Hayden Carruth Books

Ben Lerner is fantastic at what he does and not only is his material fresh, but his approach at poetry is quite miraculous. Each time I sit down to write a poem, I think of his collection and how it inspired me to become more creative and flexible with my voice. This is a must-read. -->Ben Lerner<-- is way cool...A true artist and genius in his gift.

This book signals that Copper Canyon has turned an important corner. Formerly more concerned with publishing established poets than with discovering new ones, Copper Canyon has now produced the most impressive debut collection I've read in twenty years.

Lerner's sonnets are authentic explorations in an old form. Jargons and cliches combine with the poet's plain observations to illuminate a far-ranging curiosity...and a modern assimilating heart.

While Lerner's work has much in common with L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E writing--an interest in the materiality of language, in postmodern theory, in visual art, and so on--it also has the discursive precision of a more traditional poet--Auden, for example. The Lichtenberg Figures is one of those rare books in which beautiful and playful linguistic surfaces coexist with moments of sincerity.

In the 1998 Hal Hartley movie Henry Fool a perverted garbageman writes a poem that becomes the "best selling poem of all time," eventually earning him the Nobel Prize. Ben Lerner is not a garbageman, but he holds a degree in Political Theory from Brown University, which is close enough to the script that he ought to be in line for recognition by the Swedish Academy. Lichtenberg is a sonnet sequence chloroformed by the lies and swindles of the English language circa 2004. I adore this book. I adorate it.

Check out some of its lines:

What am I the antecedent of?
When I shave I feel like a Russian.
When I drink I'm the last Jew in Kansas.
I sit in my hammock and whittle my rebus.
I feel disease spread through me like a theaory.
I take a sip from Death's black daiquiri.

...

O slender spadix projecting from a narrow spathe,

you are thinner than spaghetti but not as thin as vermicelli.
You are the first and last indigenous Nintendo.

One of the most significant poetry publications at the end of the twentieth century is Hayden Carruth's Collected Shorter Poems. For too long Carruth suffered the lack of a consistent publisher; as a result, much of his best work has gone unnoticed or too little noticed. Notable in a volume as diverse as this are Carruth's monologues and poems about characters delivered in lines that echo their speech; as the speaker in "John Dryden" notes, "have you noticed / I can't talk about him without talking like him?" Like Frost, Carruth captures a sense of character and place while subtly presenting a complex set of meanings, discovering the kind of "natural symbol" ordinary people grapple with to understand their lives. One of the most powerful, "Marvin McCabe," is a monologue by an inarticulate speaker whose friend "Hayden" acts as amanuensis for the poem. Marvin McCabe details his upbringing and the accident that left him incapacitated--able to think but not talk. Other poems in this mode include "Johnny Spain's White Heifer," "Lady," "Marshall Washer," and "Regarding Chainsaws."

Carruth's lyrics display a range of diction and vocabulary which allows him to modulate easily from low to high style and to incorporate moments of humor in otherwise serious, even solemn poems without violating that tone. His lyrics often derive from careful observation of the natural world, not merely to see things but to consider. Typically, Carruth presents his observations through details objective enough to allow us to "see" the situation yet in language that renders the emotional construct of the subject.

The later poems in the volume, following Carruth's move to Syracuse, New York, in 1979, shift not only idiom and locale, as in Asphalt Georgics, a group of poems written in syllabic ballad stanzas employing frequently hyphenated enjambments, but open up very different poetic territory in the Whitmanesque-lined and loopingly discursive poems from Tell Me Again How the White Heron Rises and Flies Across the Nacreous River at Twilight Toward the Distant Islands. The first of these laments the passing of the agrarian lifestyle that provided the basis for traditional georgics while celebrating the persistence of human life amid suburban sprawl that threatens that spirit. The strategies of apparent tangent and indirection Carruth uses to build these poems evolves into structures, in the second, which accumulate like jazz riffs and motifs: they seem to diverge wildly from the "point" of the poem only to swoop around at the end to enlarge the idea of point.

Finally, a collected poems provides a perspective on a poet's career. And this volume demonstrates what some readers have long known: Hayden Carruth possesses greater range of style, scope of subject, and diversity of formal skills than any other poet working in the United States today.

Especially poignant is Carruth's poem "Marvin McCabe," the story of a man who loses his power of speech in a drunk-driving accident..

The poems of Sascha Feinstein intertwine the heart of the blues and human emotion. The reader is taken on a trip through memories of love, death, foreign lands and relationships with ingenous use of song. Thelonious Monk, Billie Holiday, Miles Davis and many others find their place in the strong voice of Feinstein who's lines make their own music. I strongly encourage others to read this book. Even those without a strong love for the blues can enjoy their travels through his poems and relate to the strong sense of humanity that seems to illuminate each page.

Feinstein's poems evoke images of the great Jazz artists of the 20th Century while at the same time bringing the spirit of their music - so often lost when transliterated into words - onto the written page. At times lonely, always emotional, and sometimes spiritual, Misterioso is a collection of profound magnitude.

What a pleasure to read an artist who absolutely knows what he is doing! "Part of the Bargain" is distinguished and original. The book seems to celebrate the delicateness of the human condition while recognizing the harshness of the grief that comes with the territory. Without being arcane, archaic, or sentimental, the poems are smart, insightful, and clear. The voice is consistent--even generous. Whether song or story, Hightower is at the top of his game in every poem!

From an invocation to the muse and polio in the childhood landscape to Hightower's take on "Noli Me Tangere" to a meditation on Filicide (which I had to look up) and public execution. The poems in "Part of the Bargain" are clean and deep hitting. I loved every bit of it!

Extremely creative, poignant, and insight provoking, Uncertain
Grace invites new ways of seeing and knowing. Like verbal
holograms, Rebecca Wee's poems beckon the reader to assemble
multidimensional meanings which are both unique and universal,
private and profound. Her confrontational but empathic studies
compel sensitive and transcendent connections between external
beauty or pathos and inner self. A masterwork from a remarkable
thinker and artist, this refined and very beautiful collection
will stimulate, satisfy, and inspire for many years to come.

Sometimes sad, sometimes funny, the poems in this collection beautifully describe how we, as humans, respond to the world around us. By incorporating vibrant images with fragments of narrative, Rebecca Wee makes clear the connection between what we experience in the present and what we have previously experienced. As readers, we are reminded of the strange beauty of all that is around us, and encouraged to reflect upon those things we have seen or stories we have heard that we simply can't forget. Personally, I found that her poems inspired me to really "take in" the people and things I encounter on a daily basis and appreciate their poignancy, be it painful or pleasurable.

Hayden Carruth, Brothers, I Loved You All (Faculty Press, 1978)

Why must it be such a truism that the best books of any relatively prolific poet must be published by small, out-of-the-way presses with no distribution? Bukowski's Poems Written Before Jumping Out of an 8 Story Window, for example, or Lifshin's A New Film in Love with the Dead. Simic's Nine Poems, Cronshey's Afternoon in the Museum of Late Things. The whole catalog of Liz Willis. It's all brilliant and all impossibly hard to find.

Add Carruth's "wow"-inducing Brothers, I Loved You All, published by Faculty Press, to the list. Now almost impossible to find (though most of it can be found in Collected Shorter and Collected Longer, published in the early nineties by Copper Canyon and must-haves for any poetry fan), Brothers is one of the rarest birds to be found in all of poetry.

Poetry has long been considered a dying art form, and there are valid arguments to be made to that effect. Song has taken the province that poetry trod before it, and in all honesty does much of it better. But the solid image is still, for the most part, the exclusive province of poetry, save for a few surrealist novels and a handful of consistently amazing songwriters. The niche for poetry, since the time of Eliot and Williams, has been the image. (Would that more would-be poets understood this and stopped penning second-rate song lyrics. But I digress.) The poet who persists in formal poetry, or poetry that strays outside the bounds of image, is wading in a pool of hip-deep slime from which ninety-nine percent of poets fail to emerge at all. (Your current author is very much included in this, when he chooses to venture into such dangerous waters.) Of those who do, they may manage a few short pieces that manage to both take the narrative quality of earlier works and add to it the polish necessary to captivate today's reader of poetry, unutterably jaded after years of having schoolroom elephant dung shoved down their throats. A handful of poets are consistently fantastic at this. But very, very few after World War II would ever have even considered trying to do it with the long poem. Hayden Carruth has tried a number of times, usually with less than stellar results compared to his finest short work; in "Vermont," the centerpiece of Brothers, he has succeeded in such a way that, had he never written a single other word in his career that will be remembered, he has etched himself in the canon of American writers.

"Vermont" is an astounding piece of work that traverses history, politics, quirky personalities, the gradual paving of the state, and everything in between, the whole mess. Carruth switches voices as effortlessly as Rich Little roasting Mel Blanc, with subtle changes in diction to bring the whole thing off. Part formal, part free, "Vermont" is, quite simply, must reading for poets, aspiring poets, and poetry fans.

"...Why, hell, I knew a man
living in Coos Junction who wouldn't take
a twenty-dollar bill; he couldn't stand
to carry Andrew Jackson in his back pocket.
'Gimme two tens,' he said. 'Ain't it just like
them fathead red-tape artists? They design
the twenty for a red, then put a great man
like Hamilton on the tens...."

I have no illusions that reading "Vermont" will suddenly turn a nation with millions of wannabes for every real working poet into a nation of Carruths; most people are simply too dull, or too unschooled, to pick up the subtle differences between the brilliance that Carruth displays here and the random, unpoetic barkings of the "socially conscious" poets that never fail to land with such a dull thud. (I know. I've already tried to get them to read Carolyn Forche.) But at least they will have been exposed to such great brilliance. **** ½

Hayden Carruth, From Snow and Rock, from Chaos (New Directions, 1973)

Hayden Carruth has long been one of the finest poets America has to offer, and this slim volume offers a good number of reasons why. The fifty-eight pages of this collection (which can still be found for its extremely low cover price at Amazon thirty years later!) are far less intimidating to the Carruth novice than the eight hundred plus of Collected Shorter Poems 1946-1991, and while the book doesn't include anything of the magnitude of "Ray" or The Bloomingdale Papers, there is more than enough brilliance here to whet the reader's appetite for more of Carruth's soft, often witty poetry. Moving between structure and free verse with a sure hand in both, there is something in this collection for just about everyone. If you haven't yet discovered Carruth, this is an excellent starting point. **** ½

These letters from Hayden Carruth to Jane Kenyon are an intriguing exploration of a relationship between two great poets. I have always been curious about poets' letters, since they write things in letters they might not reveal under any other circumstances, even, perhaps, in their own poems. For instance, in his letter of May 9, 1994, Carruth writes: "So I frittered away the weekend: read a short manuscript, wrote a few letters, watched a hell of a lot of basketball, read what we used to call cheap-screw fiction. I haven't heard that term for a while. At first it meant under-the-counter porn, but later came to mean any escapist literature. As a consequence, on top of the desperation and depression, I feel guilt. What else is new?" For those who picture the writer's life as one in which the author sits thoughtfully poised over a manuscript 24-hours a day, this may come as a revelation: writers waste time, they struggle to keep themselves on track, they fail, they get depressed as a result of their failures. I find this revelation uplifting rather than sad: it shows Carruth's nuts and bolts existence and in doing so, reveals his humanity. In another letter he talks about having to take his laptop computer to a repair shop because of "excessive cat hair." Carruth, a lover of cats, says that his repairman suggested he get rid of the cat whereupon Carruth admits to Kenyon: "I said immediately, 'Oh, I can't do that,' implying that my wife wouldn't stand for it, which was a cowardly way out, and no doubt sexist too. The fact is I wouldn't stand for it either." Such moments of marvelous self-disclosure are frequent in this book. If you are holding off buying this because you've read other authors' letters and found them boring, don't hesitate any longer. Carruth's presence in these letters is huge. These letters are honest, funny, tender, and true. I am in awe of the relationship Carruth and Kenyon had, and a bit envious, too. I highly recommend this book for writers and for those interested in 20th Century poetry.

I am the author of this collection of poems. On January 3, 2001, Garrison Keillor read "The Sailor" from ONLY WHAT'S IMAGINED on his daily National Public Radio program, "The Writer's Almanac." Now I sit back and watch the book's sales-ranking spurt in the direction of #1!

Ms. Olstein sings the songs of angels with lyrics inspired, timeless and resonant. Deeply rooted in the earth and the nether world, she portrays the divinity of nature and humanity; indeed, of life itself. She more than deserves the Hayden Carruth Award. I expect to hear a lot more from this talented young poet.