Hayden Carruth 1921-2008

The Impossible Indispensibility of the Ars Poetica
by Hayden Carruth

But of course the poem is not an assertion. Do you see? When I wrote

That all my poems over the long years before I met you made you come true,

And that the poems for you since then have made you in yourself become more true,

I did not mean that the poems created or invented you. How many have foundered

In that sargasso! No, what I have been trying to say

Is that neither of the quaint immemorial views of poetry is adequate for us.

A poem is not an expression, nor is it an object. Yet it somewhat partakes of both. What a poem is

Is never to be known, for which I have learned to be grateful. But the aspect in which I see my own

Is as the act of love. The poem is a gift, a bestowal.

The poem is for us what instinct is for animals, a continuing and chiefly unthought corroboration of essence

(Thought thought, ours and the animals’, is still useful).

Why otherwise is the earliest always the most important, the formative? The Iliad, the Odyssey, the book of Genesis,

These were acts of Love, I mean deeply felt gestures, which continuously bestow upon us

What we are. And if I do not know which poem of mine

Was my earliest gift to you,

Except that it had to have been written about someone else,

Nevertheless it was the gesture accruing value to you, your essence, while you were still a child, and thereafter

Across all these years. And see how much

Has come from that first sonnet after our loving began, the one

That was a kiss, a gift, a bestowal. This is the paradigm of fecundity. I think the poem is not

Transparent, as some have said, nor a looking glass, as some have also said,

Yet it has a quality of disappearance

In its cage of visibility. It disperses among the words. It is a fluidity, a vapor, of love.

This, the instinctual, is what caused me to write, “Do you see?” instead of “Don’t you see?” in the first line

Of this poem, this loving treatise, which is what gives away the poem

And gives it all to you.

BIO: Hayden Carruth according to Poets.org

The Impossible Indispensibility of the Ars Poetica
by Hayden Carruth
Collected Shorter Poems 1946-1991 page 352
Copper Canyon Press 1992
winner of the National Book Crtiics Circle Award

His lines are so long, so voluptuous–I wonder if he wrote on legal pads sideways. I’ve tried to transcribe the lines accurately but when in doubt, he capitalized each new line.

August 3, 1921-September 29, 2008.

Among the 10 poets and writers he named  in 1991 as having influenced his work and were his close friends, he named Raymond Carver, Wendell Berry, Galway Kinnell, Denise Levertov, Henry Rago, JV Cunningham, George Dennison, David Budbill, Adrienne Rich and Carolyn Kizer. A few of my favorite poems by Ray Carver and by Wendell Berry can be found on this blog.

Here’s a poem about Ray Carver by Hayden Carruth read by him in May 2008:

Here he reads one of his most well-known poems, “Emergency Haying” :

He described himself as “A duck blown out to sea and still squawking.” Fortunately, we can still hear him even when he’s flown farther than we can see him.