The Best Words in the Best Order

Take As Long As You Wish

I missed poetry.

I used to devote much—if not most—of my free time solely to studying and writing it. As I visited the the archaeological ruins of my life, excavating ode and ballad, sifting through sonnets and quatrains tucked into letters, remnants of soul cobwebbed in the corners of notebooks, I feel as though I found a treasure I had forgotten, something ancient, something vivified: And all this while, I carried it within myself.

I found myself within myself, the most primeval architecture of my being.

Why did I ever elude my responsibility to that foundation of my life?

Whatever I do, I aim to be the best. I am hypercompetitive: with others, with myself. I teeter on not merely wanting to succeed or to prevail but also to both to such an extent that I want nobody else to flourish in the shadow of any light that touches or beams from me. I am not proud of this quality but know it within myself.

When I began teaching, my diligence toward writing precipitously diminished. This began at my first school, in part, when the hours were so utterly draining and taxing that I had little consciousness available to muster toward coherency in writing. Instead, I labored toward being a leader and role model, to eliminate bullying and hazing and to inspire the best from those with budding leadership qualities to do the same in turn. At my second school, where I found such ample time that I genuinely did not know what to do with it after three years of laborious effort, I found myself relaxed enough to return to writing again—until my second year of teaching there when the department chair critiqued me, telling me that he wanted to see more effort in terms of my expectations and writing development in the students. In my hypercompetitiveness, I amplified this to such an extent that I delivered to my poor middle school students the most intellectually rigorous and demanding curriculum that I could create—within reason, of course—for that age bracket. I established myself and my classes—there and everywhere since—as the “gold standard” offering within whatever school I found myself employed.

This effort came at the cost of whatever greatness I could offer my gifts and talents and aspirations though.

Other circumstances transpired that affected my writing—at least my thoughts about my writing—before teaching especially distracted me from my literary ambitions. Before we consider them, however, I would like to return to an essay that I read as an undergraduate student which so deeply resonated with me that I felt it articulated precisely how I felt about not merely poetry but also why I wished to write it and why I must.

I remember going to the gym one evening after classes and bumping into my favorite professor—genuinely, my role model in many ways, beyond mere intellect—who, not having taught me for a few semesters, asked about my studies and, more crucially, what my plans and aspirations were. I told him that I wanted to write. He asked me what I wanted to write. I told him that I wanted to write literature. He asked me what kind. I said, “Great.” He smiled, his eyes lighting for a moment before responding, “Ah, I’m here with Achilles—so you want to live forever?”

He knew exactly my intention. And yes, my goal was to write something of such greatness in scope and imagination that others would not understand how a mind could dream it into being.

He told me that my university had little else to offer me and that I already had everything within me to become the man I envisioned for myself. Hearing this from the person whom I most admired meant the world.

I do not remember how I found this essay, but it always reminded me of this exchange with that teacher. It felt like being summoned, like a gauntlet cast before me.

The One Who Writes and Loves

I share here Donald Hall’s “Poetry and Ambition” should any promising writer also feel called to scale the canonical manmade mountain range of words. It begins as boldly as any essay on such a topic of importance might for those to whom the canon most deeply speaks:

I see no reason to spend your life writing poems unless your goal is to write great poems.

This only validated my own sentiment, far beyond mere sentiment, and epitomized what felt core to the nature of my being: Whatever you do, do with distinction and verve. Honor it.

Hall would articulate much of what did not move or strike me as I genuinely made effort to explore contemporary poetry as he expresses that “contemporary American poetry is afflicted by modesty of ambition … [or] accompanied by vast pretense.” Instead, I typically found a politeness, a mediocrity, a feigned humility and projected nonpareil of literary offering in matters of substance, inviting others inside, a democratized, inclusionary temple of words—so long as you worshiped the gods and especially also the living prophets.

The holy word inscribed on the tablets?

Thou Shalt Not Write Great Poems

One must write modestly.

Hall gently reminds us of one of Keats’s gems in one of his many beautiful letters:

I would sooner fail than not be among the greatest.

Yet any who might undertake such a daunting pursuit would “in all likelihood … fail, and … if we succeed we will never know it.” Some might wonder why any would bother when we might aim at status and celebrity and readings and money. But ambition always costs in terms of ardor and rewards only uncertainty. Poets seldom know their worth—even if they embody Shelley’s proclamation of being “the unacknowledged legislators of the world.”

What should any poet do in the face of such choice and nebulous promise?

Honor it: “[T]he only way we are likely to be any good is to try to be as great as the best.”

Why would anybody want any less for oneself? What good is status and celebrity and readings and money when it exists to impress people whom we do not even know let alone perhaps not even like or respect? It’s not merely insincere but also insecure. To choose to write with verve and distinction, to honor the act, is to value art for art’s sake. It’s selfless instead of selfish: love.

To Love and to Write Unrequited

Hall clarifies how, in spite of how the most view the industry, publication does not equate to achievement because “for some people it seems ambitious merely to set up as a poet, merely to write and to publish” and therefore that “[p]ublication stands in for achievement.” Within such a publication industry, “[m]any of these peoples are often readable, charming, funny, touching, [and] sometimes even intelligent” but that they also “are usually brief, … resemble each other, … are anecdotal, [and] … do not extend themselves, [for] they make no great claims” as “they connect small things to other small things.” The industry of the small, anecdotal, brief poem swarms and crushes magnitude.

Then again, who has time to read long poetry that demands attention?

More crucially, who has time—or wants to make time—to write it?

Hall summarizes that he does “not complain that we find ourselves incapable of such achievement” but instead “complain[s] that we seem not even to entertain the desire.”

I will answer my own question by stating that I wish to write literature of magnitude. But I also remember how my ambition was received—not only by my classmates, who seemed awed and valued my labor, but, more surprisingly, for me, my professors. One of whom, Professor One, a twice recipient of the National Endowment of the Arts, wrote to me that he “continued to appreciate [me] and [my] talent” but that he does “not think about poetry in anything close to the way [I] think about it.” Though I felt certain about my vision and mettle, it made me wonder about how I saw poetry and what I wished to do with and for it. Another of my professors, Professor Two, winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry and the T.S. Eliot Prize, who deeply valued my personality and also championed a prose poem I wrote for his course¹ after he told me that he only wanted me to write “normal” poems, not ones that pursued lofty ambitions. One of the professors, Professor Three, with whom I had established a thoughtful correspondence in my inchoate studies of and deep immersion into poetry, in response to my announcing of the epic poem I wished to write over the course of my life, stated, with care and gentleness and—in his own way—support:

This is ambitious. Also impractical. Also (perhaps) brilliant. Also (perhaps) loony.
You are going into deep waters.
Be careful.

It made me pause to question not my ability but, unfortunately, my vision. Though I know that my younger self repelled the sentiments and comments as though encircled by some protective cloak,

My undergraduate professor, from whom I was fortunate to learn, one on one, offered incredibly thoughtful praise and support of me, writing that “

Kieranthologist

is a marvel” and expressing that he had “never met a poet, let alone a young student, driven by such vision and belief: not only in his ability but in art itself.” Perhaps these words lent to that protective cloak at times, for I felt a glimpse of understanding, or at least felt partly understood, in my world in which I found myself surrounded by career professors and poets whose work needed publishing with rapidity and minds who studied the greats but perhaps paled in the singing light of such artistic vision. I found myself caught between the means of production and the merits of eternity.

But what does this all mean?

Hall writes that ambition, “mellowed and washed of its darkness,” in our modern understanding lacks how “Protestantism and capitalism celebrate [not merely] the desire to rise” but also “the desire to make words that live forever” as when Milton was “ready ‘to scorn delights, and live laborious days,’ to discover fame” when he “wanted merely to ‘justify the ways of God to men.’” This is ambition. Milton’s Paradise Lost not only attempted to justify God’s ways to men but invented narrative to arrive at a fuller understanding of our prelapsarian origins. He mythologized mythology to understand his and all of our place within a grander cosmic order through the written word.

Ambition therefore “meant something like universal and enduring love for the deed done or the song sung” instead of how “mere literacy[’s effect on] the decline of qualified literacy” led to “the mere quantitative distribution of images [to a] culture crowded with people who are famous for being famous.” The deluge of publication—now only exponentially increased by social media and its need for constant attention, validation, and “content creation”—thins the soup.

The desire for cheapened fame—a whoring of the soul—diminishes the enterprise of Art: The distinction residing in a mellowed ambition whereas true fame once meant enduring honor in and for Poetry.

Hall suggests that “[t]rue ambition in a poet seeks fame in the old sense, to make words that live forever” and that “the poem becomes more important than the poet.” We know this when “the poem is altered for its own sake, to make it better art, not for the sake of its maker’s feelings but because decent art is the goal.” The artist loves the art so much that ego no longer matters—or at least matters far less—enough so that the poem may come into the world like a child in need of attention and nurturing and protection and care. Like a good parent, the artist must stand vigil and provide with an aim for the future vision of the progeny’s well-being and maturity.

I would imagine that a complete reduction of ego, or at least a temporary dismissal of it from mind long enough, allows for the artist to enter an undistracted, unconscious state, “a possible further stage: when the poet becomes an instrument or agency of art” whose “grandeur … may turn itself an apparent 180 degrees to tell the truth.”

What might that truth be?

Only the artist knows and for each artist, that truth differs but courses through a bloodline pulsing through a heart of the individualistic spirit. Yeats, as Hall acknowledges with significance in his essay, “sought an image not a book” and expressed that “[m]an can embody truth” but “he cannot know it” because “[e]mbodiment is art and artfulness.”

True ambition seeks permanence which requires that the poem outranks the poet.

The Poet’s Fate

Hall offers those who wish to write with ambition a way forward:

We develop the notion of art from our reading. When we call the poem more important than ourselves, it is not that we have confidence in our ability to write it; we believe in poetry. We look daily at the great monuments of old accomplishment and we desire to add to their number, to make poems in homage to poems. Old poems that we continue to read and love become the standard we try to live up to. These poems, internalized, criticize our own work. These old poems become our Muse, our encouragement to song and our discouragement of comparison.

Hall’s essay encouraged me: Let great poems, great works, be the North Star, the Muse.

Yet I found myself surrounded by those who would “play records all night and write unambitious poems” and felt alone in my endeavors. I do not say that with judgment because I do not believe in an elitist view of self-expression. What I am asserting is an elitism of envy in which those with ambitions that rise above mere self-expression and a desire for status and celebrity and readings and money find themselves diminished—publicly or privately—ambitions derided, passions scoffed, efforts retrenched. I made the egregious error of studying those who were deemed the canonical greats in search of what made them canonically great and found myself judged, sometimes criticized, often by those with status and gravity.

Why? I can only question.

Hall offers a potential answer, a cultural one, in which “all societies [offer] a template to which its institutions conform” and for us, today, “[c]orporations exist to create or discover consumers’ desires and fulfill them with something that satisfies briefly and needs frequent repetition” to sate demand. This is the culture of democracy, of mass production.

This furnishes convenience and, arguably but not wholly, expedience.

Our poems, in their charming and interchangeable quantity, do not presume to the status of “Lycidas”—for that would be elitist and un-American. We write and publish the McPoem … which becomes our contribution to the history of literature … Pull in any time day or night, park by the busload, and the McPoem waits … for us, wrapped and protected, indistinguishable, undistinguished, and reliable, … subject to the quality control of the least common denominator.

I remember reading this essay while enrolled in Professor Two’s course and wrote an “Ode to the McPoem”² when he assigned the class to write a poem in some variation of quatrains. I made no effort toward “great claims” with the work but processed the idea of my first workshop experience in relation to what I currently assigned myself to read as I explored not only the canon of poetry but also as many ars poeticas as I could find.

Hall’s essay once again felt reassuring as I navigated a less comfortable experience that I now can see more clearly in hindsight than I could recognize in my youth:

To produce the McPoem, institutions must enforce patterns, institutions within institutions, all subject to the same glorious dominance of unconscious economic determinism, template and formula of consumerism.

What emerges?

The culture of mass production breeds the “McPoem,” something “uniform, reliable, indistinguishable,” that—as overproduction models abound—few resist, the workshops mass-reproduce ersatz.

The mob essentially converges upon the individual³, the artist, for the offense of being.

You Must Rise

The artist must find company in himself and in the company of those artists who preceded and the aspiration of the inward voice toward that which it envisions. Comfort must be found in trusting that vision and the labor toward it. Time will judge.

Hall writes how the Roman poet “Horace, when he wrote the Ars Poetica, recommended that poets keep their poems home for ten years” and how the British poet and critic Alexander Pope “wrote ‘An Essay on Criticism’ seventeen hundred years [later and] cut the waiting time in half, suggesting that poets keep their poems for five years before publication” whereas anyone today, those in the workshops, might “be grateful—and [feel that] published poetry would be better—if people kept their poems home for eighteen months.”

Haste kills revision and growth, for the workshop becomes not “a place for starting and finishing poems” but instead “a place for repairing them” as it “resembles a garage to which we bring incomplete or malfunctioning homemade machines for diagnosis and repair” because “we bring it too soon” and then “we bring a new poem to the workshop, anxious for praise, [and] others’ voices enter the poem’s metabolism before it is mature, distorting its possible growth and change.

Robert Frost expresses that “only when you get far enough away from your work to begin to be critical of it yourself … that anyone else’s criticism can be tolerable” for it must be “old and cold things,” for “[n]othing is old and cold until it has gone through months of drafts” and “[t]herefore workshopping is intrinsically impossible.” Instead, “[w]e learn to write poems that will please not the Muse but our contemporaries” and thus “count on number and frequency to counterbalance ineptitude.” Rather, we as poets should “stay outside the circle of peers … [and instead] take Homer for [our] peer,” for as Frost stated, “The thing is to write better and better poems,” for when we set “our heart when we’re too young on getting our poems appreciated[, it] lands us in the politics of poetry which is death.” We do not have time for death. We must have time for life so that we best death with art that defies it.

But in choosing our peers, those artists after whom we model ourselves like butterflies within our respective chrysalises before breaking free to become ourselves, we do need company, we need dialogue, for Hemingway best described in his Nobel Prize Banquet Speech how being an artist, an individual, feels in the world centered on the lowest common mob denominator:

Writing, at its best, is a lonely life. Organizations for writers palliate the writer’s loneliness but I doubt if they improve his writing. He grows in public stature as he sheds his loneliness and often his work deteriorates. For he does his work alone and if he is a good enough writer he must face eternity, or the lack of it, each day.

For a true writer each book should be a new beginning where he tries again for something that is beyond attainment. He should always try for something that has never been done or that others have tried and failed. Then sometimes, with great luck, he will succeed.

Hemingway needed the cafes in Paris with his fellow Lost Generation writers, and Hall agrees that “[m]ost poets need the conversation of other poets[,] not … mentors; they need friends, critics, people to argue with.” We know this because “[t]he history of poetry is a history of friendships and rivalries, not only with the dead great ones but with the living young.” I was fortunate to room blindly with my great peer during my penultimate semester of graduate school and have always spoken of him in this way since. I often implored him to continue writing—and I hope he has because I believe it would be the most important contribution of his life to the world—and, more selfishly and perhaps with this essay and the great pairings of literary greats in mind, to pair with me so that we each elicited the best from each other. I never heard much on my selfish want but am happy for him that he has found great success in his career in education. I stand by my belief that his poetic voice would overshadow this, however, even if he returned to this enterprise today.

The workshop, instead, becomes the institutionalized café in which courses often assign formulas that “reduce poetry to a parlor game” and in the process “trivialize and make safe … the real terrors of real art” whose unfortunate “reduction-by-formula is not accidental.” We do this because such parlor games “serve to democratize, to soften, and to standardize; they are repellant,” and “[a]lthough … workshops serve a useful purpose in gathering young artists together, workshop practices enforce the McPoem.” The bring together a community in the same way that social media often assembles social connection: It looks real but often arrives with unseen strings and algorithms, distorted reality and insincere dialogue.

Hall offers his own assignment: “This is your conrary assignment: Be as good a poet as George Herbert. Take as long as you wish.”

Choose your own literary giant(s) if you find Herbert unfamiliar.

Pass Beyond Your Gaze

Hall’s essay also explores—beyond the relationship between poet and poet or poet and scholar—the relationship between poet and critic.

Early in my undergraduate years, I found myself blessed to discover The Teaching Company’s lecture series, which furnished me with a robust education, most notably, two series of lectures by Professor Willard L. Spiegelman: the first, How to Read and Understand Poetry, a guide into my understanding of mechanics and craft and the second, The Lives and Works of the English Romantic Poets, a genuine treat for my mind and broader reading. (Coincidentally, my gifted roommate from graduate school whom I previously mentioned would, years later, meet this professor and have lunch with him: What a strange, small world!)

In one of the How to Read and Understand Poetry lectures, Professor Spiegelman introduced me to The Double Dactyl form. I loved meter and rhyme as much as, if not more so, in many ways, than free verse at the time and would not have paid much attention to this incredibly rigid form—until he mentioned that nobody had yet used his own name to write a double dactyl. I mentioned my hypercompetitive nature: The gauntlet therefore had been thrown.

I will allow you to review the extremely tight requirements of the form and then see them employed by John Hollander’s amusing self-referential example:

Starting with nonsense words
(“Higgledy-piggledy”),
Then comes a name
(Making line number two);

Somewhere along in the
Terminal quatrain, a
Didaktyliaios⁴
Word, and we’re through

Or you might enjoy this double dactyl on Milton’s

Higgledy-piggledy
Archangel Rafael,
Speaking of Satan’s re-
Bellion from God:

“Chap was decidedly
Turgiversational,
Given to lewdness and
Rodomontade.”

Because the challenge had been established in his recorded lecture, I decided to write a double dactyl that evening which used his name. As I began, however, I felt the form did not challenge me enough, so I decided to “push” the stanzas together to form a single stanza and then wrote an entire “long-form” version of the double dactyl: only by continuing the rhyme in each “stanza” of my longer double dactyl poem—and also increasing the challenge by making it a narrative. I will enclose the opening stanza here and the rest in the footnotes⁵:

Sillicus Willicus,
Willard L. Spiegelman,
Challenges poetry:
"I will detail,"
Bardling young Kieran writes
Bravely to Willard, "with
Sesquipedalian
Words to avail."

I sent it to him the next day and established a quiet correspondence over many years that pleased and encouraged me.

One Whose Name Was Writ in Water

Hall heartens us writers:

If it seems hopeless, one has only to look up in perfect silence at the stars … and it does help to remember that poems are the stars, not poets. Of most help is to remember that it is possible for people to take hold of themselves and become better by thinking. It is also necessary, alas, to continue to take hold of ourselves—if we are to pursue the true ambition of poetry. Our disinterest must discover that last week’s nobility was really covert rottenness.

I alluded to my gratitude for John Keats a number of times, often in footnotes and regarding his idea of “negative capability,” but his idea of cultivating disinterestedness remains crucial for the artist too—and in many ways, I owe Professor Spiegelman my enriched love of the English Romantic Poets, thanks to his course, as well as reading the Norton Critical Editions of as many of those Romantics about whom he taught as I could.

Hall continues:

When Keats in his letters praised disinterestedness—his favorite moral idea—he lectured himself because he feared that he would lose it … No one is guiltless of temptation, but it is possible to resist temptation. When Keats worried over his reputation, over insults from Haydon or the Quarterly, over Shelley’s condescension or Wordsworth’s neglect, he reminded himself to cultivate disinterest; to avoid distraction and to keep his eye on the true goal, which was to become one of the English Poets.

How could that young, brilliant, tragic Keats—one who seems to embody the idea of the candle that burns half as long but twice as bright—ever think of himself as he did that “Here Lies One Whose Name Was Writ in Water” would be inscribed upon his grave following his death of tuberculosis at 25?

It all draws me to Hall’s cardinal question:

How shall we lead our lives?

Fortunately, he also offers an answer:

The greatest good luck in life, for anybody, is to have something that means everything to you … to do what you want to do, and to find that people will pay you for doing it … if it’s unattainable. It’s no good having an objective that’s attainable! That’s the big thing: you have an ideal, an objective, and that objective is unreachable.

This would seem resonant with Nietzsche’s understanding: “He who has a why to live for can bear with almost any how.”

As I revisited Donald Hall’s essay, it rekindled within me a relationship with my younger self and all my aspirations and ideals. I would say that I wish I could speak to that person to encourage him but do not actually think he needed to hear that, least of all from himself, future version or otherwise. I imagine he would instead want me to lend that encouragement elsewhere, as I have with so many other newsletters I have written or artists I have met or pupils in whom I have seen nascent greatness: Do what you are called to do. Stop sacrificing precious time toward the things which do not serve you, which do not matter.

Follow your bliss.
—Joseph Campbell, The Power of Myth

Hurl Themselves into the Flames

Hall closes his essay by reminding us that “no audit [exists for us to] perform on ourselves, to assure that we work with proper ambition” but that we instead “must try to hold ourselves to the mark.”

Why?

Because “[a]mbition is not a quality of the poem but of the poet,” and in understanding this, we might also recognize that “[m]aybe ambition is appropriately unattainable when we acknowledge: No poem is so great as we demand that poetry be.”

Demand that poetry be great—and that you, yourself, be great as well.

Do you not deserve as much? Does not the world?

I will close with the following reminder to myself and hopefully to you too:

You know how to write poetry, it is all you need to be happy, but you will not be happy, you will be miserable, thinking you need so many other things, and in years and years of misery you have only one thing, as poets, to look forward to, the day you will not want what you haven’t got, the thing you have got is poetry, let nothing cheat, steal, or deflect you from it, even poetry itself. Why are you sitting there? You should have fled before I finished the first sentence.
—Mary Ruefle, Madness, Rack and Honey

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