by David Mason

from Hudson Review, Winter 2009

          Come let us sing against death.
          —Hayden Carruth, "Contra Mortem"

Poetry is an art of margins.

Poets rarely think so. They prefer believing they are somehow at the center of things, but they rarely are. This is not to say poets are unimportant, only that they gain their importance in unexpected, unforeseeable ways.

Hayden Carruth, who died at 87 on September 29, 2008, was a case in point. He was part of a great generation of poets, including Richard Wilbur, Anthony Hecht, Louis Simpson, Donald Justice, Marie Ponsot and Adrienne Rich, but he was never a figure of the cultural center. His poetry flourished despite decades of hardship and neglect.

I never met Hayden, unless you count meetings in these pages or in a handful of letters he sent me late in his life. Still, he was important to me even when I glimpsed him off in some corner of my field of vision. I understood him to be one of those marginalized polymaths who become so central to American literary life. As a college student I found his book The Bloomingdale Papers, about his time in a mental hospital, and while I heard something deeply impressive in the voice, I was also frightened by the forbidden in his subject. It was too close to home, you might say, too close to raw wounds of my own.

In the 1980s I heard him give a reading at the Rochester Institute of Technology, where he shared the stage with Robert Creeley and Joel Oppenheimer. Oppenheimer's poems were not getting off the ground, I felt, and Creeley, too, was having an off night, not really connecting with his audience. Carruth had just published Asphalt Georgics, his irascible poems about people he had known in his years as a rural laborer, and he read them in a fresh, unmannered voice. He owned the stage that night. His poems had strong pacing, narrative arc, human connection—all things I valued as a reader and would-be writer. He was the real thing, and in his seed cap and clipped beard (later to sprawl like Whitman's over his shoulders and chest), he reminded me of men I had known in my own laboring years. This was not the affected proletarianism of the academic but the dress of a man who had chosen his allies among his own neighbors in Vermont and New York.

Before the nervous breakdown and hospitalization in his thirties, Carruth had fought in Italy in World War II, then earned a master's degree in Chicago, where he edited Poetry. He would later serve as poetry editor for Harper's and even become in 1979 a professor at Syracuse University. Copper Canyon Press would champion his work and name a prize for him. He would publish more than thirty books and win the National Book Award, yet I still think of him as a figure off to one side of things, a champion of the marginal. His much-loved anthology, The Voice That Is Great Within Us, continuously in print since 1970, is dedicated to Ezra Pound and begins with a large, somewhat idiosyncratic selection of poems by Robert Frost. What follows is remarkable for its range. Few anthologists have ever brought such diversity between two covers, from "mainstream" poets like Lowell and Hecht to blacklisted writers like Thomas McGrath. Carruth enjoyed poetic meters and even invented a sonnet-like form he called a "paragraph," but he had little patience with gentility. He liked the way jazz pushed out of its measures, the improvisational married to the formal, and so often enjambed his own stanzas that he tried the patience of pure formalists. Yet he numbered J. V. Cunningham, one of our strictest metrical poets, among his friends.

It was this catholic rigor I most admired in Carruth. We first corresponded about McGrath, too often misread only for his politics or as a Deep Imagist. Later he wrote approving my own efforts to write a sort of epic, urging me to try another.

Such generosity had come at a cost. An autobiographical essay recounts his lifelong struggle against nihilistic terrors. "Existence had no use. It was without end or reason. The most beautiful things in it, a flower or a song, as well as the most compelling, a desire or a thought, were pointless." Yet Carruth, who married four times and had two children, one of whom predeceased him, was clearly a man who valued the emotional anchor of family. His desire to belong to the larger world of success and sophistication was checked by his natural reclusiveness, but he had loved ones who sustained him close to home. More than once he wrote me from the Jersey Shore, where he accompanied his wife, Joe-Anne McLaughlin, so she could be close to her grandchildren.

He also wrote about his association with this magazine and its founding editor, Frederick Morgan: "I began accepting assignments from Fred sometime around 1950, I believe, and before then he had published a good number of my poems and perhaps an essay or two. He was a good friend and I still miss him." Now it is the spirit of magnanimity in both men I wish to remember—an understanding of what is centrally important in life, what is truly marginal, and how poetry unites us more than it divides us, how language touches what we love, and how the love remains.

About the Author
David Mason's verse novel Ludlow (Red Hen Press, 2007) won the Colorado Book Award and was named Best New Poetry Book by Contemporary Poetry Review.

Hudson Review
New York

Editor: Paula Deitz
Founding Editor: Frederick Morgan (1922-2004)
Managing Editor: Ronald Koury
Assistant Editor: Julia Powers