I have wasted my life

Reflections on James Wright's poem, 'Lying in a Hammock at William Duffy’s Farm in Pine Island, Minnesota'.

Writers —especially poets— are always looking beyond the literal. Literal explanations are a prison: the literal is the only perspective that claims it is not a perspective, but the true version of events. Poetry, on the other hand, inspires the understanding that there are many versions, many perspectives on a truth.

Last week, I looked at a poem by Wallace Stevens, ‘Earthy Anecdote’, and suggested that it might be read as an analogy of the creative process. Today I’d like to consider a poem by another of those North American poets of the mid-twentieth century, which is remarkable for the way it stops the reader in their tracks with a final line that casts all that precedes it into doubt.

The poem is ‘Lying in a Hammock at William Duffy’s Farm in Pine Island, Minnesota’ by James Wright. As a bonus, here is a rare recording of Wright, or a weird animated version of him, reading his own poem

Lying in a Hammock at William Duffy’s Farm in Pine Island, Minnesota

Over my head, I see the bronze butterfly,   
Asleep on the black trunk,
Blowing like a leaf in green shadow.   
Down the ravine behind the empty house,   
The cowbells follow one another   
Into the distances of the afternoon.   
To my right,
In a field of sunlight between two pines,   
The droppings of last year’s horses   
Blaze up into golden stones.
I lean back, as the evening darkens and comes on.   
A chicken hawk floats over, looking for home.
I have wasted my life.

A religious statement?

When I first read Wright’s poem, years ago — a colleague had been using it for teaching— I was a little shocked by that last line, not sure what to make of it. It seemed to me, at first, to be ostentatiously startling, tagged onto the end of a meditative, pastoral poem merely to draw attention to itself.

So I researched the poem a little, and found a few interesting articles about it. In one of them, from the Paris Review, Dan Piepenbring asks, of the last line: ‘Is it a lament? Is it a joke, a kind of boast? Did Wright intend to undercut or to bolster his pastoral scene with it? Could it be a winking response to Rilke, whose ‘Archaic Torso of Apollo’ concludes with the imperative “You must change your life”?’

But what of the poet himself? In an interview published two years before his death, Wright told Bruce Henricksen that he thought the line was “a religious statement”:

Here I am and I’m not straining myself and yet I’m happy at this moment, and perhaps I’ve been wastefully unhappy in the past because through my arrogance or whatever, and in my blindness, I haven’t allowed myself to pay true attention to what was around me. And a very strange thing happened. After I wrote the poem and after I published it, I was reading the poems of the eleventh-century Persian poet, Ansari, and he used exactly the same phrase at a moment when he was happy. He said, “I have wasted my life.” Nobody gave him hell for giving up iambics. You can’t win.

Robert Bly, a friend of Wright’s, urged the reader not to be distracted by ‘discursive reasoning’, or ‘rationalism’:

In poems the deepest thoughts are often the most painful thoughts, and they come to consciousness only despite the rationalist road-blocks, by slipping past the defenses of the ego. In most men, the inner thoughts are never able to slip by these defenses of the ego. The ordinary mind has pickets everywhere, who make an impregnable ring.

Ben Lerner, writing in the London Review of Books, contributes to the controversy that hovers around Wright’s poem:

Poets are liars not because, as Socrates said, they can fool us with the power of their imitations, but because identifying yourself as a poet implies you might overcome the bitter logic of the poetic principle, and you can’t. You can only compose poems that, when read with perfect contempt, clear a place for the genuine Poem that never appears.

Every poem a failure

Perhaps that comes close to explicating James Wright’s final line: the Perfect Poem never exists. Furthermore (as Lerner insists in his book The Hatred of Poetry) every poem is a failure, and the reason every poem is a failure goes something like this: you’re moved to write a poem because of some transcendent impulse to get beyond the human, the historical, the finite. But as soon as you move from that impulse to the actual poem, the song of the infinite is compromised by the finitude of its terms. So the poem is always a record of failure. This might stand as an epitaph for poetry itself, but clearly it does not, as Lerner and millions of others continue to write poetry. But the idea of poetry itself being compromised by ‘the finitude of its terms’ might be a sentiment that is expressed concisely in James Wright’s poem.

The novelist David Mitchell, who apparently keeps a copy of the poem pinned above his desk, regards it as a kind of exhortation to be observant at all times. In an article published in The Atlantic, he writes:

I hear him [James Wright] exhale it with a wry laugh: I’ve wasted my life! He’s kind of smiling. I’ve done it again, all this wasted time, he thinks — but at least I know it. Though he hasn’t really wasted all of his life — he knows that, too. You have to enter the hammock, put the world on hold, to really see things clearly the way the poem does. He’s been to this hammock before, and he’s had moments like this before, and it’s mostly positive. It’s self-deflating, but not depressing. It’s sad, and longing, and nostalgic, and wry — the ironic half-bark of a laugh.

Mitchell also sees the poem as lending an insight into the creative process, and it has inspired him to keep on track. He writes:

I do think there’s some relationship between maintaining focus, looking closely, and the act of writing itself. The more you practice really looking, the more convincingly you can build a set for a scene. You become used to looking at the relationships between objects and people and light and time and mood and air. That’s what you’re doing when you’re having a James Wright’s hammock moment, and it’s also what you need to do to bring a scene into being. I think all writers do this. I don’t think I’m remarkably gifted at it or anything, but if there is an overlap between the skill of perception and the skill of populating a scene with objects and people, then this would be the connection.

I like this notion that the writer has to be alert to the intricate connections and patterns between people, places and things, and the way that our ‘hammock moments’ can crystallise a seemingly everyday perception, urging us to reframe our vision, or our way of being in the world. Mitchell goes on:

For me, the poem’s chief value is as a reminder to stay inside the moment. It asks us not to let our minds rerun things that have already happened, not to trouble our head fruitlessly about things that haven’t happened yet. Inhabit the now, the poem urges — just see the beauty around you that you don’t normally see.

We have a hard time remaining in the present: Our monkey minds are continually jumping through the jungles of the past and the forests of the future. But Wright’s poem says: Stop! Just stop. Calm down, be quiet, and look around. It’s an homage to, and an exhortation of, the act of seeing.’

Paradoxical joy

I believe that the poem can be read as a paradoxically joyful manifesto. I have no idea why it makes me feel good about life, when the ending is —at first sight— so dismally self-judgemental. That is the wonder of good poetry: we are not limited to one response; we can enjoy multiple responses, even ones that seemingly contradict each other.

Perhaps the poem is, at heart, an entreaty not to be distracted, and specifically not to be distracted to the point of confusion or self-criticism: but to look closely, to watch the world. There is, after all, a close relationship between looking closely, between seeing —as expressed so lyrically in the first twelve lines of the poem— and the act of writing itself. You learn, in David Mitchell’s words, to look at the relationship ‘between objects and people and light and time and mood and air.’ And of other animals and birds, I would add, thinking of that chicken hawk. And of fire and water, and rock and grass and trees and leaves. And to be conscious, as best we can, of the responsibilities and unseen consequences of our own presence in that place, in that moment. To be immersed in the natural world and to be profoundly aware of being there, a part of it all.

And before I forget, the answers to last Friday’s quiz on AI generated poems are as follows:

A: T.S. Eliot; B: Emily Dickinson; C: Philip Larkin; D: Charles Bukowski; E: Sylvia Plath; F: Benjamin Zephaniah.

Richard Gwyn is a writer and translator. Information about his books, as well as articles, interviews and forthcoming events can be found on his website at https://richardgwyn.com or by clicking here.