New & Selected Poems

Charles O. Hartman

An author’s statement

 

The poems have taken shape beside or between other kinds of work: playing jazz guitar, writing critical prose, building computer programs, teaching. If you don’t put your whole self into the work, it won’t be true so not worth making. But which whole self? Some want to talk, some to dance. From prose through poetry to music, I make this bootstrap choice every time I sit down to work.

A student who saw the fat bundle of proofs asked how it felt to assemble a New and Selected Poems. Maybe for some poets reviewing three or four decades of work is revisiting earlier selves, like paging through a family photo album or a box of old letter carbons. (Remember albums? carbons?) For me it has meant bumping into a crowd of people just as strange and provocative as when I first met them. Like the gathering Proust ends up at, it was the party of a lifetime.

The poems from The Pigfoot Rebellion (1982) are probably as clinched to the details and texture of my personal life as those in anyone’s first book, but its publication was delayed so long that by the time the chapbook handsomely appeared, the mode of double-distilled autobiography already dissatisfied me. In True North (1990), though many of the poems evoked people and feelings someone close to me could have identified, “Lebensraum” sounded in James Merrill’s voice as I was writing it, “Things to Attend To” in John Ashbery’s, “Over a Cup of Tea” in my high-school math teacher’s. If “The Difference Engine” began with my wanting to solo for twenty minutes like Coltrane, in that long stretch it watched its own authorial unity dissolve.

The title poem of Glass Enclosure (1995) sang (at least in its right-hand pages) like Bud Powell, though the poem contradicts as many facts of Powell’s life as of mine. It persisted past expecation—until that voice was through—a lesson that enabled all the longer poems. The third book closes with “Monologues of Soul & Body,” whose authorship is partly given over to the computer, a voice that becomes human only as the poem’s sedulously herds it into our fold.

If The Long View (1999) seems to return to personal concerns in some shorter lyrics, longer ones like “Common Prayer” again refract the person and yield each constituent the stage for its moment. The middle of the book, “Except to Be” (represented here by about a third of the original 48 entries meant to represent potential thousands), emulates the goofy voicelessness of encyclopedias and theological exegeses. The origin of this book’s title poem remains mysterious to me; a Vietnam veteran and a Bible scholar took part, but the despairing narrator was a man I couldn’t place.

Island (2004) included (though this volume doesn’t) eight poems in Greek, which I was learning as I wrote them, and which my English-speaking self could never have written. One layer of “Tambourine,” my longest poem, was dictated by the digits of pi as a mneomic. The short poems of “Morning Noon & Night” were written so fast—72 in 21 days—that either they couldn’t capture my own personal voice or they couldn’t help delineating it; for the life of me I can’t tell which.

Compiling the New section was as strange as culling the old. Because Island was a specially focused book, some of the New poems predate it by several years. Still, in moving from work as early as “lying awake 8/24/72” to poems too recent for any collection, I might have expected some gratifying sense of progress. I don’t see that I’ve gotten any better or worse, slower or faster, more or less sure. I don’t seem to meet a better class of people, though I love them all. The severe “Maud de Chaworth” and the voluble speaker of “Too far—he said,” both of whom I served as amanuensis during a month in Crete just a year or two ago, are as much a part of me, and as little, as the young guy who set out (“A Little Song”) to learn how Sapphic stanzas worked and found out how much in love he was.

Writing poems is always trying to see around a corner. Some poems do it by staring intently enough into the darkness straight ahead to make it bend. Others resort to mirrors—which work when the mirrors exist in the same dimensions as the corners. Some of the best rely instead on hearing, which is wiser about what’s not yet in sight. A poem is finished when it has seen, or heard. Beginning over and over from something like scratch, all these poems startle me by seeming finished.