Dresden, June 2022, an airport: a German-speaking couple behind me laugh. A third person, a man, abruptly offers in English: “It’s based on a poem by WH Auden, a good one.”
Lisbon, still June 2022, an afternoon-light struck theater: a Ukrainian writer from Kyiv pauses, then says that with her husband a soldier during Russia’s invasion of her city “ it helps to be translating a poem by WH Auden.”
Here’s to the hat trick, the trifecta of summer. Asked about ‘first real poets’, I breathe to my long hallway, a bookshelf, and green/green beyond window: WH Auden.
His Selected Poems I purchased maybe for a class–Yeats to Auden– maybe as a new grad student at Vanderbilt. I would TA for this course 3 times. Professor Vereen Bell never got all the way to Auden, though. On the sidewalk, a grad student some years ahead of me argued that Auden had written a few great poems but so many bad ones that he was, after all, ‘a minor poet.” Half-sun on bare arms. Was this why we never reached Auden in that class, still among the most mesmerizing of my hours in school? The woman was adamant and very beautiful.
Like many, I first loved “In Praise of Limestone.” Florida, where I live now, slides fitfully atop the same stone, and I’ve spent a long time thinking about underwater escapes through porous karstic routes: the nymph Arethusa, who vanishes in a swell of fresh water through salt, is a founding myth for me. I loved the young men’s casual nudity, the queerness, the poet’s understanding that limestone is also a motherstone. So much of that poem I didn’t quite follow phrase by phrase at first. Could music not –why this word at the end of the line–smell? The rolling beauty almost still loses me: lines enjambed in vast, tidal thought and image sweeps. Other things that became part of my subterranean self are more iconically traceable: children fall from everywhere in a current manuscript collab with Amaranth Borsuk, for example. My son, a comic book artist, has recently made a series of panels of falling men without faces. Is he thinking of Auden? Of Brueghel? I think not. But something’s in the air there that once again feels like now.
Of course, I also loved early the poet’s Shakespearean re-up plus colonialist underpinnings in his ars poetica, The Sea and the Mirror. How Auden invites us into an upstagable forever–the sheer audacity to show how we could play all the parts and change them: today we’re the curtain, the audience, Sycorax’s rage. And a secret: I even love the late, funny, thoroughly uneven Thanksgiving for a Habitat by Auden: we get to go everywhere in that long wandering poem too, room by room. I’d never read a man of early to mid-20th century who wrote about domestic spaces so well:
…...not
a cradle,
a
magic Eden without clocks,
and
not a windowless grave, but a place
I
may go both in and out of.
Despite his ranginess, the various arguments about him, and his willingness to write both wittily and in “bad taste” in addition to many life-ravishers, WH Auden remains for me embeddedly great– partly bc he was all that. And mostly because in him the act of thinking is so very beautiful, a human way of loving. Plus those plus ultra lines: “....but when I try to imagine a faultless love..” Must keep arguing with The Dyer’s Hand. Be glad for poetic impatience with alt-right minds. So anti-war. And at the end of July, I suddenly remember that Vereen Bell, who never quite got around to teaching Auden in class, had gifted me a story from his own parents: they were sitting in an outside cafe with Auden when his lover Chester Kallman left with another man. How Wyston had carried on conversing with tears running down his face. I meandered my way through this story while walking with a friend to another museum: “About suffffffffffffffffffff…….”
Back in Lisbon, the woman translating WH Auden during the months her husband has been a soldier in Ukraine surprisingly comes back to what keeps coming back to her (“Lay your sleeping head, my love, / human on my faithless arm”) as a reason to keep translating him. I flip pages in summer’s little black notebook to what seems, in this awful moment, right to her about WH Auden’s poetry: he’s both “angry and optimistic.” Back home in August, I found I’d written this down under times for the train and an illegible note about Brueghel.
Terri Witek [photo credit: joseph witek] is the author of 7 previous books of poems: a new volume, Something’s Missing in This Museum, is forthcoming in 2023. Exit Island was a Florida Book Award medalist; The Rape Kit was the Slope Editions Prize 2018 winner, judged by Dawn Lundy Martin. Martin calls The Rape Kit “ a grand success, the best we’ll get. Fresh, relevant, and heartbreaking” and “a fire in the throat of a culture that has no appropriate language for rape and its aftermath…”
Witek’s visual poetics work is featured in JUDITH: Women Making Visual Poetry (2021), and in the WAAVe Global Gallery of Women’s Asemic Writing and Visual Poetry (2021) as well as in arts venues. The poet’s collaborations with Brazilian visual artist Cyriaco Lopes (cyriacolopes.com) have, since 2005, been shown nationally and internationally: in New York, Seoul, Miami, Lisbon, Valencia (Spain) and Rio de Janeiro. The duo are represented by The Liminal gallery in Valencia: their most recent solo gallery show is the imaginary pediment. Since 2011, collaborations with new media artist Matt Roberts (mattroberts.com) often use augmented reality technology and have been featured in Matanza (Colombia), Lisbon, Glasgow, Vancouver, and Miami. Recent collaborative work with poet Amaranth Borsuk loops the pandemic and the eco-crisis as a crisis of rain and smoke between worlds; that with weaver Paula Damm combines text/textile. Individual and collaborative work has been featured in a wide variety of text venues, including Fence, Hampden-Sydney Poetry Review, American Poetry Review, Poetry, Slate, Hudson Review, Lana Turner, The New Republic, and many other journals and anthologies.
With Cyriaco Lopes, Witek team-teaches Poetry in the Expanded Field in Stetson University’s low-residency MFA of the Americas; they also run The Fernando Pessoa Game as faculty in the summer Disquiet International Literary Program in Lisbon. Witek directs Stetson’s undergraduate creative writing program , and holds the university’s Sullivan Chair in Creative Writing. She is the recipient of both the McInery Award and the John Hague Award for teaching. terriwitek.com