Last Words: Bringing a Poet’s Final Work to Print
Deborah
Garrison, formerly an editor at The New Yorker, is currently the poetry editor
at Alfred A. Knopf and a senior editor at Pantheon Books. She is the author of
A Working Girl Can’t Win and Other Poems (Random House, 1998).
Before
I started working as an editor of poetry books, when I was still a magazine
editor, I used to roam indiscriminately in my extracurricular reading among
poetry, novels, and short stories. I was on a long poetry jag in 1999 when,
after basking in the familiar voices of poets I already admired (Louise Glück
and C.K. Williams both had good new books that year), I came across Stan Rice’s
fifth collection, The Radiance of Pigs, just published by Alfred A. Knopf. I’d
never heard of Rice, but the borzoi imprint seemed a recommendation of quality;
I had no idea that only a year later I would be working as an editor at Knopf
and that one of my authors would be Stan Rice. Nor did I realize, as I puzzled
over Rice’s refreshingly nervy work (was he a Beat? a distant southern cousin
of the writers of the
In
the garden, lying
By
the brick wall in the dirt
Where
the sprinklers drench each night
And
the sun never shines
I
saw something black,
It
looked like feces of the elephant ear,
Like
merchandise,
In
plastic wrap, thrown
Under
the plants, repulsive as offal,
Daring
me to fall on it and
Eat
it if I really loved life.
The
poem serves as a useful entrée to Rice’s worldview. He shrank from nothing and
didn’t trouble himself about anyone else’s idea of good taste. In the time we
worked together, I marveled at his high-stakes creative impulse and learned to
respect the way his on-the-street (sometimes in-your-face) immediacy was
countered by a surprisingly staunch formality, a closet strictness about rhythm
and shape. I began to grasp that, as is so often the case with writers, Rice’s
person was like his writing: pungent, self-knowing, and proud. Now, to my great
sadness, Stan is gone, having died of brain cancer December 9, 2002, at the age of 60. This
month sees the posthumous publication of his final collection, False Prophet,
which I sent to press without him.
It
was lucky for me that Rice was one of my first subjects—or victims, perhaps—in
my new job as a poetry editor. (In those first months, I had to remind myself
daily that there was no way to walk in the footsteps of the illustrious Harry
Ford, the editor who’d brought such poets as W.S. Merwin, Mark Strand, and
Philip Levine to the house—that to walk at all was an accomplishment.) The
manuscript of Rice’s Red to the Rind (2002), originally called “The Daylight
Moon” (a title I found unexciting and, perhaps impertinently, asked him to
scrap in one of my first communications with him), came in during my first
month on the job, and was followed by lively letters from its author, arguing
over points I had raised (he was more than willing to find a better title). He
let me know early on that he did not “do” phone, but his correspondence—mostly
real letters, which arrived addressed in his hand, in the time-honored
fashion—was a joy: by turns casual and formal, like his poems, and courting an
intimacy that felt earned line by line.
Some
poets—most, actually—are not easy to edit, because their work has been
conceived in a mental and emotional space that bars all entry by outsiders. And
yet it’s also true that good writers, even great ones, can be open to
suggestions, eager to be better than they already are. Rice was of this type.
He was receptive to line and word changes within individual poems (the poems, I
noticed, were still alive to him as problems), and he agreed to cut several
very long and, I felt, rather “out there” poems from his manuscript. But he
also let me know how important the long-poem form was to him, and pinpointed my
prejudices as a reader while educating me about his own. “Perhaps someday in
the future we can discuss what I am trying to achieve in…my more ‘excessivist’
and experimental poems,” he wrote. “The ones you like best are shorter, more
compact, and at the end they tend to—paraphrasing Yeats—‘click shut like a
box.’” He explained that he saw his longer poems, with their more “open
strategies,” as a point on a straight line from Whitman, Pound, Zukofsky,
Lawrence, Olson, Ginsberg, and O’Hara. Not bad company, though Rice on the page
has more the footprint of an iconoclast than of one who walks in a straight
line from anything. From his first publications, it seems, Rice was a lone
wolf, inventing himself as a poet. In Whiteboy (1976), a poem titled “Poems and
Marriage” describes the sensation of roots pushing down through the chair he
sits on as he writes, suggesting that his poetic roots are self-generated (and
that his drive to write poetry is solipsistic, an unfortunate distraction from
his role as a husband). “A vain and selfish flower,” he writes, “is growing
downward from my / tip-of-spine,” and he finishes: “One day / standing up from
this chair / will rip my heart out.”
Rice’s
heart was ripped out, but not by poetry. His collection Some Lamb (1975) was
published three years after the death of Stan and Anne Rice’s first child,
Michele, who died at the age of six from leukemia. (They later had a son,
Christopher, who is a novelist.) What Rice faces in these poems is truly
unspeakable, yet he is determined to speak it, in a thousand different ways. In
“Incanto,” he catalogues the details of the end:
Chief Doctor
In
rumpled suit no tie unshaven
5
a.m. & fumbling Intern,
This
probably his first death, mine too
.
. . . . . . . . . .
. . . .
The
oxygen tent ripped back, the cooler roaring for nothing, me
Squeezing
the rubber bag trying to find the rhythm of a breather sleeping
That
her heart might recognize
.
. . . . . . . . . .
. . .
The
head nurse massaging the chest a deep gurgle like a clogged trap
NO
RESPONSE, Anne
“Can’t
we do anything, isn’t there anything else we can do?” The Doctor
Stands
up, “You can stop now, we might as well stop kidding ourselves, she’s
Gone,”
and my head cocks sideways like the RCA Victor dog
&
I bend over & her lips part easily & wetly & I give her
the
long kept sexual kiss of father
to
daughter, too late
Hello.
That
ambiguous, terrifying kiss: How many fathers would give voice to it? Rice’s
willingness to do so is almost exhilarating. Elsewhere he finds something close
to repose in the same scene, when he writes, “look! a shaft of light pierces
the dustball: just that effortlessly / she went.” (Odd how both versions seem
equally true.) Or he manages a cool distance, as in “Sonnet”: “No more child.
Much less fathering / therefore. Much less mothering to know.” Hardest to bear
is the naked brutality of the collection’s title poem, in which Death, having
finished its meal, remarks, “That was / Some lamb.” Stan and I never spoke
about his daughter. But I knew that the remarkable poems in Some Lamb were, for
him, the only possible response to her death, that in the course of writing
them he discovered a clarity of purpose (and earned a horrific badge of pain)
from which all his future work would issue. There was more trouble to come: In
Body of Work (Lost Roads, 1983), we find him “Wrecked on the wine, on wreckage
/ itself. Wrecked on what / some call / the dog.” It is a case, he jokes
bitterly, of “Losing the haystack finding the needle. / Singing along with the
wrecking ball.” The point was—and this, too, would become a lifelong theme—that he was still
singing, wrecking ball or not.
Born
in 1942, in Dallas, Rice met Anne O’Brien in high school in Richardson, Texas.
They married young, in 1961, and Michele was born in 1966. Perhaps it is no
accident that in the same years that Stan was composing his own chronicle of
loss, Anne was finding her way toward Interview With the Vampire (1976), written as it is out of deep
psychological engagement with the idea of the living dead. The first in the
series of vampire books that would make her an international sensation,
Interview changed the Rices’ lives forever. No one can comprehend what goes on
in a marriage, of course, other than the two people who are in it, but it’s
fair to say that many marriages between two writers would not have survived the
kind of fame and money that arrived with Anne’s success. The pair remained
together for 41 years, and Stan gave up his position as head of the creative writing
program at San Francisco State in 1988 when they moved to New Orleans, the city
of Anne’s childhood and of her imagination. Though this was her turf, it became
a rich vein in Stan’s work (some of those Whitmanian longer experiments owe
their macabre charm to the atmosphere of the city), and the financial ease that
came with Anne’s career allowed Stan to pursue his art full time.
His
art, increasingly, involved painting as well as poetry; he set up a studio in
the guest house behind the Rices’ main residence in the Garden District, and
began producing canvases with the same Fauvist energy of his poems, taking
similar risks: He would put things together in a painting that didn’t seem to
go together, without fearing (indeed at times courting) the possibility of
mixed results. One startling work is Hitler Denies to Six Million Jews the
Watermelon of Life; in Taxi, a ghoulish family of dogs tries to hail a cab
(actually, it’s wonderful). Among these visions—which, even more than his
poems, seem “found” in some way—are a few simple, gorgeous still lifes, perhaps
the equivalent of his exquisite short poems: caps hanging on a hook, poppies
melting into an orange-red background.
Few
writers can afford the luxury of a life devoted solely to their work, and lesser
men might have been undone by it all and might not have produced in the way
that Rice continued to do. Still, I have sometimes wondered if it wasn’t a
mistake for Rice to come to Knopf—in the eyes of the world, his wife’s
publisher—which he did with Singing Yet, a volume of new and selected poems, in
1992. Over the years he has not received the review attention that other poets
on the Knopf list generally enjoy, as though critics weren’t sure if we were
publishing Stan because he was Anne Rice’s husband, and didn’t know what to
make of the work as a result. As one who had made my way into his poems before
I knew about his marriage, this pained me, though I never raised the subject,
and Stan didn’t either.
Last
summer Rice wrote to let me know that, though we had just published Red to the
Rind, he was almost ready to send us a new manuscript, which he called “False
Prophet.” It was, he explained, a series of his own biblical psalms; he
promised that it “breaks every rule, written and unwritten,” adding, “The book
dovetails with events of 9/11 uncannily, yet 90 percent of poems were written
before that event.…Who says a false prophet can’t be accurate?”
A
few weeks later I learned that Stan had been diagnosed with brain cancer. I
wrote him immediately, and received in return a spidery handwritten note that
would be the last from him. He stated briefly that he was dealing with “the
T-rex of brain tumors, glioblastoma Grade 4,” and went on to say, “I will poem
and paint until I am a cauliflower, for I still look forward to each day.”
Apparently that’s what he did. About a month after Stan’s death I received at
last the manuscript of “False Prophet,” with a heartbreaking letter from Anne
Rice: “He went to his studio every day for as long as he could, even though he
finally had to be strapped upright into his wheelchair.… Only when his right
hand finally weakened to the point that he couldn’t write or paint and his
vision was blurry did he go to bed.” She spoke of Stan as a “secular saint,” a
man devoted wholly to his writing and painting. “It is my considered opinion,”
she wrote, “that for decades the fanfare surrounding my novels hurt Stan’s
career brutally and unfairly. He never received the recognition that he
deserved.”
It
was difficult for me to turn to the manuscript itself—by now a communication
from beyond. I was acutely aware that whatever I might feel about the work,
there would be no further conversation between Stan and me, no editorial
negotiation of the kind we had come to enjoy. But the work supplied the
conversation. “Lord, hear me out,” the book begins, with “Psalm 151,” thus
taking up where the Bible leaves off. “At the point of our need / The
storehouse shares its shambles.” Each piece is a prayer, an enraged or grateful
or haunted or cackling song, for our existence, full of nonsensical questions
without question marks: “Is that old sock in the back yard / In a coffee can
worth going to hell for. Is a Superdome full of screaming women.”
Instead
of supplying the answers we might crave in response, each poem finishes with
the mysterious Hebrew word Selah. (Webster’s 10th calls it “a term of uncertain
meaning…carried over untranslated into some English versions” of the Psalms.)
The effect is oddly deadpan, as in: “Have I heard my last mandolin. / Selah.”
Or “And after the walk the blindfold is always wet. / Selah.” As Rice’s psalms
accumulate, you begin to read the word as a kind of “So be it,” or maybe a
“Thus I set it down for you to ponder”—a ritual utterance that recalls us to the act of writing itself, and to its sacredness, even in the face of the unanswerable questions throughout. For me, the Selah, as the last word on each page, also carried another meaning. These poems were Stan’s
last words, and had to be considered finished. With the exception of a few
superficial points about Stan’s unorthodox spellings, which I found myself
lingering over unduly, I would publish the manuscript exactly as he left it.
False
Prophet is meant as a book about foresight, but what I find most moving in it is
perhaps a product of hindsight—not, that is, the prophetic sense of a world
going to hell due to terrorism and other forms of social, political, and
personal corruption, but the feeling of a writer composing his own farewell,
and the profound love of life, with all its burdens and beauties, that is
stitched into every verse. I can’t help but hear “Psalm 212,” which closes the
collection, as the intentional final statement of a poet who, as he put it so
eloquently, looked forward to each day:
…I
was lost
and
sang my broken-down songs in the hell of the hour.
Then
in my heart moved an oar,
And
I was found by a breeze from a door in the sea of forms
And
was rowed to the cherry trees on the shore.
Selah. Selah.