[Robert J. Clawson]

David,

Sorry about the run of comments. This is probably my most important, regarding what I can learn from you.

Whenever people ask me what poets influence me most, I answer, Yeats, Frost, Hughes, and Heaney. The last thing I would want anyone to think is that I WRITE like any of them, yet I love Yeats's dramatic lyrics, Frost's dramas, Hughes' narratives, and Heaney's admixture of these precedents plus his apparent "ratcheting up" of the sounds with which his predecessors played. Each of these poets has a keen ear, and each further exploits the talent. Heaney, I think, has the keenest ear of all, or at least takes the greatest risks as he employs his sounds.

But, in your essay on Frost and Heaney, you tie it up with PLAY, and play is what most intrigues me about poetry. Song, yes, but not if it doesn't play. I think the song is in the peculiar, and we don't strike peculiar notes until we're willing to play. Play takes risk. Play, which may sound like the easiest thing to do, perhaps the laziest, is to me the key to making a way to a poetic destination. I think that Frost and Heaney each are wonderfully playful poets. Despite their dark sides, I think all four, Yeats, Frost, Hughes, and Heaney would thoroughly enjoy each other at recess.

I'd like to hear more about your notion of PLAY.

Bob

[David Mason]

Oh, yes. I'm with you. My disseration on Auden was called "The Purposes of Play," and dealt with his longer poems. It was the younger Auden who called poetry "a game of knowledge." Auden and Frost are the two poets who most often use the word play in their discourse on poetry. And who was it--one of the German poets, I think--who said, "A man is most nearly himself when he is at play."

Remember Yeats saying "Their eyes, their ancient, glittering eyes, are gay" in the old sense of gay of course. But this is one of the paradoxes of poetry, right at the heart of the matter. Poets are most serious about their business when they appear to others to be most frivolous. Auden also called poetry "A reverent frivolity." I think my college administrators consider me a bit cracked, and that's as it should be. If my students and I aren't having fun when we talk about poetry, I want to say, we're doing something dead wrong. I enjoyed the response of one student on his course evaluation for my last poetry writing class: "Sometimes it seemed we did more playing than working." But this is the anarchic spirit even in the most obsessive formalist poet. I know I'm on course when the joy of creation, verbal and otherwise, is pulsing through me. Mind you, I sometimes think this might just be a symptom of low-level bi-polar disorder. But it's a spirit in which one is taken out of oneself, and it is quite intoxicating. Speaking of which, I'm also fond of Cyril Connelly's statement that "The reward of art is not fame or success, but intoxication. That is why so many bad artists are unable to live without it."

My great objection to much American poetry is that it's so damned Puritanical. So what if the subject of a poem is serious or not? The spirit of play has to be there in the making of it, or it won't really get off the ground as poetry.

Ultimately, I agree with Frost that nature seems to be winking at us, toying with us, so we might as well wink at our own creations. Seriousness does not always have to be taken seriously--a lighter heart even in grief is much to be desired, though of course not always achievable.

I'll have a review of several poets in the next issue of The Hudson Review called "In Praise of Artifice," which is of course precisely what I was told should not be praised when I was young. I praise Paul Muldoon's spirit of play in the review, but comment that I wish it were more often play for mortal stakes (Frost again, of course). And I praise Michael Donaghy as, for me, a better model of what I mean. This is rushed--maybe I'll come back to it later....

[Robert J. Clawson]

Fine stuff for "rushed," David. Thanks.

Russell Baker once wrote a column in the Times about how children are serious, adults are solemn.

Bob

[David Mason]

Perhaps poets are among those who reverse Russell Baker's formula?

[David Mason]

PS- I must also have been thinking of Frost's "Directive," a serious poem if there ever was one, yet we're taken on a quest-journey in which we must be lost enough to find ourselves, and we're headed for the children's playhouse, and then the source of water near the "house in earnest," where the poet has hidden the grail. It's a game of hide and seek, meaning and the play of searching for it--and the grail was stolen from the children's playhouse! There's an anecdote, too, in Auden's prose, about how as a boy he played engineer, damming a little stream and creating an imaginary world of mud that he could dominate. I think Frost and Auden would agree that poets are still playing at this very game, using the materials of the world to make another world they can manipulate, a world of their own imagining, but one that partakes of, or is built of, the world we all inhabit.

[Richard Wakefield]

Frost's comments on play always make me ponder the many ramifications of the word. I think he meant it in part (in part!) to evoke the engineer's sense as well: the amount of movement allowable within necessary constraints. That's an important part of the music of meter, isn't it? It's also a religious notion in a way, that we're given the great restrictions or requirements of life but are left to find our own range of acceptable movement. William James touches on the same idea, saying that we are most ourselves in discovering the range in which our will can influence the world, whether in a poem or in building a bridge or, I suppose, playing a game. I sometimes fear that our modern world, for all its apparent freedom of choice, allows us far less room for play in that fundamental sense.
RPW

[RCL]

David, that's the best brief discussion of "Directive" I've ever heard. He was also playing, perhaps, with the modernism of Eliot et.al, having said this was his cross-over poem to that poetic world. My students usually connect the grail quest with Eliot's narrator. Thanks.

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Ralph

[This message has been edited by RCL (edited January 02, 2002).]

[David Mason]

Thanks for the responses. Yes, "play" does have wonderful sway through its meanings--rather like a birch tree bent to left or right, eh?

[Jan D. Hodge]

John Ciardi, in one of his lectures of poetry, defined play as "making things difficult for the fun of it." Seems to me that speaks to this same spirit.

Jan

[David Mason]

Yes, and I can think of ways in which I value poets who make things simple for the fun of it, too.