POETS Day! Anthony Hecht

© OpenStreetMap-Mitwirkende, openstreetmap.org, CC BY-SA 2.0.

I used to work for a wine distributor. I’d carry open bottles around in my shoulder strap cooler and pour a taste for buyers and employees at restaurants and wine shops, take orders, and treat people who bought a lot or used to buy a lot but had slipped recently to lunch. It was fun at first, but after a while it became like any other job. The idea of working “in wine” is great and all, but given time and it loses its luster. You’re moving product. Might as well be shoes.

The bonus was the built in POETS Day. You didn’t need to make a “Piss Off Early, Tomorrow’s Saturday” type declaration, because if all went as planned, trucks checked in that deliveries were made to all your accounts by one or two Friday afternoon and that was that. The wine buyers had weekend diners to plan for, cases to help party throwers carry to their cars, etc. And, you had whatever dregs of tasting wine was left in the shoulder bag to sip with friends. Long lunches that bled into weekends were the norm. Expected.

Unless you serviced Charlie’s account. Charlie managed a fine dining place on the eastern end of our delivery area, which was just beyond the eastern end of what most would consider the Birmingham metro area. He was a nice guy, so you didn’t want to be mad at him, but at least once a month he’d call mid-Friday afternoon in a panic. He’d forgotten to order something and that something was never something trivial. One time it would be a pre-advertised pairing for a sold-out wine dinner, the next a champagne for a rehearsal dinner. It was always a job-endangering error and he was an otherwise good customer so I’d have to go to our warehouse all the way at the western extreme of town, pack up my Honda with his hooch, and fight school check out, honest POETS Day folk, and eventually rush hour traffic getting to him in the east. I’d rarely get there before six or seven. He was a POETS Day killer.

Don’t take these things for granted. I did. As a wine salesman, my Friday afternoons were assumed relaxation. It hurts to have to work when the weekend beckons. It hurts worse when you see freedom and it’s taken away.

Get free. Lie, fib, whatever. Enjoy a few extra hours of weekend. It’s your afternoon, but try a little verse first.

***

Anthony Hecht’s father was a stockbroker during the Great Depression. I don’t know if he made imprudent investments or if his frequent catastrophic losses were par for the era’s course, but his mother’s parents were needed to bail the family out, a devastating blow to his father’s ego. I don’t know which numbered more: the losses, the bailouts, or his father’s unsuccessful suicide attempts, but all are referred to in the plural. Apparently more successful stockbrokers’ bodies were covered with blankets and left on the streets until whatever authority responsible for removing them got to the task. Hecht saw them laid out as a boy, also in the plural.

He wasn’t much of a student in his younger years. Unimpressive, it seems, rather than bad, but his lack of accomplishment caused friction with his parents. He made it to Bard where he discovered Auden, among other poets. Things were looking up. He was finally happy. Then he got drafted.

In World War II, Hecht saw combat in Germany and Czechoslovakia. In the Army Specialized Training Program, he was taught French and German, so when his unit liberated Flossenbürg concentration camp, he was among those ordered to collect stories and information from the newly freed French-speaking prisoners. What he saw and heard haunted him for the rest of his life.

His poetry could, understandably, be dark.

More Light! More Light!
Anthony Hecht (1923-2004)

for Heinrich Blücher and Hannah Arendt

Composed in the Tower before his execution
These moving verses, and being brought at that time
Painfully to the stake, submitted, declaring thus:
“I implore my God to witness that I have made no crime.”

Nor was he forsaken of courage, but the death was horrible,
The sack of gunpowder failing to ignite.
His legs were blistered sticks on which the black sap
Bubbled and burst as he howled for the Kindly Light.

And that was but one, and by no means one of the worst;
Permitted at least his pitiful dignity;
And such as were by made prayers in the name of Christ,
That shall judge all men, for his soul’s tranquillity.

We move now to outside a German wood.
Three men are there commanded to dig a hole
In which the two Jews are ordered to lie down
And be buried alive by the third, who is a Pole.

Not light from the shrine at Weimar beyond the hill
Nor light from heaven appeared. But he did refuse.
A Lüger settled back deeply in its glove.
He was ordered to change places with the Jews.

Much casual death had drained away their souls.
The thick dirt mounted toward the quivering chin.
When only the head was exposed the order came
To dig him out again and to get back in.

No light, no light in the blue Polish eye.
When he finished a riding boot packed down the earth.
The Lüger hovered lightly in its glove.
He was shot in the belly and in three hours bled to death.

No prayers or incense rose up in those hours
Which grew to be years, and every day came mute
Ghosts from the ovens, sifting through crisp air,
And settled upon his eyes in a black soot.

There are several instances of his having an event; nervous breakdown, panic attack, what have you. None of the sources I’ve read gave a clinical rendering, but the incidents were serious, at least once requiring a lengthy hospital stay. Wikipedia adds “although he was spared electric shock therapy, unlike Sylvia Plath, whom he had encountered while teaching at Smith College.” I’m not sure if that’s supposed to tell us that his mental issues were not as grave as Plath’s, that his doctors were not as high on the treatment as hers, thought he wasn’t a candidate, that his or her doctors were more humane, or what. It’s not very useful throwing her in as a comparison, but it’s interesting that he knew her. Famous literary people pop up in his biography. It’s not that they shouldn’t. A promising poet will have opportunity to meet established or other promising poets, but that’s not exactly it.

I’m not talking about figures who crossed his path once he became well known. He was Poet Laureate from 1982 to 1984, so you’d expect he met Reagan. I don’t mean that kind of thing. I mean before he was prominent, before his collection The Hard Hours won the ’68 Pulitzer. He went to prep school with Jack Kerouac. He served with Robie Macauley. When his parents learned he planned on pursuing a career in poetry, they tried to talk him out of it. When he failed to listen, they sent a family friend, Doctor Seuss, to better make their case, though they probably called him Theodor. Teddy.

As a student he knew Elizabeth Bishop, Allen Tate, John Crowe Ranson, and Robert Lowell. Before he was known, before he’d published his first collection, he’d already made enviable rounds.

The above poem, from his Pulitzer-winning collection, is considered his finest by many. The Holocaust figures prominently in his work, as does war. That’s to be expected given what he saw. For me, he’ll be the author of one of the wittiest poems I’ve read. His “The Dover Bitch,” which I’ve discussed here before and is also from The Hard Hours, was a lighthearted answer to Matthew Arnold’s sonorous “Dover Beach.” Arnold warned of doom and Hecht didn’t despair.

Serious subjects, and none falls as heavy as the Holocaust, exert a pull, the weight of the subject accompanied by an appropriate gravity. He had his episodes, but Hecht understood the need for levity.

from Three Prompters from the Wings

This is true as well
Of wisdom and ignorance
And of happiness and pain:
Nothing is purely itself
But is linked with its antidote
In cold self-mockery—
A fact with which only these
Born with a Comic sense
Can learn to content themselves.
While heroes die to maintain
Some part of existence clean
And incontaminate.

The last few lines echo the plight of the Pole in “More Light! More Light!”

Levity and fear come together in “Lizards and Snakes.”

Lizards and Snakes

On the summer road that ran by our front porch
Lizards and snakes came out to sun.
It was hot as a stove out there, enough to scorch
A buzzard’s foot. Still, it was fun
To lie in the dust and spy on them. Near but remote,
They snoozed in the carriage ruts, a smile
In the set of the jaw, a fierce pulse in the throat
Working away like Jack Doyle’s after he’s run the mile.

Aunt Martha had an unfair prejudice
Against them (as well as being cold
Towards bats.) She was pretty inflexible in this,
Being a spinster and all, and old.
So we used to slip them into her knitting box.
In the evening she’d bring in things to mend
And a nice surprise would slide out from under the socks.
It broadened her life, as Joe said. Joe was my friend.

But we never did it again after the day
Of the big wind when you could hear the trees
Creak like rockingchairs. She was looking away
Off, and kept saying, “Sweet Jesus, please
Don’t let him near me. He’s as like as twins.
He can crack us like lice with his fingernail.
I can see him plain as a pikestaff. Look how he grins
And swinges the scaly horror of his folded tail.”

To the boys, the prank is just a bit of fun, and we’re with them through two stanzas. I was egging them on as best a reader can do. That Martha would be scared is hoped for, but that there are reasons for fear beyond one’s kin, that people associate differently according to experience or beliefs, that they do so to our (it drew me in) joke in such a specific manner is itself frighting. Nightmares are bespoke.

This final poem is from his first collection, Summoning of Stones, published in 1954. It’s a thoughtful story. Considered and a useful thought, but not serious in the sense he’s known for. Nor is it lighthearted, although there’s a smirk in parts. His early stuff has been criticized as “ornate or Baroque” according to Poetry Foundation, and that’s fair. Often dense, too. Sometimes in early works, efforts at being poets keep writers from being a poet. Bits of voice and attitude taken from across a spectrum of respected predecessors get pasted on so that the poet is in there, and not even obscured, but weighed down by unnecessaries.

He’s an improved poet by The Hard Hours. In 1984, Joseph Brodsky said of him “without question, the best poet writing in English today.” This is before. I like it a great deal, stilted and all.

As Plato Said

These Public dances and other exercises of the young maidens naked, in the sight of the young men, were moreover incentives to marriage; and to use Plato’s expression, drew them almost as necessarily by the attraction of love as a geometrical conclusion is drawn from the premises.
PLUTARCH

Although I do not know your name, although
It was a silly dance you did with apple flowers
Bunched in your hands after the racing games,
My friends and I have spent these several hours
Watching. Although I do not know your name,
I saw then sun dress half of you with shadow, and I saw
The wind water your eyes as though with tears
Until they flashed like newly-pointed spears.
This afternoon there was a giant daw
Turning above us—though I put no trust
In all these flying omens, being just
A plain man and a warrior, like my friends—
Yet I am mastered by uncommon force
And made to think of you, although it blends
Not with my humor, or the business
Of soldiering. I have seen a horse
Moving with more economy, and know
Armor is surer that a girl’s promises.
But it is a compelling kind of law
Puts your design before me, even though
I put no faith or fancy in that daw
Turning above us. There’s some rigor here,
More than in nature’s daily masterpiece
That bring us, with absolute and clear
Insistence, worms from their midnight soil,
Ungodly honk and trumpeting of geese
In the early morning, and at last the toil
Of soldiering. This is a simple code,
Far simpler than Lycurgus has set down.
The sheep come out of the hills, the sheep come down
When it rains, or gather under a tree,
And in the damp they stink most heartily.
Yet the hills are not so tough but they will yield
Brass for the kitchen, and the soft wet hair
Of the sheep will occupy some fingers. In the bottom fields
The herd’s deposit shall assist the spring
Out of the earth and up into the air.
No. There is not a more unbending thing
In nature. It is an order that shall find
You out. There’s not a season or a bird can bring
You to my senses or so harness me
To my intention. Let the Helots mind
The barley fields, lest they should see a daw
Turning to perch on some adjacent tree
And fancy it their sovereign ruler. No,
However we are governed, it shall draw
Both of us to its own conclusion, though
I do not even know you by your name.