One Art
BY PROF. VAROL AKMAN
Hayden Carruth
"My poems, I think, exist in a state of tension between the love of natural beauty and the fear of natural meaninglessness or absurdity."
Hayden Carruth (pronounced kuh-RUTH) was born in 1921 in Waterbury, Connecticut, and died in 2008 in Munnsville, New York. The son and grandson of newspapermen, he was educated at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (B.A., 1943) and the University of Chicago (M.A., 1948).
From early childhood, Carruth developed affection for jazz, which later became an influence shaping his poetry. His first collection of poems, The Crow and the Heart, was published in 1959. Since then he has produced more than thirty books of poetry, including For You (1970); From Snow and Rock, From Chaos (1973); Tell Me Again How the White Heron Rises and Flies Across Nacreous River at Twilight Toward the Distant Islands (1989); The Sleeping Beauty (1990); Collected Longer Poems (1993); Doctor Jazz (2001); and Toward the Distant Islands: New and Selected Poems (2006).
Galway Kinnell regards Carruth as a virtuoso who wrote "subtle, finely tuned poems in rhyme and meter; syllabics; and in highly formalized free verse." Kinnell also notes that Carruth's poetry is so invisibly crafty that "under its spell we are not in the presence of a poem, but of the world." Adrienne Rich has called him "a part of our country's poetic treasure."
The Bollingen, Guggenheim, and Lannan Foundations, as well as the National Endowment for the Arts, awarded fellowships to Carruth. He has also been presented with the Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize, the Paterson Poetry Prize, the Carl Sandburg Award, the Whiting Award, and the Ruth Lily Prize. His Collected Shorter Poems, 1946-1991 won the National Book Critics' Circle Award and his poems covering the period 1991-1995, Scrambled Eggs & Whiskey, received the National Book Award for Poetry. He has been editor of Poetry, poetry editor of Harper's, and an advisory editor of The Hudson Review.
In his volume of autobiographical essays, Reluctantly (1998), Carruth gave details of his unremitting depression, poverty-stricken years, phobias, suicide attempt (1988), and amorous affairs. He also noted that he has never been a member of a literary group: "The possibility of being where I am -- wherever, however, whenever -- a single eye, an autochthonous imagination, full of sympathy but apart, apart from even myself -- is what I always wanted to demonstrate to myself."
Carruth's earlier three marriages ended in divorce. Then in his final marriage in 1989 to the poet Joe-Anne McLaughlin (30 years his junior) he found great bliss. It can be said that over time an elegiac tone became central to Carruth's poetry. In the following poem addressed to McLauglin, melancholy of his impending death and heartfelt concern for his loved one are rendered with masterly grace.
Testament
So often has it been displayed to us, the hourglass
with its grains of sand drifting down,
not as an object in our world
but as a sign, a symbol, our lives
drifting down grain by grain,
sifting away - I'm sure everyone must
see this emblem somewhere in the mind.
Yet not only our lives drift down. The stuff
of ego with which we began, the mass
in the upper chamber, filters away
as love accumulates below. Now
I am almost entirely love. I have been
to the banker, the broker, those strange
people, to talk about unit trusts,
annuities, CDs, IRAs, trying
to leave you whatever I can after
I die. I've made my will, written
you a long letter of instructions.
I think about this continually.
What will you do? How
will you live? You can't go back
to cocktail waitressing in the casino.
And your poetry? It will bring you
at best a pittance in our civilization,
a widow's mite, as mine has
for forty-five years. Which is why
I leave you so little. Brokers?
Unit trusts? I'm no financier doing
the world's great business. And the sands
in the upper glass grow few. Can I leave
you the vale of ten thousand trilliums
where we buried our good cat Pokey
across the lane to the quarry?
…