Burning Bright

The wonderful American poet, Frank Bidart will be 80 on 27 May 2019 and his Collected Poems – Half-light – published in 2017 and recipient of the Pulitzer Prize should be read by anyone interested in contemporary poetry.
     Half-light – the title of the Collected Poems (2017) – is a quintessentially Bidartian title, suggesting as it does not simple illumination but shadow, not clarity of vision but dimness, when things cannot be seen too clearly. Although, of course perception is still possible, and essential in this poet’s enterprise of half a century, the title also conveys both internal and external experience, the on-looker with perception clouded or dimmed and the external source of natural light diminished either at the breaking of night into day, or the falling of day into night, dawn and dusk, beginnings and endings, birth and death. In Bidart’s poetry the human seer is subject to greater elements and experiences than can be contained in the mind or heart. Christopher Spaide contends:

Bidart’s tendency, swept up in divided ceaseless revolt, is to expand: intolerable propositions, even a single word, can detonate into forty-page sequences and book-length interrogations; Half-light itself can be read as a single seven-hundred-page poem, reprising the same obsessions over its fifty-year composition. (1)

In addition to his previous poetry collections, a further 66 pages of new poems – including ‘The Fourth Hour of the Night’ – are published together under the title Thirst. In the notes to Half-light Bidart admits to making changes in format of three poems; ‘The War of Vaslav Nijinsky,’ ‘Confessional’ and ‘The First Hour of the Night’. He explains why this is necessary, as previously noted:

None of the words are different. But in terms of punctuation and “set-up,” they seemed to me too often spoken à haute voix, as if declaimed to the last row of the balcony. I have always heard the voice in them more intimately. They increasingly to my eye lacked this intimacy. I have tried to modulate the voices, by shifting punctuation, spacing, pacing. 

He decries what he sees as his youthful judgmental tone in his poem Book of Life and further says:

This is the first poem I wrote about my family. The four-line refrain now makes me wince – such confidence about what the alternatives are, such speed in judgment. Hard to encounter in writing one’s old self. I feel some version of this throughout the book, but most acutely in Golden State (1973). Such confidence about what the alternatives are…. 

The four-line refrains he refers to is as follows:

Its memory is of poverty,
not merely poverty of means
but poverty of history, of awareness of 
the ways men have found to live.
             (Collected Poems, p.174.)

Such confidence about what the alternatives are; the commentary reflects both age and experience, and is a mark of the poet’s compassion for his younger self (as he doesn’t alter the poem) and the lives his parents lived. It is also a mark of Bidart’s motivation; he writes and continues to write because he is never satisfied with what he has written. Bidart’s famous dramatic monologues demonstrate that the strategy of his poetics rests on the four pillars of voice, autobiography, sources and survival. This strategy can be seen to work throughout his collected poems, and is exemplified in his new poems including the title poem, ‘Half-light’ (Collected Poems p.603) as it embodies paradox and duality both in its structure, themes and figurative language. It consists of 36 lines arranged in 18 couplets across two pages with the familiar, intimate, autobiographical lyric voice of the Bidart that was first heard (read) in ‘California Plush’ (Collected Poems, p.163) incorporating a variety of time zones; of now and memory, of ‘that crazy drunken night’ and ‘yesterday’ of the unattainable future (when both the poet and dead friend he addresses might have become ‘broken- down old men’) and ‘all the years we were | undergraduates.’  This is a poem about the irreconcilable aspects of a lived life, unrequited love, memory and regret and, as always with Bidart, a continuous conversation with the dead. He feels compelled to tell his old friend, now he knows his friend is dead – of his adolescent passion.

We haven’t spoken in years. I thought
perhaps at ninety or a hundred, two

broken-down old men, we wouldn’t
give a damn, and find speech.

When I tell you that all the years we were
undergraduates I was madly in love with you

you say you
knew. I say I knew you

knew. You say
There was no place in nature we could meet.

The italicised line is a repeated line from part II of his earlier poem ‘Confessional’ concerned with his filial relationship with his mother. The earlier poem states that there are two sentences our protagonist “can’t get out of my head” – ‘Forgiveness doesn’t exist’ and (as punctuated in the first poem): 

                 THERE WAS NO PLACE IN NATURE WE COULD MEET. 

This line, his earlier verdict about his relationship with his mother, now becomes a verdict about the poet in the voice of a dead man. It is a conclusion of sorts about human love and shame, self-identity, Oedipal longing, sexuality and its humiliations, friendship and loss. It is difficult not to hear the accusation and awkwardness in the repetition of ‘knew’ and ‘you’. It also implies the question, Bidart’s own riddle, of ‘where in nature can we [the irreconcilable] meet?’  It’s a question central to his poetics – and one he attempts to answer in the first new poem in Thirst – ‘Old and Young’  (Collected Poems, pp.599 – 602); this is a meditation on looking at someone else in a mirror, of an old man looking at a young man in a long mirror “backstage as you | prepare | for a performance.”  It might be about an old man, like Frank Bidart, looking at a younger man such as the actor, James Franco. Over four pages the poem asks whether anyone has made a film about two people looking at each other (and talking to each other) through a mirror: 

trapped but freed 
neither knowing 
why this is better

why this
as long as no one enters 
is release

because you are
twice
his age

THIS IS THE PLACE IN 
NATURE
WE CAN MEET

space which
every other
space merely approximates
             (Collected Poems, p. 601.) 

The mirror is a metaphor for the place in which Bidart has encountered his subjects, his torments, his research and themes of human connection and breach; it brings together the concepts of the male gaze, the voyeur, reflective artist and the study of human nature. It is the medium through which Bidart resolves the repeated dilemma: THERE IS NO PLACE IN NATURE WE COULD MEET – a line and concept he returns to, to articulate filial disobedience and the anguish of unrequited love. In ‘Old and Young’ he declares, at last:

THIS IS THE PLACE IN
NATURE
WE CAN MEET

The mirror is the medium not of solipsistic reflection but the place through which the poet looks outwards to art and making:

suddenly inspired not 
to look at each other 
directly but held by this third 
thing  
                                           (Collected Poems, p. 600.)

          Making is the mirror in which we see ourselves.
                                                                          (Collected Poems, p. 346.) 

Bidart’s mirror – and solution to the divisions and paradoxes of human suffering – is, as it has always been, poetry, his art of making.

Happy birthday, Professor Bidart.

Reference:

(1)   Christopher Spaide, ‘Poetry in Review: Half-light: Collected Poems, 1965–2016, by Frank Bidart,’ Yale Review Jan 2018, Vol. 106 Issue 1, pp.178 – 191.