Hayden Carruth Quotes

Why speak of the use of poetry? Poetry is what uses us.

A poem is not an expression, nor it is an object. Yet it somewhat partakes of both. What a poem is Is never to be known, for which I have learned to be grateful.

One thing in our favor: some of this “becoming kinder” happens naturally, with age. It might be a simple matter of attrition: as we get older, we come to see how useless it is to be selfish — how illogical, really. We come to love other people and are thereby counter-instructed in our own centrality. We get our butts kicked by real life, and people come to our defense, and help us, and we learn that we’re not separate, and don’t want to be. We see people near and dear to us dropping away, and are gradually convinced that maybe we too will drop away (someday, a long time from now). Most people, as they age, become less selfish and more loving. I think this is true. The great Syracuse poet, Hayden Carruth, said, in a poem written near the end of his life, that he was “mostly Love, now.

The eye has knowledge the mind cannot share

many paths in the forest have chosen me. I go on any.

On Being Asked to Write a Poem Against the War in Vietnam Well I have and in fact more than one and I'll tell you this too I wrote one against Algeria that nightmare and another against Korea and another against the one I was in and I don't remember how many against the three when I was a boy Abyssinia Spain and Harlan county and not one breath was restored to one shattered throat mans womans or childs not one not one but death went on and on never looking aside except now and then like a child with a furtive half-smile to make sure I was noticing.

The mind of man, which he did not ask to be given, demands a reason and a meaning--this is its self-defining cause--and yet it finds itself int he midst of a radically meaningless existence. The result: impasse. And nausea.

Language not urged and crammed with love is nothing, while that which is is everything.

Indeed poetry is bounded by silence on all sides, is almost defined by silence. from “Fallacies of Silence

For your love given ask no return, none. To love you must love to love.

I'm to have dinner with some people from the bookshop, which is as posh as the motel, at six, then read at seven-thirty. I will have to watch my mouth. Some sarcastic remark about gentrification is almost bound to slip out. Even though the topography is right, this doesn't even look like Vermont. Not a cow in sight, not a single shack held together with staples and Masonite. Where are my people? The ones who used to go to Canada automatically at age 18 and get all their teeth pulled out, a standard right of passage. The ones who believe you can't be an alcoholic if you drink nothing but beer. The ones who know how to roast a haunch of venison with onions and garlic and sage and mustard (and where to find the haunch in July). The ones who buy their clothes at rummage and their cars at the junkyard. The ones who used to be me. Here I am on my balcony with a finger or two of cognac, a cigar, and a laptop computer, wearing my black jeans and my Reeboks. God, it's awful.

I've been reading poetry manuscripts for a poetry prize, not as many this time as in the past--I guess the screening process is more stringent than it used to be. But I haven't found a single book I can be enthusiastic about. I wish now I hadn't agreed to do it, because it puts me in a bind: I've already received and cashed the check, and I must choose a winner, I must write a statement about it, I must have my name attached to it. Which means, in effect, I must tell a lie and be a hypocrite. Of course I could write a check and turn down the assignment, late as it is. But that would bother me a lot too, it's not my style. Damn. These manuscripts--anonymous, but equally divided between women and men--are frightfully stylish and clever and Cantabridgian. Anyway to me they are, for all their brilliance, dry as dust, trivial, pretentious, over-refined, and unrewarding. Not the direction in which our poetry should be moving at this point--or at any point.

The past is nothing and we are in love with it.

I like that name, that game too, though utterly valueless, the animal in us just sufficiently domesticated, our venomous American aggressiveness confined to balls and bats.

I've been reading poetry manuscripts for a poetry prize, not as many this time as in the past--I guess the screening process is more stringent than it used to be. But I haven't found a single book I can be enthusiastic about. I wish now I hadn't agreed to do it, because it puts me in a bind: I've already received and cashed the check, and I must choose a winner, I must write a statement about it, I must have my name attached to it. Which means, in effect, I must tell a lie and be a hypocrite. Of course I could write a check and turn down the assignment, late as it is. But that would bother me a lot too, it's not my style. Damn. These manuscripts--anonymous, buy equally divided between women and me--are frightfully stylish and clever and Cantabridgian. Anyway to me they are, for all their brilliance, dry as dust, trivial, pretentious, over-refined, and unrewarding. Not the direction in which our poetry should be moving at this point--or at any point.

Let the fragments of love be reassembled in you. Only then will you have true courage. Hayden Carruth

Beauty was worth Its every sorrow, mind's fading or World's ending, As darkness covered the garden that is the earth.

The Brook" Murmuring of the brook in late summer darkness, after moonset, as I lay sleepless on the porch cot. A music extraordinarily variable. Each passage of water against its stone sounding a different pitch and rhythm. It was an uncivilized music in the foothills of the mountains, continuing long beyond the endurance of a human singer, almost beyond the endurance of a human listener, syllables of unknown meaning, notes on an unknown scale. A few fat yellow stars above the northern horizon. Without art, the song was perfectly artistic. The unmeaning music and the unknowing listener were one in the loneliness of those distant late summer nights in Vermont. Truly the music meant nothing, no intimation, which was why I liked it so much, my brook murmuring all night in the darkness, and I meant nothing, and I liked that too.

Candor seeks its own unforeseeable occasions.

After Hayden Carruth” It is not snow on hills, nor sleeping silence. Your eardrums beating softly against another’s cheek, another’s lips, and softly beating. Nor is it the garden laid to rest there: the backyard you won’t see again, the piles left. Weeds. A flannel shirt buried. Stuff of the mind, the earth. Rocks for eyes, a heart of twigs, the mountain lion slowly decomposed in silence, onto and into rock. Dust, you say. An old man sleeps like snow on hills. You turn words to some- thing else, something which might stand alone. If you could only hear it. Jacqueline Winter Thomas (March 23, 1991 – April 18, 2019), Jacqueline Winter Thomas was an M.F.A. candidate in poetry at UNC Wilmington where she teaches courses in creative writing. Her poems have been published and are forthcoming in Barrelhouse, Eratio, Nude Bruce Review, Trillium, Burningword, and more. She is interested in the convergence of poetics and poststructural semiotics.