Kendal Trips in 2022

languages.

One Path to Poetry

Llyn Clague

I can still picture the moment, although it was more than six decades ago. I was lying in bed, probably around one p.m. (yes, p.), after the midday meal on a German farm near Wesel-amRhein. It was supposed to be nap-time, though I was struggling to stay awake, reading German poetry as I tried to improve and expand my German as quickly as possible.

It was early June. The previous month I had finished my junior year in Sweden. I was the first from my college (Antioch, in Ohio) to participate in the Scandinavian Seminars, a Danish-run exchange program. That experience, to put it metaphorically, made a definitive bend in the river of my life. The river might continue in the same direction for a long distance, or it might turn back: but wherever it went, nothing would undo the bend.

Two things during that year had a profound effect on me. One was learning Swedish. I started in August, using, as I remember, a 78-rpm “record” (remember those?) that would produce a phrase and leave a gap for me to say it back. By late September I was on a family stay (also a farm), one of two before my school started in November. I helped bring hay into the barn and accompanied the farmer on many other chores, but my major focus was on learning Swedish. I had taken years of French in middle and high school because there were more pretty girls there than in woodshop, but this was serious. I was a “broken-tongued” foreigner (speaking with an accent); I listened, practiced, memorized intensely. And was rewarded: kind people said how well I spoke long before I did, and through the winter and into the spring, as I became thoroughly fluent and “repaired my tongue” (became almost completely accent-less), I felt real pride in my accomplishment. As a kind of bonus, I enjoyed wide-ranging discussions with my more sophisticated friends about language itself.

The second thing that affected me is a little more complicated to explain. Perhaps more than I consciously realized then, I had felt alienated at home: the misfit in the family, a “wrong-un,” even the cliché-ish “black sheep” in a white family (not so fairytale-like an image, however, in 90 percent Black Washington, D.C. at the time). This strong sense of my lack of belonging, even legitimacy, at home was certainly part of my urge to go abroad. My conflicted childhood then contrasted sharply with the warmth of the families and the school that welcomed and accepted me. The difference was very emotional for me, and at some point (I don’t remember the moment) I had an epiphany: my real role is the alien. I belong as the broken-tongued foreigner. Deeply felt even if perhaps irrational, it gave my “outsider” sense a foundation that would return, later that summer, in poetry.

So back to the bedroom and the non-nap, with sunshine slipping through the curtains. I had a small paperback of Johann Goethe’s lyric poetry. The nap period was short, and I was still looking up a lot of words in the dictionary, which made even a short story a slog. The lyrics were generally short, the language straightforward, conversational, the images vivid, and the emotions directly expressed. Goethe was in his twenties in the 1770s, and his expressive romanticism antedated the British Romantics – Shelley, Byron, Keats, Wordsworth – by a quarter century. He and other writers (like Mozart and Hadyn in music) were breaking away from the heavy cultural and intellectual dominance of the French Enlightenment to create a fresher German art – throw out the Establishment! I could agree with that, but more to the point, we were both in our early twenties, he and I, not quite 200 years apart. The joys and pains of love seemed timeless. (Liebe, Liebe! Lass mich los! Love, love! Let go of me!)

But it was not just the shared thrill of love lyrics. Because my German was still rudimentary, I read slowly, syllable by syllable, line by line. I lingered over individual words, often repeating them aloud in order to shape them in my mouth, to pronounce them properly. I carefully noted the case- and verb-endings (German is an inflected language). And above all I listened, and I heard the sounds in the poems reverberate within and among the individual lines in a way I had never done in English. In my schooling at home the mantra had been to analyze, identify the key ideas, or more colloquially rip the guts out it. Here I heard the music, the shape, the texture: here I, the alien, the broken-tongued, felt at home in a foreignlanguage poem.

Further beyond the love poems, Goethe’s range of lyrics deeply impressed me. This wasn’t just a narrow slice of emotional and intellectual life: at one moment he would be challenging the gods (Hey, you up there, what do you think you’re doing?), at the next he might be reverent and prayerful (kiss the hems of their robes….) Some poems were full of speed (To horse! to horse!), others deeply contemplative. In one, about a conflicted love affair, he challenges “destiny” itself.

In a nutshell, lyric poetry, starting but not ending with Goethe, was not only a whole new world to me, it was a whole new way of perceiving and responding to the world. It gave me a way to accept and value feelings that were irrational, emotional (not “intellectual”!), deeply personal, and very different from the “expected” standards of “home.” So … I could be a poet! I want to be a poet…. The river of my life, unlike that of some of my peers in Scandinavian Seminars who stayed permanently in Europe, bent back toward the United States, in that at the end of the year I returned to college in Ohio. But it continued, undeflected, to flow in the direction of poetry.

This description – in prose – may help you gain an understanding of my “path to poetry.” The accompanying poem (next page) may help you share some of the feelings I had during my walk along the beginning of that path.

Alien and Intimate

Llyn Clague

Alien before intimate, poetry in my native American for me posed more a barrier to clarity than a focus of intensity, like translucent glass in place of clear panes of prose.

Abroad as a student, immersed in alien speech, in my very foreignness I found my interior identity made manifest: in the warmth of family I was an outsider; among my schoolmates, however intimate the debates, my accent marked me as other.

The written language only with great effort and a dog-eared dictionary gradually became transparent. Plain prose – even a short story –seemed a flood of words opaque as white water, while a poem, though more layered, was, at first, simply shorter.

Slowed by compressed poetic diction, I plodded, word by word, through each lyric, cherishing in time the sweetness of rhyme I had missed at home, feeling rhythms with a precision I had heard only in jazz.

The accumulation of poems, like a ray of light laid open by a prism in a broad arc from red to violet, revealed to me an interior beyond the glass of prose: a world no longer obscured beneath my fierce, gregarious loneliness a world where alien and intimate meet.