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"On the Memory of Stone," exemplifies this act of
retrieval on Santos’s part. Deftly performing a free-hand sketch of
Robinson Jeffers’s beloved Carmel River seascape - with its "scent of
wild sage and dying kelp," "its ice-plant and seagrass" - Santos
gets to the heart of the Jeffers myth as evinced in the images of that other
well-known Carmel resident, Edward Weston. Never mind that the motivation for
this unearthing can be traced back, at least in part, to a very specific
moment: When, "after years of a rather nomadic life in the military"
Santos’s family settled, in 1965, "in a hillside house a mile or so
from the horseshoe inlet where the Carmel River empties into the sea." In
other words, within walking distance of the Jeffers’s family home. Not yet
knowing anything of Jeffers’s "literary standing" (or
"anyone’s literary standing" for that matter), the young Santos
nonetheless developed a strong connection to the elderly poet from an early
age.
Ultimately, many of the poetic life-lessons recounted here are
fairly conventional: "It [Jeffers’s influence] turned me away from the
insular fascinations of literary affairs, and turned me back... to the raw
physical reality around us"; or, "he [Jeffers] encouraged me to see
an essential faith in the work as work, independent of its relative
value." This notwithstanding, Santos paints a very convincing picture of
Jeffers’s comic vision as necessarily arising out of the wildness of the
Californian coastline. Furthermore, he intuits how "Not since Wordsworth... has a poet placed such a high regard... or culled from a pile of
’unhewn stones’ such a legible record of human history." Which
makes one realize just how oddly fitting Weston’s image of Jeffers’s
"mildly bohemian flyaway collar" and weathered "bleak Irish
features" really is. For such a grave visual catalogue seems only
appropriate for a poet whose poems "can sound less spoken from the page
than broadcast like oracles from the crumbling sea cliffs of the Western
world."
Elsewhere it becomes clear that what really interests Santos is
"how poems come into being"; how "an idée fixe...
submits itself to the shaping method of Hamlet’s 'words, words,
words'. " How a poem becomes, this is Santos’s great project. And
it can be no mere coincidence that he devotes considerable space to a
discussion of the implications of Heidegger’s phrase: "We never come
to thoughts. They come to us." Two essays in particular, "Subject
Matters" and "A Poetics of Cannibalism," make this interest more
explicit. Both of these pieces eschew received narrative continuity in favor of
the "sidelong, overheard, and allusive." They are perhaps not quite
aphoristic in a Nietzschean manner, but then they are not that far from it
either. What they document is the peculiar germination period that accompanies
a poem on its journey from the spiritual to the corporeal realm.
Santos is careful, however, to provide a framework for such
loftiness. Speaking of the "snippets of conversation, fleeting thoughts,
fragments of mood and memory, perceptions and misperceptions," and
"takes and double-takes" that constitute the working method of these
two essays, he remarks: "It’s what I call a day-book. It’s not a
diary, not quite a journal, not really a commonplace book either." He goes
on to maintain that only "some of these extracts have actually found their
way into poems." Whatever the case, one can’t help but be struck by
the thought that here is the raw materiality of poesis itself, the imagination
as imagination, before its eventual subjugation to the straight-jacket
that is meter, rhyme, syntax, coherence, etc.
Translation is another area of the poetic enterprise where Santos
appears to be on comfortable ground. Relying on varying degrees of quotability
(think Frost and what gets lost), he maneuvers around the discipline’s
orthodoxies, past and present, in order to arrive at a position that is
somewhat akin to the following remark by Robert Bly: "by trying to
translate... the poems come deep inside you, the images come deep inside you... and your house is changed." Translation: Every good translation
creates a new poem and not the cursed poetic doppelganger we’ve been
trained to look for.
Santos manages to move slightly beyond this notion, however, in
his discussion of the "’afterlife’ that any ’original’
poem begins, and that any translation extends." Literary belatedness is
another way of putting it and what this essentially means is that translation,
in Walter Benjamin’s phrase, "marks [a poem’s] stage of continued
life," with all the unforeseen consequences, trivialities, coincidences,
and mutations that this continuation suggests.
As Santos remarks in "In a Glass, Darkly," the final
essay selected for inclusion in A Poetry of Two Minds, there are some
"assertions so commonplace [in contemporary poetry] it hardly seems
necessary to attach them to any one person." These assertions are
"clustered around four main points: (1) we have too many poets; (2) we
have no great poets; (3) there is a sameness to all our poems; and (4) our
poems are not sufficiently engaged in issues of political or social
concern." To each of these complaints Santos injects a heavy dosage of
sobering, Yankee reasonableness. For example, as a sort of ready-made retort to
all four of these notions he offers up Philip Larkin’s savage wit:
"supposing no one played tennis because they wouldn’t make
Wimbledon." Similarly, to the objection that there are currently no great
poets, Santos cites Donald Hall: "the great majority of poems, in any age,
will always be bad or mediocre." If this doesn’t quite come across as
a hands-down-victory for Santos’s camp, at least it’s a far cry from
the I-refute-it-thus logic some of his detractors are prone to using.
This is a fine book, gracefully written and gracefully argued.
If the book lacks something, then it is a more detailed engagement with poetic
form: specifically its usefulness, applicability, and relevance to the
contemporary versifier. A more substantial flaw is the absence of any
engagement with what Derek Mahon has called the poetry of "warm
places": those bookshops, classrooms, lecture podiums, and clubrooms where
our institutionally acknowledged poets workshop with the well fed, the moneyed,
and the carefree.
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