To be an artist is to live hanging on the precipice between recognition and artistic value, never knowing whether your art will reach either bank, or will travel between the two, or be swallowed by the fathomless pit of invisibility. We do not know how our work stirs another mind or touches another heart, how it focuses on the death of the world. We don't know who will receive it in a year or a generation or a century and be saved by it, be saved by it. “The greatest poets are never crowned until death has turned their brows to bone,” wrote Elizabeth Barrett Browning, not fully aware – or perhaps not at all – that she was transforming the art of her time.
This is the eternal problem of the artist, because the crown given or rejected by the changing tastes of today's society has little effect on how the work itself will stand the test of time as a vessel of truth and beauty, whether it will pass down the generations or pass into oblivion. Walt Whitman almost died in obscurity when his supervisor Leaves of Grass for the first time he met with contempt and neglect. Emily Dickinson, unpublished in her lifetime, never lived to see her work transform a century of thought and feeling. Germaine de Staël captured this fundamental pitfall of the work of art in her wise observation that “true glory cannot be found in relative celebrity.”
In our culture, obsessed with celebrity and fearful of instant approval, what begins as creative work often ends up as flotsam in the media of self-satisfaction – a bunch of fake crowns that come in the form of retweets and likes and best-seller lists, untethered from any real measure of artistic value and longevity. How, then, can an artist live with that sacred, terrifying uncertainty with which all creative work enters the world, and continue to make art?
That's it WS Merwin (September 30, 1927–March 15, 2019) examines a remarkable poem celebrating his mentor, the poet John Berryman, published in Merwin's 2005 book. Migration: New and Selected Poems (public library). At its heart is one of the biggest, hardest, most beautiful truths about creative work, including soul-saving advice on how to stay healthy as an artist.
Berryman had founded Princeton's creative writing program and was teaching there when Merwin enrolled as a freshman in 1944. The thirty-year-old professor immediately recognized the unusual genius of the seventeen-year-old poet, who would go on to win the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award – “a real thing for a man later,” Berwirry would remember. Merwin himself would remember his mentor as “totally unsympathetic” – a quality he valued. That constructive, constructive brutality, to which Merwin was forever indebted, emerges with unsympathetic love in this poem in memory of his learned teacher, read here by an astrologer, a literary artist and a master of poetry. Janna Levin:
BERRYMAN
by WS MerwinI will tell you what he told me
just years after the war
as we once called
the second world wardon't lose your pride yet he said
you can do that when you are old
lose quickly and you may
just instead of it in vainonce he suggested
to change the normal order
of similar words in a line of verse
why do you point to something twicehe suggested that I pray to the Muse
kneel down and pray
right there in the corner with him
he said he meant itit was in the days before the beard
and drinking but he was deep
on the waves he travels with
chin to the sides and head tilted like a tacking sloophe was much older than the allowed dates
he was much older than me, he was in his thirties
He lowered his nose in his voice
I think he was affected in Englandabout publishing he advised me
writing my wall with throw away slips
his lips and the bones of his long fingers trembled
with the prominence of his ideas about poetryhe said there was a great presence
that allowed everything and passed it on
there was love in the poems
Love was a master and he admired movement and innovationI hadn't started reading yet
I asked how you can be sure
that what you write is true
any good and said you can'tyou can never be sure
you die without knowing
whatever you wrote was good
if you must be sure don't write
Nearly three decades after teaching Merwin, Berryman would include his advice to young writers:
I would recommend the cultivation of extreme indifference to both praise and blame because praise will lead to vanity, and blame will lead to self-pity, and both are bad for writers.
Along with artist Ann Hamilton's beautiful idea of ”doing not knowing” and this collection of timeless advice from some of humanity's greatest writers, revisit Levin's beautiful reading of Ursula K. Le Guin's hymn to time, Maya Angelou's universally clarifying call to humanity, Adrienne the first woman and WHT world director. Auden's elegy of unrequited love.
