Mark Rudman

A Garland for Nicanor Parra at Ninety
On the Occasion of Antipoems: How to look better & feel great, antitranslation by Liz Werner (New Directions, 2004)

In the fall of 1973 I sat with a group of students at Columbia’s watering hole, the West End Tavern, drinking watery draft beer across from the Chilean poet Nicanor Parra. I had made sure to get a seat across from Parra, whose Poems and Antipoems had been a source of delight and inspiration to me. I didn’t intend to write dramatic monologues, like Parra, but I was in agreement with his implicit critique of modernism and neo-romanticism. Up until this point in his career, the political edge to Parra’s poetry had been completely internalized. He was wearing a heavy suit and tie and blocky shoes—conservative garb for a poet at that time, but not perhaps for a poet of Latin culture. He was also affable and warm. I overcame my shyness and told him how I felt about his work, and then recited a good part of one of his poems, “The Viper,” in an animated and slightly exaggerated way, which suited the bravado of the poem:

For years I was doomed to worship a contemptible woman
Sacrifice myself for her, endure endless humiliation and sneers,
Work night and day to feed her and clothe her,
Perform several crimes, commit several misdemeanors,
Practice petty burglary by moonlight,
Forge compromising documents,
For fear of a scornful glance from her bewitching eyes.
During brief phases of understanding we used to meet in parks
Or we would go to a nightclub
And fling ourselves into an orgy of dancing
That went on until well after dawn.
For years I was under the spell of that woman.
She used to appear in my office completely naked
And perform contortions that defy the imagination,
Simply to draw my poor soul into her orbit
And above all to wring from me my last penny.
She absolutely forbade me to have anything to do with my family.
To get rid of my friends this viper made free with defamatory libels
Which she published in a newspaper she owned.
Passionate to the point of delirium, she never let up an instant,
Commanding me to kiss her on the mouth
And to reply at once to her silly questions
Concerning, among other things, eternity and the afterlife,
Subjects which upset me terribly,
Producing buzzing in my ears, recurrent nausea, sudden fainting spells,
Which she turned to account with that practical turn of mind
that distinguished her,
Putting her clothes on without wasting a moment
And clearing out of my apartment, leaving me flat.
(translated by W. S. Merwin)

I had long sections of several of his other poems by heart, too—“The Trap” and “The Tunnel” among them—though I had made no deliberate attempt to memorize them. Parra, who was one of the best known and most intriguing poets in the world at the time, responded with immense warmth, and said, “I can’t believe that a young American poet knows a poem of mine by heart. I am moved.” The spontaneous sharing of my enthusiasm with this wry and ebullient man opened the door to further conversation. I asked him what he thought about his compatriot Pablo Neruda, knowing that his work was a direct rejoinder. “Neruda is a great poet, no question. His poetry may be as great as poetry gets. But he is a nineteenth-century man.”

It is hard for me to describe how shattering I found that sentence. Parra was saying that the cosmic repertory, the full orchestra of the poetry of the past, was no longer viable or possible. I wasn’t at the time familiar with Adorno’s now-over-flogged dicta about the impossibility of poetry after Auschwitz, but I was acutely conscious of the necessity for poetry to respond to a new reality. It is also shocking to consider that Neruda, who does have the characteristics of that grand nineteenth-century sensibility, was born not in 1899, like Hart Crane, but in 1904. It seems incredible that Neruda was only ten years older than Parra because he does seem like someone from another era, more like the contemporary of Rilke.

This erasure of nineteenth-century sensibility still informs poetry in a significant way, with respect to what I consider the requirements of a viable neo-romanticism. One way to look at this has to do with a rejection of the concept, dubiously derived from a phrase that John Keats used in a letter, of “negative capability.” For Parra, in his vision of the future, poetry would not be about the sensitive receptivity of the poet as an individual, a lyrical self; a different identification would be called for. Poetry would have to respond to what Donald Davie would later describe in his important, compelling, and little known book, taken from the Hodges Lectures on Czeslaw Milosz, “the insufficiency of lyric.” (A related study by Davie, The Poems of Dr. Zhivago, with translation and commentary, is one of the great quixotic acts of critical/imaginative writing in the modern period, structured very much like Pale Fire but the product of incisive reflection rather than a lunatic version of literary scholarship.)

We thus come round to press again the insufficiency of the lyric mode for registering, except glancingly, the complexity of twentieth-century experience. Since I have invoked, as spokesman for the lyric voice, a figure so illustrious and never to be discounted as John Keats, it is worthwhile pointing out that in our time an anti-Keatsian position is to be found articulated by persons not much less distinguished. Here for instance, surprisingly, is Pasternak, writing in his own English to his American translator Eugene Kayden, in 1958:

You say I am “first and last a poet, a lyric poet.” Is it really so? And should I feel proud of being just that? And do you realize the meaning of my being no more than that, whereas it hurts me to feel that I have not had the ability to express in greater fullness the whole of poetry and life in their complete unity?
(Donald Davie, Czeslaw Milosz and the Insufficiency of Lyric, University of Tennessee Press, 1986)

At the time that I met Parra, I was twenty-three years old, and I wanted to write poems in the spirit of Keats, as expressed in his letters. Instead I was to translate poets, including Pasternak, who required me to stretch beyond any perception I might have had regarding the limits of the English language. Part of the attraction of poetry was its difficulty. I didn’t want to go straight to a postmodern aesthetic on the basis of some external objective doctrine. As Keats said, “that which is creative, must create itself.” I also believed what Keats said right afterwards, that by leaping “headlong into the sea . . . [I had] become better acquainted with the soundings, the quicksands, & with the rocks, than if I had stayed upon the green shore, and piped a silly pipe, and took tea & comfortable advice.” I’m willing to embrace Keats as a model for the development of a poet’s imagination—push yourself, fill four thousand lines of blank verse at the rate of fifty lines a day, as he did when he wrote Endymion—but I cannot take the concept of negative capability as an unquestionable given.

The poetry of Brecht, of eastern European poets like Miroslav Holub and Janos Pilinszky, of Polish poets such as Zbigniew Herbert and Czeslaw Milosz—these models and others had already served to predict a poetry that severely and definitively rejected the notion of negative capability, which is still a kind of raft upon which much American and English poetry attempts to float.

*

The later works of Parra are far more critical. If I were to put quotations from Brecht, Milosz, and Parra side by side, you’d see what I mean. Keats’s letter, which was not initially intended for public consumption, is quoted flagrantly in almost everything written about poetry, without thought, as if it were now part of nature and not a phrase snatched from a letter written by a twenty-three-year-old English poet. As for myself, I had a lot of growing to do and was still willing to try to imitate Neruda’s largesse. I would have given anything to have written a lot of the poems in Residence on Earth, as would most of my friends. Anything.

Maligna, the truth of it, how huge the night is, how lonely the earth!
I have gone back again to single bedrooms,
to cold lunches in restaurants, and I
drop my pants and my shirts on the floor as I used to,
there are no hangers in my room, and nobody’s pictures are on the walls.
How much of the shadow that is in my soul I would give to have
you back,
the names of the months sound to me like threats
and the word winter is like the sound of a lugubrious drum.

Later on you will find buried near the coconut tree
the knife which I hid there for fear you would kill me . . .
(“Widower’s Tango,” trans. W. S. Merwin)²

When we spoke, Parra said that he no longer wrote poetry. I smiled. “I don’t believe you,” I said. “Poetry is all around us,” he said. “It is in the graffiti on the walls. I walk around and write down the graffiti, and those are my poems.” I wasn’t quite sure how to respond to his slyly humorous tone. I was interested in approaching poetry as an apprenticeship to signs. Whenever I could, in a poem, I would use the equivalent of a found object, in the hope of some semiological revelation, but as I’ve suggested, I was unwilling to limit my own practice in obedience to this kind of reduced aesthetic, even if I agreed with it in theory. I have been in continual dialogue with Parra’s problem with poetry ever since that conversation at the West End. It was fine for him, who had already exhausted many possibilities of language, to avail himself of endecasilado, the Spanish equivalent of iambic pentameter, to limit his imagination so severely, but for me at the time it would have been a form of amputation, or an inoculating serum that prohibits growth.

*

In Paris the summer after the conversation with Parra at the West End, my girlfriend and I visited a relative on her mother’s side, who was married to a Chilean diplomat. In the course of tea, in their airy, elegant, uncluttered apartment in the Sixteenth Arrondissement, in which we had never set foot until that day, I mentioned that Nicanor Parra was an important poet to me. “Why, Parra,” he said, “he comes from a family of clowns. He’s very funny.” “He is,” I said, with a vaguely uncomfortable tingle coming over me at this circus image. Santiago continued: “Everyone knows of the Parra family in Chile.”

*

The second time I saw Parra was more frustrating. It was at a crowded party on the Upper West Side; Allen Ginsberg corralled him and sat cross-legged at his feet. (There is only one appropriate response to the literature written in Spanish in the twentieth century and that is to bow.)

Fifteen years passed. Meanwhile, a longtime friend, Kevin Mathewson, son of Ruth Mathewson, from whom we had rented a house in Brooklin, Maine, had become close to Nicanor Parra and his sister, Violetta, a well-known folk singer. At some point in the Christmas season, Kevin invited us to come over for a glass of wine, allowing me a chance to rekindle my acquaintance with Nicanor. We arrived at his mother’s brownstone. Nicanor, dressed in a brown suit and open shirt collar, was grazing the bookshelves. Kevin reintroduced us, we shook hands, and I briefly reacquainted him with our conversation. He claimed to remember it. It seemed to amuse him no end that his ironic statement had had such a resonant effect on me. Indeed, I had used his words as part of an attempt at self-definition in an interview I had reprinted in my first book of poems. His humor and irony and warmth allowed for multiple tonalities in dialogue. At this point, he began to sing the same tune he had sung fifteen years before at the West End; he wasn’t writing his own poetry, but he was writing the greatest poetry of his life.

How much better could conversation get? Where was he going next? I was anxious for his next sentence but wanted him to deliver the resolution of this contradiction in his own time. Then he spoke.

“I am translating King Lear into Spanish for Joseph Papp. This is the greatest poetry I have written. For the first time I feel I am a great poet, while translating Shakespeare.” Poetry per se was even more dead and superfluous than it had been in 1973. If Parra was a jokester, he was also making a critique of culture, like Karl Kraus. I hadn’t thought of the connection between Parra and Karl Kraus until this instant, but it seems to me to help explain him, as it does to remember that he was a teacher of physics and mathematics for many years. He certainly wasn’t over the top in this critique, as is Thomas Bernhard in a book like The Old Masters, where the narrator ridicules the idea that Tintoretto is a great artist with unquenchable and delirious venom. Clearly, Parra meant and did not mean exactly what he said. Parra, seventy-something at the time, had his finger on some kind of truth, which he chose to express in a tone imbued with understated gaiety. It was more fun for me to listen than to make another case. I reminded him of how similar this was to the argument he had made at the West End fifteen years earlier. This amused him. I offered him my counterargument: “that which is created must create itself.” That amused him further. (The amusement was implicit, and the less I noted it the better.) Then he upped the stakes. “Do you know who the greatest poet in America is?” I knew this would be good and remained the straight man. “Frederic Jameson.”

I loved it. A conversation with Parra was like a game of five-card stud with a master bluffer, who, some of the time, wasn’t bluffing. Most of the time, you really needed the cards to win. I refused to give Parra further satisfaction by making the obvious protest that Jameson was a critic and theorist and not a poet.

I then apologized for not sticking with the poetry of signs. At this point, I hadn’t seen any of his work in print since Emergency Poems. “Frederic Jameson,” he repeated, “is the greatest poet of our time.” This declaration is given added resonance when uttered with a Spanish accent. “This is what the young people want to read. Theory, not poetry.” I resisted the childish impulse to pronounce how disturbed I was by the painfully self-evident truth of his revelation, of a reality I was keen to deny.

*

The key to the idea of Parra has to do with the creation of narrators who do not exist, who are part of antimatter. He is obsessed with the idea of their nonexistence and the nonexistence of the self in terms of any stable ego. That’s why Allen Ginsberg, the eternal student of Buddhism, sat cross-legged at his feet.

How strange that no sooner do I write Parra’s name than I discover that my treasured faded and weathered copy of Poems and Antipoems is missing. I have this past year lent it to one student and then another, and now I don’t remember who had it last. I call a friend at New Directions, Parra’s U.S. publisher, and there is some confusion as to what Antipoems I am looking for because Parra’s first book to be published in English in twenty years, Antipoems: How to look better & feel great, about whose existence I knew nothing at all moments before, is about to appear in September 2004, two months from the moment at which I am writing. Once the confusion is resolved, to my surprise my friend agrees to send over by messenger Parra’s Antipoems: New and Selected, which gives an afternoon spent writing indoors the quality of an adventure.

*

As I’ve said, the fact that Nicanor taught physics and mathematics must be factored in, amid all the raillery. No matter how funny it seems to say that Frederic Jameson is the greatest poet of our time, this pronouncement comes from someone who has a theoretical background and whose concept of antipoetry might easily be mistaken as a mere rebellion against certain romantic and modernist tendencies. In reality, that notion is grounded in the provocative and dualistic concept of antimatter.

The concept of antimatter can lead us to a deeper reading of antipoetry. In 1928 a physicist named Paul Dirac came up with a mathematical equation that predicted the existence of an antiworld identical to ours but consisting of antimatter. Each particle of this world would exactly match each particle of our world, but would carry an opposite charge. Viewed through the lens of antimatter, antipoetry mirrors poetry, not as its adversary but as its perfect complement; it is not by nature negative, but negative where poetry is positive, and vice versa; it is as opposite, complete, and interdependent as the shape left behind in the fabric where the garment has been cut out. (Liz Werner, Introduction to Antipoems, 2004 [italics added])

(Now, trapped in Manhattan for the third consecutive summer, I am hit, forgive me, by a rush of images from summers spent in Maine, several at the Mathewsons’ Red House on Naskeag Point in Brooklin, with which I will not burden you, okay— keeping an eye on my son, who is nineteen and began to drive to Maryland at midnight this July Fourth weekend to visit a friend who had just come out of a coma, and who doesn’t share our passion for solitude and silence, harbors and quiet coves and eating for free on the mussels we used to wade out to gather at low tide—while my wife, still in her nightie, works on geometric group theory, utterly absorbed in another world, though she did consent to watch the radiant Maria Sharapova outplay the indomitable Serena Williams in the Women’s Final at Wimbledon. . . . Perhaps it is she who should write about Nicanor Parra, she to whom the concept of antimatter is more palpable than it is to me, who might tend to regard it as something in the vein of possibility, like negative capability.)

And now Antipoems: How to look better & feel great has allowed me, after a thirtyyear wait, to read—and more importantly, to see—the outcome of Parra’s laboratory experiments. These antipoems are like political cartoons by Joan Miró, speaking to the eternal youthfulness of Nicanor Parra, who was born in 1914.

*

Parra, unlike his contemporaries around the world like Yehuda Amichai, Edmond Jabès, Wislawa Szymborska, Zbigniew Herbert, and, it goes without saying, Czeslaw Milosz, did not continue to publish in English in the 1980s and ’90s, and I fear he may now be largely unknown to younger readers.

just thinking about it
makes my hair stand on end
a lion a she-wolf and a panther
—miserere di me—
gazed at me like they wanted to eat me for breakfast
what luck that the great Tomas³
came along at exactly the right moment
otherwise I wouldn’t be telling this story—
(“Canto Primo,” Antipoems, 2004)

*

It may not be an accident, unless it is a case of supreme accident, that there is a certain consonance between the work of two great Portuguese poets, Carlos Drummond de Andrade and Fernando Pessoa. It is almost as if the birth of Parra’s voice coincided with the death of Pessoa in 1936. Pessoa is more multivalent than Parra, but Parra’s persona is more powerful than the persona of Pessoa’s that he most resembles, Alvaro de Campos. Parra’s poetry pokes a hole in the grandiose poetry of the modernists. His goal is to unsettle, to keep readers alert and thinking on their feet. If Rilke (“You must change your life”) and Frost (“Drink and be whole again beyond confusion”) and Bishop (“knowledge is historical, flowing, and flown”) strove toward an unquestionably magnificent and comforting form of closure, or resolution—in rhetorical culminations which over time are in danger of becoming chestnuts—Parra’s endings are keyed to the next step:

My angel! she said nervously.
Let me sit on your knees once again!
It was then that I was able to ponder the fact that she was now wearing brief tights.
It was a memorable meeting, though full of discordant notes.
I have bought a plot of land not far from the slaughterhouse, she exclaimed.
I plan to build a sort of pyramid there
Where we can spend the rest of our days.
I have finished my studies, I have been admitted to the bar,
I have a tidy bit of capital at my disposal;
Let’s go into some lucrative business, we two, my love, she added,
Let’s build our nest far from the world.
Enough of your foolishness, I answered, I have no confidence in your plans.
Bear in mind that my real wife
Can at any moment leave both of us in the most frightful poverty.
My children are grown up, time has elapsed,
I feel utterly exhausted, let me have a minute’s rest,
Give me a little water, woman,
Get me something to eat from somewhere,
I’m starving,
I can’t work for you anymore,
It’s all over between us.
(“The Viper”)

*

Every work of art is a diary of its own creation, just as a stone, as Osip Mandelstam observed, is a “geometer of the weather.” Some art is eternally fresh, will never be dated, like that of Fra Angelico and François Villon and John Skelton and Gustave Courbet and Constantin Brancusi. *

I keep coming back to Santiago’s comment that Nicanor comes from a famous family of clowns. That he comes from a famous family seems undeniable. Pablo Neruda testifies that “the Parras of Chile [are] outstanding in poetry and folklore, their talent ever ripening and flowering.” Parra doesn’t write as if he thinks nobody’s listening. When nobody listened, he interrupted a reading by the most revered Chilean poet of the time, Gabriela Mistral, by jumping onto the stage and reciting a poem he had written in her honor. This endeared him to her and she used her influence to help get him published.

There is a reason why poets of my generation, born around 1950, have been so profoundly influenced by foreign poets, though it may be more a matter of sustenance than influence. Foreign poets don’t have the same feeling of writing in the gap, as Tocqueville put it, between the solitary void and the crowd, which he insisted defined the disorienting American spiritual condition. What was the fate of some of the most inventive and multivalent American poets born in the same year as Parra, poets like John Berryman, Randall Jarrell, and Weldon Kees? Different fates, clearly, but none as happy as it might have been. Randall Jarrell tried to address some of the problems of being a poet in America from a special angle in “The Obscurity of the Poet,” as Richard Howard did in the title of his book of essays Alone with America, and as Berryman did in The Dream Songs and Love & Fame. Permit me to use a Freudian term without necessarily subscribing to it: the Oedipality of most of these poets seems to me overwhelming, in the end altogether crushing.

*
Returning to Parra’s fabulous assertion that the theorist Frederic Jameson was the greatest poet of our time, I must now confess that I hadn’t read a thing by Jameson when Parra said this, although I knew who he was, and I got the drift. I figured Jameson would be a replicant of Barthes, Deleuze, Derrida, and Lacan, and I felt no compulsion to read another writer who did not generate his own ideas, but merely applied the theories developed by others to contemporary contexts. And I might never have read Jameson had a student not given me, some fifteen years after the second conversation with Parra, a Xerox of an essay of Jameson’s on Joseph Conrad called “Romance and Reification: Plot Constructions and Ideological Closure in Joseph Conrad.” I’m not sure who gave it to me, or why, but I may have mentioned in class that I was rereading Conrad’s Victory.

The copy of Jameson’s essay, in a brown folder among a batch of manila folders, lay in a pile for about a year. When I began thinking about Conrad again I began to fantasize rereading Nostromo and Lord Jim, but I couldn’t decide in which order. In the midst of this indecision, I pulled out Jameson’s essay which, I discovered, is specifically concerned with these two books, and was staggered and stimulated by its brilliance and implications. I had never read anything quite like it. Reading Jameson’s essay was like reading a whole book. It was so profound and provocative, I could only read five pages at a time, and then mull them over. And of course I couldn’t go back to Conrad’s novels until I had “finished” the essay by Frederic Jameson, America’s greatest poet.

I began to carry around the folder with the thirty-five Xeroxed pages, in the hope of finding the spare time to read and reflect on those pages in between my other responsibilities.

I had never read a better definition of Conrad’s work than I found in Jameson’s opening gambit, where he calls it unclassifiable, “spilling out of high literature into light reading and romance, reclaiming great areas of diversion and distraction by the most demanding practice of style and écriture alike, floating uncertainly somewhere between Proust and Robert Louis Stevenson.”

The beauty of Jameson’s essay is that it’s perfectly compatible with the density and texture of these two inexhaustible novels of Conrad. Or as Jameson would put it, “The ‘event’ in Lord Jim is the analysis and dissolution of the event, . . . but we have understood very little about this narrative unless we have come to realize that even that ‘real story’ itself is for Conrad hollow and empty, and that there is a void at the heart of events and acts in these works which goes well beyond simple anecdotal mystification.”

I believe Nicanor Parra would signify his assent.

NOTES:

Poems and Antipoems

Pablo Neruda: A Passion for Life

Tres poetas chilenos

Three Chilean Poets

‘Hasta aqui nomas llega Neruda y despues Parra.’