Nature: Selected & New Poems 1970-2020, William Heyen (Mammoth Books, 2021)
Diaspora: Poems — 15 Collections, William Heyen (Cyberwit, 2024)
In his Primer, Dan Beachy-Quick describes it as one irony of being a prolific poet “that there is no other way to be inside the poem save by making the next poem, … even though all that work does is deepen the crisis that has created the desperate necessity of making a poem.” The poet William Heyen has made a virtue of that necessity. Few poets are more prolific, as he proves with two recent tomes. I use “tome” advisedly: Nature, a volume of “selected and new poems” from the five decades 1970-2020, and Diaspora, a gathering of “15 collections” of poems from the last two decades or so, weigh in at 691 pages and 951 pages, respectively.
The general contrast between the precise poet and the prolific poet is familiar, and we register it with particular contrasts that are themselves familiar, as for example in English-language poetry, especially in North America, Emily Dickinson and Walt Whitman. The poet of vigilance (“There’s a certain Slant of light, / Winter Afternoons —”) and the poet of vista (“… each man and each woman of you I lead upon a knoll, / My left hand hooking you round the waist, / My right hand pointing to landscapes of continents and the public road”). The poet of capsule (“To ponder little Workmanships / In Crayon, or in Wool”) and the poet of capaciousness (“I am large, I contain multitudes”). For one poet the poem offers a moment of clarity, for the other the poem effects a way of clarity. Like many other binaries, this one can be handy as a provisional, qualified rule of thumb, but also falsifying if treated as final and unqualified.
One form of falsification is exclusivity, permitting a poet only one or the other characteristic but not both. In fact, a “precise” poet can also be prolific (the standard edition of Dickinson is over 700 pages, with nearly 2,000 poems), and a “prolific” poet can also be precise (the lists and incantations in Leaves of Grass are long because Whitman sees so much, in such detail). This particular falsification, treating the precise and the prolific as mutually exclusive, plays out as a tendency to apply quantity – prolificness – as a heuristic differently by genre. Applied to prose, it is customarily taken to add stature to an individual work (e.g. Infinite Jest) or to a writer (e.g. Joyce Carol Oates). Applied to poetry, though, it is taken to warrant distrust. A prolific poet must be a sloppy poet, a careless one disdainful of craft. That distrust, though, applies the same zero-sum reasoning as the view that one has a fixed number of heartbeats and therefore should eschew cardio workouts, which use those heartbeats up faster and thus shorten one’s life.
The relationship of poetry to work, though, is more complicated than that, as (to appeal again to Primer) Beachy-Quick highlights. Maybe, he speculates, “the poem is a form of life that requires your vulnerability and openness, and so has these accidental but ethical consequences, of attuning us to the reality of other lives.” That attunement ensures that the labor that results in prolific quantities of poetry is not opposed to but instead is consonant with poetic “inspiration” and “genius,” and with the quality of precision. “An active poetic practice,” Beachy-Quick observes, “puts one in a strangely, maybe radically, passive relation to the world. One works so as to receive – the labor is the song it brings.”
The tendency to distrust prolific poets ensures that William Heyen’s recent volumes will find few readers. That “the labor is the song” ensures that Heyen’s volumes will richly reward those few. Let me call the source of that reward “comprehension,” to indicate that Heyen’s poetry is both comprehensive and comprehending: comprehensive because in it scale generates scope, comprehending because in it wit produces wisdom.
Scale is not the same as scope. We all know of poets who write at large scale (big poems or many poems) but with very narrow scope: the same poem over and over. In Heyen’s case, though, scale facilitates scope. Heyen was writing what would now be called “ecopoetry” before the term was invented. He has written multiple volumes lamenting atrocities: the Holocaust, European American genocide of Native Americans, the U.S. bombing of Japan in World War II. He has written poetry about sports, a phenomenon much more present in public life than in poetry. (As I write this, the most recent “Super Bowl” of American football was the most-watched TV broadcast ever, but I can think of few poems or collections that attend to sports.) He has written “occasional” work such as a book about the 1991 Gulf War, and homages to other writers. And so on.
Within such scope, no one poem counts as representative, but here is a sample, one poem in its entirety, first published as part of his book-length Holocaust sequence The Candle, and now included in Nature.
Hitler Street
The strip left from hair roughly shaved
down the middle of a prisoner’s skull:
SS called this strip Hitler Strasse —
they could see their Fuhrer in his black boots
stride from back of the Jews’ heads overhill
to their foreheads. He had his dog Blondi with him,
& led a parade, & lifted his arm, Heil,
to adoring crowds as the whole Reich
followed him to the crematorium.
That poem does illustrate one insight that informs Heyen’s poetry: the recognition that how we see shapes, for good or ill, what we do.
Scale is not the same as scope, nor is wit the same as wisdom. I use “wit” here in the older sense of verbal and associative facility, the quality of Elizabethan poetry admired by the New Critics, rather than the newer sense closely connected to humor. Heyen’s poetry is charged with such wit, but not as an end in itself, a way of showing off. Heyen’s wit is oriented toward, and fulfills itself as, wisdom. As here, in a poem from Diaspora, no more representative than the poem above, but also given in its entirety.
Peek-a-Boo
A friend said don’t ask him why but this morning’s newspaper pervert
who pasted
a small mirror to his shoe so he could peek up little girls’ dresses
reminded him
of border guards at Checkpoint Charlie in East Berlin in divided Germany
who, decades before,
wheeled mirrors under his car — sexual creepiness to post-war politics,
no logical connection
except that events iterate our attempts to make sense of vast psychic networks —
a deviant’s desire
to peek up at girls’ undies, guards pushing mirrors under vehicles in case
of contraband
being smuggled to the wrong side of the Cold War…. Guards liberated
a bag of bananas
from his back seat…. He got to his lecture in Leipzig. The pervert got
a couple years
in the clink who could have been a checkpoint guard above where
the messianic Fuhrer
had plotted from his bunker, & whose minions, in warps of Time & Space,
might have been peekers,
here they all come, enforcing borders, mirrors on their jackboots.
Like “Hitler Street,” this poem illustrates an informing insight in Heyen’s poetry, in this case the recognition that the widely various ways in which we humans harm one another manifest widely distributed susceptibilities to corruption and debasement. Loyalty to a violent political order and violation of minors’ sexual integrity and personal privacy are not identical wrongs, but they are not unrelated wrongs. One implication of which is reflexive: my not having committed some offense (I’ve never patroled a border! I don’t molest young girls!) does not award me purity, does not secure me against committing injustice. Heyen’s poetry warns me away from confidently identifying myself as a “good guy” different in kind from the bad guys. A Heyen poem is a momentary stay against self-righteousness.
Heyen’s huge body of work might be described in various ways, by highlighting in turn various of its preoccupations and presences, as he himself does for example in his poem “Sacred Place,” by locating his work in The Atrocitorium. Taking as my cue, though, one of the very last poems in Diaspora, I’m inclined to describe Heyen’s work, by appeal to Plato’s Theatetus, as an aviary replete with birds, each alert to the everything “that the redwing took in as it whistled, / as it glared.”
H.L. Hix
.