Letter To An Old Poet
by John Kendall Hawkins
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This article first appeared in Counterpunch on February 14, 2023
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I feel almost ashamed to say that it's taken all these years to finally get around to reading Rainer Maria Rilke in earnest. As an undergraduate, decades ago, I heard all kinds of great things about his masterful idiosyncratic expressiveness that toyed and purloined the heart. He was said to be not only the cat's meow among poets, but the rose's attar stirring up the suspirations of the inner cathedral of the lonely, seeing mind.
But in my circle at that time were two personages who, though pretentious and vaguely narcissistic, were nevertheless quite agreeable romantics to be around. Jeffrey, chief poet and editor of the student literary magazine, and Tom, a Nietzschean with an open marriage that seemed all looky-no-touchy. (Or was that just my experience?). Jeffrey liked cocaine and would pull out a tiny shovel in the middle of a meeting and go to work sniffing snow out of a baggie in his sports coat. Nobody understood his poetry, which seemed, at times, like a confluence of Elizabeth Bishop and his beloved Rilke. But he got laid a lot. And Tom was like the prodigy genius Mozart presented to us in the film, Amadeus, loose with the lyricism and love gun. Tom and his genius wife moved to Germany shortly after graduation. He was Nietzschean, it's true, but he had a thing for Wagner as well. And Rilke's Orpheus, not Young Werther, was his hero. Go forth and sally, was his motto, if sallying is your fate.
Jeffrey and Tom didn't want to harm anybody. Better the swoons of love-talk, back then, than caving to the voodoo music of Reaganomics at work in the collective mind (think of the sound of your piss pressing in the urinal at Fenway Park in the 7th inning of a game they'd given away by the time you got back to your seat: Fuckin Mike Torrez), a credo which the Young Republican Club, overly represented on the Student Council and, so, overly-funded, was constantly rubbing in the face of us Che t-shirt-wearing Sandinistas sporting Daniel Ortega mustaches (even the women).
Jeffrey and Tom were constantly quoting Rilke -- "praise to assenting angels" this, and "Truly being here is glorious" that -- and it frankly got on my nerves and I swore I'd put off reading any Rilke in earnest until I found some pure athletic silence. Boy, am I musclebound by the fullness of emptiness now, 50 years later. f*ck you, Tom, and your bride, Isolde -- and may you both be down and out in some tent city of Heinrichheinestrasse now, reading Duino Elegies to neo-Nazis without the swagger inside. And Jeffrey, you"you didn't have to steal Laura from me, you and me, walking talking ragtime, come across Laura with bags of groceries and she chooses you to help carry her bags home. I had to leave the litmag after she wrote a "soulful" poem about the incident, titling it, "White Girl's Burden." "Scarface" was still shovelling up love when I left.
Half a century later and I'm digging into Rilke's literary Arbeiten and feel like I'm digging my own grave, tossing love by the shovelfuls, up to my neck in dust to dust. I got on the trail to Rilke by way of Lou Andreas-Salome', whose Jungian estrus had strung Nietzsche and Freud along as a muse with the mind of Minerva. You might say she en-manned them. But it was her work with Rilke that paid dividends for the young poet. If you recall the song by Rod Stewart, she was his "Maggie Mae." And when the morning finally kicked him in the head, they went their separate ways, becoming friends without benefits. He, too, was en-manned by her. In his new translation of Rilke's Letters to a Young Poet (2022), Ulrich Baer describes their thing:
On a trip to Venice in 1897, Rilke met Lou Andreas-Salome', a married woman fifteen years his senior who became his lover, mentor, and muse and famously instructed him to shorten his given names to the more masculine Rainer [nee, Rene' Karl Wilhelm Johann Josef Maria Rilke] and impose more discipline on his prodigious poetic talents. Their romantic relationship lasted four years, and their friendship a lifetime.
Alas, not every rising poet is so lucky to have such a Eurydice in his life as a prize wife rescued from the catacombs of his existential crisis -- with benefits (i.e., poetry). When I looked back at my muse she was a pile of salt. And today, I see myself as fatfuck orpheus lite. The Furies, at times eating me alive inside, have made it impossible to get to the next level with my poetry. (Or is it just me? I wonder)
So, here I am, half a century later, reading the Ulrich Baer translation of Rilke's Letters to a Young Poet. And it's a wonderful read. A fantastic translation. Baer's gone out of his way to make the language accessible and fresh, as if Rilke were still alive and writing. It's immediately clear that Rilke was a romantic in his poetic propensities, finding depths in things and nature that many of us contemporaries took for granted and threw away long ago. Baer has Rilke say of army cadet Franz Xaver Kappus's poem "My Soul," in his first of 10 letters published in this volume,
Things are not as easy to understand or express as we are mostly led to believe; most of what happens cannot be put into words and takes place in a realm into which no word has ever entered. Works of art are even more inexpressible than anything else: they are altogether secretive beings whose lives outlast our life, which will inevitably cease to be.
This seems quaint to the modern ear, full of the in-breeding of techno-scientific thinking. We no longer privilege the sacredness of mythopoesis over the logical coherence of systems integration. A Bell ad back in the 70s told us that The System Is the Solution. And most of us soon believed it. But as the late poet and philosopher Louis Hammer, once wrote me,
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