"The Guild" by Edward Hirsch
This one is for my brothers, living, lost to me, and dead.
The Guild Goodbye to those years we spent leaning over badly typed poems in cramped studies and dank hotel rooms, half-crazed, inconsolable, constantly jabbing pencils at each other, brooding, smoking on the balcony across from a temple on the other side of the river one night in Rome, loyal or disloyal to the old gods, our flawed mentors, our weakness for standing at the podium seeking applause, slashing lines, reciting Blake or Yeats, giving up sleep for late-night sessions listening to Coltrane and gossiping about new books and poets who have been dead for centuries, facing each other knee to knee or sitting side by side over each fresh draft, furiously arguing about this enjambment or that allusion, mysteries of the craft, the muse, our shoulders touching, our voices growing hoarse with laughter or walking out to the pier a few yards from the sea so that we could stand there together under the stars, alone with the abyss. —Edward Hirsch from Stranger by Night (Knopf, 2020)
This morning I wondered if I should be more intentional about this publication, and then rejected the thought in favour of—you guessed it—pleasure. I do not mean the hedonic variety, but the eudaemonic: achieved through the pursuit of meaning, of well-being through a sense of one’s purpose. In this light, pleasure’s the wrong word. I guess I should rebrand, but being “good” at social media holds little to no value to me. Stopping whatever I’m doing to spend an hour in the middle of the day—or at the advent of a sleepless night—to tell the truth about a poem, without second-guessing it, strikes me, for a host of reasons personal and not, as priceless.
I was looking for something else in Ed Hirsch’s Stranger by Night yesterday and was reminded of “The Guild,” which I promptly emailed to someone I thought would appreciate it. It took an hour or so and a walk along the river, during which I squatted on a rock and watched a great blue heron fishing in the shallows on the other side of the little bay, for my real interest in the poem to swim up to the surface: when the bird hauled itself up into its unlikely flight, I assumed I’d spooked it, but instead it flew straight towards me to alight at the other end of the groyne1 —maybe fifteen feet away—and turn its stony dino gaze on me. Yes, this is a metaphor: for the way a poem sometimes looks back at you, explains you to yourself.
I then confronted, and continue to confront, a series of increasingly kooky and embarrassing thoughts, which—outside of “what about my Substack stats”—I will not share, about why I should not write this reflection and set it sailing along to your inbox. Ah ha, thinks the twenty-first century mind, that finely-tuned hypocrisy detector: what happened to telling the truth? I promise I’m writing about that elsewhere, and as the philosopher Egon Spengler said, don’t cross the streams. It may not be the same river twice, some other guy said, but one’s a little too wide for this space.
Stranger by Night is Hirsch’s first collection since The Living Fire, a new and selected published in 2010. He published Gabriel, a book-length poem about the death of his son, in 2014; that is an astonishing book I can’t recommend enough. Hirsch has always been an uncommonly direct poet, forceful and forthright, unafraid of the declarative statement, and when he turns this uncompromising gaze on his own grief, the result is a kind of soul exfoliation. I come away from his best work feeling like I’ve walked through fire. His style is as pared down in Stranger by Night as I’ve ever seen it, and it suits. The great poets of his generation—his kin, his brothers—have begun dying; the book is in part their elegy.
Minus the Rome-adjacent river, I’ve lived every line of “The Guild.” This is what I realized, watching that bird, and as Hirsch laments the loss of a particular kind of being together—difficult, in the context of the book, not to read that loss as engendered by the deaths of his companions in vocation—I began to number my own missing and departed. Some merely lost to distance and time, some to the great beyond, some—the hardest to bear—to misalignment, misunderstanding. They’re all men, my lost poets, and it occurred to me that things might have been simpler in some ways, if more complex in others, had I drawn a different chromosomal straw.
What is the word for this relationship, this kind of shared devotion? For this kind of love? About my own I have often wondered, sometimes tried on, disastrously, father or lover; I have sometimes had father or lover tried on by them, been considered child or beloved equally disastrously, and most disastrously by those who intermingled the two, who defaulted to a position of authority when they found it suited them. I do not know why it took so long to try out brother, other than the fact that I have a biological brother, a relationship which served as my understanding of the concept and which wasn’t much to recommend it; I had a bad time, as a kid, with having an older brother. But now: I humbly submit my application for admittance to brotherhood. I don’t know why this is gendered in my mind; I don’t really care. It’s enough to say, of my brothers, that we come from the same place and are forever trying to return. That we understand each other’s loneliness.
The Dodge Poetry Festival used to be held at Waterloo Village in New Jersey. I don’t know what the Dodge is up to now, if it even still exists, but when I used to go it was akin to fantasy camp for poets. There was a big festival tent where the marquee readings were held, and the rest of the events took place in smaller tents and little historic buildings among woods and fields. Wandering, I stumbled on Thomas Lux lounging in the grass with CK Williams and Marie Howe; I guess there was a waterfall nearby, as his inscription in my copy of his selected reads “A pleasure to meet you by the waterfall.” It was, in other words, a magical place.
One night at the 2000 festival, Chinua Achebe read in the festival tent. He followed, if memory serves, Gerald Stern, who’d read “The Dancing,” a poem that may well show up here some day, one of such thingitude and visceral astonishment I have never forgotten it. I was in the company of two of my brothers, though then I did not know to call them that, and we were already misty-eyed when Achebe came to the podium and explained the tradition of the dirge, that the singers call the name of the one who is missing, hoping to guide him back to the fire, then read in his native Igbo “Dirge for Christopher Okigbo,” the Nigerian poet who died in the Biafran Conflict. I don’t have the words to explain how beautiful this was—only the memory of the three of us exchanging glances as the audience rose in a standing ovation, and slipping down the row of chairs and up the aisle, out into the autumn night. We didn’t need any more words. No more would suit. We walked out into the grassy field where the cars were parked, between the dark ramparts of forest, together in our silences, alone under the stars.
Brothers, I think you know who you are. Time, distance, death, carelessness and confusion, weakness of heart, all be damned. Maybe it’s just because I remain half-crazed and inconsolable, but I can’t say goodbye— I don’t want to. I won’t. Hello. Hello.
I learned this word today! It’s a low structure, often wood or concrete, built out from the shore to manage erosion.