Jay Parini

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Ramona Koval: Last time Jay Parini was on The Book Show. You might remember he was speaking to me about his book The Last Station, about that final year in the life of the great Russian writer Tolstoy.

But as well as being a novelist, as I said, he's a professor of English in Vermont, he's a critic and a poet, his non-fiction works include biographies of John Steinbeck and William Faulkner and Robert Frost. He was the editor of the Oxford Encyclopaedia of American Literature in 2004 and it's about poetry that brings Jay back to The Book Show.

When I spoke to him from our London studio I welcomed him again to The Book Show

Jay Parini: It's good to be on your show again. I remember it last time very well.

Ramona Koval: You've just published this book from Yale University Press called Why Poetry Matters, and you say at the very start of the book that it doesn't matter to most people. Do you think it's enough that it matters to a small number of people or is it your mission to make it matter to many, many more people?

Jay Parini: I'm hoping to broaden the audience for poetry. It's a little presumptuous maybe to think I can actually broaden anything but I think it's possible to widen the audience for poetry. In the 19th century all sorts of people would go to school and read Longfellow and Blake and Wordsworth and have an appreciation for poetry. I can remember when I was living in Italy 25 years ago I used to walk down to the corner with the bus driver from a local bus and he would recite huge patches of Dante to me and other Italian poets, and I think it's really possible for people to reconnect to the traditions of poetry. Since poetry has changed my own life...and I see it in my classes all the time, that students are really radically transformed by being put in touch with the language of poetry. I just wanted in this book to try to set some of those sparks going and see if I could get a little fire going.

Ramona Koval: I wanted to get to some students of yours in a moment, but what do you think poetry was doing for that bus driver in Italy?

Jay Parini: First of all he felt that it was spiritually uplifting. He would be walking along with me down the streets of Amolfi and he would be a mile high when he was reciting from memory bits of The Paradiso of Dante. I was so amazed by that. Or he had sonnets or pieces of Petrarch or Guido Cavalcanti and it was just lovely to hear him reciting poetry. And he was a completely un-formally educated...not an educated man in the sense that he probably never even finished high school.

Ramona Koval: And what did you mean when you said that poetry has transformed your life? From what to what?

Jay Parini: When I discovered poetry I had never really thought much about poetry until a teacher when I was in school, maybe 15 or 16, suddenly handed me a poem of Robert Frost's and she said, 'I want you to take this poem home tonight, read it and write something about it.' And I thought, my God, my life is ruined. I hated poetry and all that stuff, I knew nothing about it and I thought it was something for stuck-up boring people who would be interested in poetry, a kind of a strange, sissy thing to be doing. Then I remember coming sideways toward this poem of Robert Frost's and I read 'Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening', you know; 'Whose woods these are, I think I know, his house is in the village though. He will not see me stopping here to watch his woods fill up with snow.'

I just felt...oh my word. And the ending of that poem; 'The woods are lovely, dark and deep, but I have promises to keep, and miles to go before I sleep, and miles to go before I sleep', and I thought, my word, this language is so simple, concrete, direct, and it just gave me a new way of thinking about the world. It made me interested in nature. I grew up in a city, I was not interested in nature. It transformed my life in the sense that I determined that I would live in Frost's New England and I spent my whole adult life in Vermont as a result of that.

Ramona Koval: That is amazing. Recently you were teaching a course to students about Robert Frost. After they vandalised the Frost cottage in Vermont...I've been to the Frost cottage, it's near Breadloaf, isn't it, up there...

Jay Parini: That's right, on Breadloaf Mountain.

Ramona Koval: Tell us about how this came about that you should be teaching these kids and what the experience was like for you?

Jay Parini: You know, I was Frost's biographer. For 25 years I worked, off an on, on my biography of Frost, often living in the Frost cottage in the summers when I was doing it. I'm informally connected with the Frost house as a professor at Middlebury, Middlebury owns the Frost place. And late in the winter this year a gang of 28 teenagers, 16, 17, 18-year-olds, thought, 'hey, do I know a place for a party', and so they went off into the woods and broke into the Robert Frost house and they had a party that was a teenage party that went beyond the boundaries. Things got out of control and they set some of the furniture on fire and tore the wallpaper and smashed some of Frost's things.

Oh my God, the place was trashed beyond trashed, and I was horrified, and the word got around the world. Then about two months later they were charged, they rounded up the kids and they were charged with vandalism, felony, breaking and entering, arson, you name it. This was a terrible situation for these kids because they were local kids, we knew them all, it's a small community, and the prosecutor went to the judge and said, 'You know, why don't we try something novel, why don't we give them a choice between going to prison or hearing Jay Parini lecture about Frost?'

Ramona Koval: Hmm, a double-edged sword.

Jay Parini: So, what a strange thing. So I agreed to do this...

Ramona Koval: Why did you agree to do it?

Jay Parini: I'm a pickup basketball player, even though I'm 60 years old, three days a week I have a gang I play basketball with, and I went in and it was the guy from the local newspaper and he brought it up at the game, he said, 'Jay, is it true that the judge has asked you to teach the kids poetry?' And I said, 'Yes, they have a choice between going to prison and hearing me lecture.' And he fell on the floor laughing. They thought, 'what a crazy idea'. My friend said, 'I thought we had a law in America about cruel and unusual punishment.'

But I agreed to do it, I thought, well, it will be interesting. Many people have asked how the classes I taught to these vandals were different from my normal university classes. I said, 'Most of my kids at Middlebury College don't come to class in handcuffs.' So it was a challenge.

Ramona Koval: How did they write in handcuffs? Did they take notes?

Jay Parini: They didn't take notes. They sat there rather glum-faced. This was their way of clearing their record, they had to sit and listen to me. I tried to involve them. I began with...I said, you know, poetry matters, I've just written this book Why Poetry Matters and I've tried to argue passionately that poetry is about morality and it's about finding a language adequate to our experience as human beings. I said, you broke into Robert Frost's house and he's the greatest American poet. I said, here's a man who really found a language adequate to not only his own experience but to our experience. I said, you're not going to believe me when I tell you this but this poetry can change your life in a good way. I said, you may have inadvertently stumbled into a treasure house that can transform your life, a treasure house of poetry.

I pointed to one girl, there were six girls and 22 boys, and I pointed to one girl sitting there rather...poor little pimply-faced girl with a baseball cap on backward, and I said, you in the front row, did you even know who Robert Frost was? And she turned to me and she said, 'I knew who Abraham Lincoln was.' I thought, well, I've got an uphill climb here. I've been a teacher for 35 years as a fulltime teacher of poetry and I love doing it, I love the classroom experience and I love the sense of transformation that you get with language. So I said, let's think about Frost. Let's look at the poem 'The Road Not Taken' because it's about choices, and you had many choices in your life here and you made a bad choice when you broke into the Frost house. You could have made a different choice. Some kids, some of your friends turned up at the Frost house and actually chose to go around and go backward. So I just began:

Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveller, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth;

Then took the other, as just as fair,
And having perhaps the better claim,
Because it was grassy and wanted wear;
Though as for that the passing there
Had worn them really about the same,

And both that morning equally lay
In leaves no step had trodden black.
Oh, I kept the first for another day!
Yet knowing how way leads on to way,
I doubted if I should ever come back.

I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—
I took the one less travelled by,
And that has made all the difference.

Well, we got into that poem and the kids really seemed...suddenly they forgot that they were there by coercion, I forgot that I was in a punishment situation. You can't punish people with poetry. And we began talking about choices in life and how this poem explores this complicated moral issue of choices and how it's not always clear what path you're going down. Frost's not scolding you; 'You go down this path and not that path.' He's saying, 'I don't really even know which path is the right path. I don't know which is the road not taken or taken.'

'And both that morning equally lay, In leaves no step had trodden black.' There is no question that Frost is standing at these two roads and he looks down one, he looks down the other. He doesn't know. I said, this is going to be the situation of your life over and over again. I said, you're going to need every ounce of linguistic ability, every wit you have to try and figure what you're going to do next. I said, by coming to these classes you're going to be liberated, in a sense, from legal obligation. You're all kids, you've got your life ahead of you. I said, I'm a 60-year-old man, my life...the roads ahead of me are not so many, I have more choices behind me than ahead of me. I said, you have endless possibilities here. And I said, I'm just hoping that in talking to me and looking at Mr Frost and thinking about what you did in breaking into this Frost house, that you will have a chance of making better choices, thinking more about your life concretely and also hoping you'll connect to some of this marvellous language.

Ramona Koval: And do you think they will?

Jay Parini: Yes. I stood talking with them in the parking lot afterwards. A lot of these kids, they were kind of excitedly talking to me about poetry and Frost. You know, the hope is...I can't know what choices they'll make. For me, all I know is it was kind of transformative for me because I think I had grown a little cynical about poetry at times and had forgotten how important it is on the most gut-basic level how this language can really tighten our grip on experience and give us a kind of purchase on the world and help us to think about choices and things we do.

Jay Parini: Talking about Frost, you say that Frost said that if you're not educated properly in the language of metaphor you're not safe to let loose in the world. So what does this mean, this language of metaphor that some poems are made up of? Why does it make the world more understandable for us?

Jay Parini: First of all, all thinking is metaphorical thinking on some level. When we sit down to think about the world, what do we do? We make comparisons. We say, well, it's sort of like this, it's sort of not like that. And one of the things poetry does is it teaches us how far you can go with a metaphor and where it breaks down and where it starts to crumble, and so it refines our thinking. Otherwise we stumble into idiotic situations where we fall back on clichéd metaphors or metaphors that really are inadequate.

I think George Bush might not have gone into the Iraq war if he had been properly educated in poetry. That's an extreme thing to say, I know it sounds a little bit grandiose, but things like the 'the war on terror', that's a metaphor. 'The war on terror'...what does that mean really? When we start to break it down, it doesn't work very well. Can you have a war on terror? It's an analogy with Lyndon Johnson's war on poverty or Richard Nixon's war on cancer. It gets you into big trouble when you start making metaphors that go wrong.

Ramona Koval: You say that formal patterns of poetry help us to order our thoughts and to make sense of our lives. How can that happen?

Jay Parini: You know, there's hardly a day of my life that some lines of poetry don't come into my head and kind of inform some aspect of my experience in that day. Just sticking with Frost, you know I live in New England, and one day this winter I went to my study and there had been an ice storm and all of the birch trees had gotten these heavy sleeves of ice on them and bent to the ground, and I immediately thought of the opening lines of 'Birches'. You know:

When I see birches bend to left and right
Across the lines of straighter darker trees,
I like to think some boy's been swinging them.
But swinging doesn't bend them down to stay.
Ice-storms do that.

And I thought, wow. Poetry is all about flashing images and language into our head. And without these concrete images we're walking around in a kind of nebulous world. I don't feel rooted unless I've been writing and reading poetry in the morning. For 40 years now, I get up in the morning, drop my kids off at various schools, I've still got one kid at home out of the three, drop him off at his school, and I go to a local diner in Vermont. When I was living in London, I'm here now at the moment but I was living here last year, I would drop him off at school in Hampstead, go to a local café and I'd begin my day always, and I have for 40 years, by reading a poem.

Ramona Koval: What about today, have you read one today?

Jay Parini: I have indeed. In fact, I got up, walked down the street to get my coffee at a local café, and I was reading a poem by Charles Simic, a really remarkable poem called 'That Little Something' from his new book which I happened to pick up in the airport before I flew over here. So I've been reading Charles Simic. I was reading him on the subway yesterday. It was about 90 degrees Fahrenheit in the subway yesterday in London and I was coming from...I forget where to where, and I just couldn't stand the crowd and the heat, and I plunged into my briefcase and I brought out this little book of poems by Charles Simic and I was in an oasis of clarity and coolness, freshness of thought, stimulation, it was just a marvellous experience.

Ramona Koval: So how will that poem affect your day, do you think?

Jay Parini: In that poem he's talking about how there are these little somethings that we're trying to understand all the time, and I've been thinking about little somethings...it's only in the morning here in London, but just after I had this breakfast, I got into a taxi and came over here for this interview, and images from the poem were just flashing into my head. I was looking around and thinking...Simic excites me. He writes about a strange nightmarish world in which the ordinary can take on a kind of rare particularity and even ominousness.

I remember the taxicab pulled up and I saw an umbrella alone sitting on the pavement and I thought, that could be a line from a Simic poem; where is the person who belongs to that umbrella? How did it get there? The world of inanimate objects in Charles Simic's poetry becomes extremely kinetic, alive, everything dances with life, there's no easy separation between the animate world and the inanimate world. Soul, animus, is everywhere in his work. So he just got me thinking about how the spirit is with us.

Ramona Koval: So is that what you mean when you say 'poetry is at its best a kind of scripture'?

Jay Parini: I'm a religious person and I think that poetry connects us to the world of spirit, the world of a spirit matter. Frost said that poetry is about the deeper and deeper penetration of matter into the world of spirit, and in the final chapter of Why Poetry Matters I give a very, very calm, centred, meditation on the use of TS Eliot's 'Four Quartets'. That's a series of four poems that I have really used as my bible alongside the Bible for, again, probably 40 years. I have read those poems over and over and over again, and I really feel like my life has been endlessly informed by that language, it's so, so perfect and beautiful. I just read a little bit of it...like, for instance, the line I can see here:

In that open field
If you do not come too close, if you do not come too close,
On a summer midnight, you can hear the music
Of the weak pipe and the little drum
And see them dancing around the bonfire
The association of man and woman
In daunsinge, signifying matrimonie—
A dignified and commodiois sacrament.
Two and two, necessarye coniunction,
Holding eche other by the hand or the arm
Whiche betokeneth concorde.

You know, everywhere in the 'Four Quartets' there's language which somehow lives in association with the language of the scriptures, the Bible, and lives in easy commerce with the great philosophers. Eliot had a kind of total vision of the world which involved an understanding of Greek philosophy, the great pre-Socratic philosophers, Heraclites, for example. He begins the poem with an epigraph from some of these pre-Socratic philosophers, especially Heraclites. The lines like 'The way up and the way down are the same way', that's one of his epigraphs. In fact, last night I got into bed late and I'm here alone in London for a week, and for whatever reason I got up and I turned the lamp on and I simply wrote down in my notebook 'The way up and the way down are the same way'. Lines like that just keep coming back to me.

But I guarantee your listeners, the 'Four Quartets' is something that can transform your life because Eliot had deep connections with Christianity, with Buddhism, with Hinduism, with all of the world's great religions and all of the insights of this mythology come to bear in these deeply meditated, heavily cadenced, beautifully written poems. Each of them are centred in a different place—Burnt Norton, Little Gidding, The Dry Salvages, East Coker—and there's a kind of a story about each one of them, but they're very closely related.

So the ninth and final chapter of my book, Why Poetry Matters, is called 'Divine Parameters' and it's simply a study of the 'Four Quartets' and how these poems have answered some of the crucial questions I have about life such as who am I, where have I come from, where am I going, how am I in this life with other people, how do our lives connect? 'What can I do to be saved?' in a sense is the question.

Ramona Koval: You also say that poetry matters in part because of its potential for political expression and also that, as far as political sympathies go, 'most of the major poets of the 20th century would fall into the conservative or reactionary camp', and I wondered why you think that is.

Jay Parini: I wish I could answer that question but it's certainly since the mid 20th century most poets would fall into a kind of leftwing camp, it would be anti-war, it would be fairly liberal. In American terms, sort of democratic, if you think of poets like Robert Lowell or any of the great contemporary poets, Adrienne Rich would a feminist poet, very much on the left. But it's ironic that the great 20th century founding poets, the modernists, TS Eliot, WB Yeats, Frost, Ezra Pound, these poets were very deeply conservative. I think it's because they were on this median line or fault line between tradition and experiment. I think all of them were deeply concerned with trying to make it new. That was the whole focus of the modernist movement; make it new. Nevertheless, they understood, as Ezra Pound said, that poetry is news that stays news, it's always fresh. For it to be always fresh means it has to have a kind of intimate connection with the poetic tradition. Eliot, Pound, Frost, Wallace Stevens, another conservative, Yeats, these poets really did read the great Greek and Latin poets carefully, they knew their Dante, they understood the traditions of English poetry.

Ramona Koval: So they had something to conserve.

Jay Parini: They had something that was worth conserving. So when the world is breaking apart in 1914, 1915, 1916, when millions are being killed and disrupted, there were immigrants wandering the planet, the terrible destruction of WWI, what are they going to hold onto? TS Eliot, at the end of The Waste Land says, 'These are the fragments I have shored against my ruins,' and I think his mind...he's having a nervous breakdown and he's rummaging through the history of philosophy and literature and thought and coming up with images. He looks over London Bridge and he sees the crowd flowing and he says, 'I had not thought death had undone so many.' And that's a line verbatim taken from Dante's Inferno. Virgil in that poem looks down at the great crowds in Hell and he says, 'I had not thought death had undone so many.' So Eliot has got this memory like flypaper and these fragments...bits of poetry cling to that mind, and he keeps reorganising them, reshaping them, pulling them together into new wholes. Frost is doing the same thing, he's reaching deeply into the traditions of Latin poetry in his work, for they're going back to the pastoral tradition.

Ramona Koval: Well, you know what? I have a feeling that some of those kids in that class of Robert Frost that you talked about might well in 20 or 25 years be telling somebody who's intervening them, 'It all began when I broke into the Robert Frost cottage and I got to hear Jay Parini talk about poetry,' because I'd sign up if I heard you, and I have and I do.

Jay Parini: You have, you've signed up and here you go, and now you've got all these people in Australia signed up to my class here.

Ramona Koval: Exactly. The book we've been talking about is Why Poetry Matters, it's published by Yale University Press. Jay Parini, thank you so much for speaking to me again on The Book Show. I'm sure we'll speak again.

Jay Parini: Well, anytime you can have me.

Publications

Title: Why Poetry Matters

Author: Jay Parini

Publisher: Yale University Press

Description: ISBN: 9780300124231