"To me, the greatest pleasure of writing is not what it’s about, but the inner music that words make."—Truman Capote
I've recently discovered a poet-critic whom I admire deeply: Ellen Bryant Voight. Last summer I heard her discuss--analyze, dissect--Robert Frost's "Birches" at the Brattleboro Literary Festival in Vermont.
When I listen to her, I feel I'm listening to a linguist. She is a scientist of rhythm, meter, alliteration. She makes me understand why I enjoy Frost as much as I do.
Happily, a writer friend of mine gave me a copy of "The Flexible Lyric" by Voight (University of Georgia Press, 1999, 226 pp., $19.95, paper.)
In her own words: "All but two of the pieces [in this collection] began as lectures [for] serious students of the craft of poetry. . . It is my presumption . . . that lyric is what most of us are writing these days when we write in lines . . . and it is my intention to counter our own genre-resistance . . . by refuting . . . some of the current restricted notions of what the lyric has been and can be."
In case this smacks of the "dry and dusty", I encourage you to read "In the Waiting Room," the first essay in the book:
"In Oxford, Mississippi, having cruised Main Street, going (as Benjy did not) the correct legal way around the square and its Confederate soldier, you make your way to William Faulkner's house, 'Rowanoak.' " And so it begins . . .
During her travels in Faulkner country, early on in the essay, Voight brings up the dictum expounded by William Butler Yeats: "that one cannot perfect both the life and the art--and how we take cover in it as unavoidable choice, an ethical loophole, the hazard in the vocation."
The counter-proposal Voight makes is that when, where and how you live your life has a great influence upon what you write--life and art go forth inextricably hand in hand.
Voight then, literally and figuratively, continues on her southern sojourn to "Andalusia," Flannery O'Connor's home in Milledgeville, Georgia, where O'Connor lived out her short adult life. Voight writes about incidents in O'Connor's life here and the bearing they had on the stories she wrote--particularly the story "Revelation" which, incidentally, takes place in a doctor's waiting room.
"O'Connor insisted on two crucial elements in fiction, mystery and manners, terms she borrowed from Henry James: 'the mystery of our position on earth, and . . . those conventions which, in the hands of the artist, reveal that central mystery . . . embodied in the concrete world of sense experience. . . . You get the manners from the texture of existence that surrounds you.' "
O'Connor continues: "The things we see, hear, smell and touch affect us long before we believe anything at all. . . . [O]ur senses have responded irrevocably to a certain reality. . . . What the . . . writer is apt to find, when he descends within his imagination, is the life . . . in which he is both native and alien. He discovers that the imagination is not free, but bound" (Mystery and Manners).
"Art," O'Connor said, "requires a delicate adjustment of the outer and inner worlds in such a way that, without changing their nature, they can be seen through each other. To know oneself is to know . . . the world, and it is also, paradoxically, a form of exile from that world. . . . And to know oneself is, above all, to know what one lacks. It is to measure oneself against Truth, and the other way around. The first product of self-knowledge is humility" (Mystery and Manners).
From the description of her travels in Georgia, Voight elides smoothly into the occasion of her attendance at "a convention of writers in Washington, D.C., at a glittery hotel, hard by an embassy seized that weekend by Mideast terrorists" where she listens to Elizabeth Bishop reading “as if from a newspaper” her poem "In the Waiting Room" which Voight describes as "a memorable poem about self and other, life and art . . . which sent me back to reread O'Connor as a grown-up."
She concludes the essay on O'Connor and Bishop: "Two 'home-made' heroes, then, with a lesson it took me years to recognize, a lesson I'm still trying to learn: that the 'life' is inextricable from the work; for a writer, they are the same thing."
The above photo is of Flannery O'Connor.
No comments:
Post a Comment