected Poems—“is perceptible in these pages. Williams is past fifty.” Autumn this evening is perceptible in Hartford. Wallace Stevens was born 127 years ago this past Monday . I knew I would write poetry forty years ago, during the au- tumn of 1966, my first semester as an undergraduate at the Uni- versity of Michigan. I had elected an upper level “Introduction to Poetry” course and the class was assigned “The Emperor of Ice Cream” by Wallace Stevens. I was also taking an upper level course in Latin, which concentrated on Book VIII of Virgil’s Aeneid. In the evenings, in the University’s Main Library, I would work through Virgil, and then through the poems assigned in “Introduction to Poetry.” I usually had some sense of a poem’s meanings—poems by Milton and Donne, Spenser and Eliot, Coleridge and Dickinson, Pound, Frost, Moore, Hopkins. But “The Emperor of Ice Cream”—I had no idea what it was about, which both frustrated and intrigued me. After the professor took us through it, explaining its multiple meanings as best he could, I felt that this was the highest form of expression, and that I wanted to emulate it. I wanted to create this kind of art—to cre- ate poems that would have the same effect on a reader that Wal- lace Stevens’s poem had on me. Professor Coles would provide literary and biographical in- formation about each poet. He told the class that for most of his life Stevens had been a bond lawyer with the Hartford Accident 3 and Indemnity Company in Hartford. I distinctly remember him saying this. I was raised to be a lawyer. My grandparents were Lebanese and Syrian Catholics who emigrated to Detroit before World War I. My mother and father were born in Detroit after the war ended. My grandparents on both sides were grocers. Each spoke and read and wrote Arabic—they also learned to speak English quickly and proficiently—but could neither read nor write English. My parents, my aunts and my uncles, all born in Detroit, were educated in Catholic grade and high schools. My father and his brother inherited their father’s grocery store, which became a grocery party-liquor store. It was located in De- troit’s most violent neighborhood during the nineteen-fifties and sixties. The only member of the family of my parents’ generation who did not enter into that declining business of city-family- owned grocery stores was my mother’s younger and only brother, who, after being in a Catholic seminary for his college years (the first of his generation to have gone to college), left the seminary and attended law school at the University of Detroit. Our uncle was held up to me and my older brother by both my father and mother as an example.