The Education of a Young Poet

by David Biespiel

Overview

"Biespiel’s supple memoir of becoming a poet will surely inspire other writers to embrace the bodily character of writing and feel the power and, sometimes, the emptiness of the act of writing poetry." —Publishers Weekly (starred review)

The Education of a Young Poet is David Biespiel’s moving account of his awakening to writing and the language that can shape a life. Exploring the original source of his creative impulse—a great–grandfather who traveled alone from Ukraine to America in 1910, eventually settling as a rag peddler in the tiny town of Elma, Iowa—through the generations that followed, Biespiel tracks his childhood in Texas and his university days in the northeast, led along by the ""pattern and random bursts that make up a life."

His book offers an intimate recollection of how one person forges a life as a writer during extraordinary times. From the Jewish quarter of Houston in the 1970s to bohemian Boston in the 1980s, from Russia’s Pale of Settlement to a farming village in Vermont, Biespiel remains alert to the magic of possibilities—ancestral journeys, hash parties, political rallies, family connections, uncertain loves, the thrill of sex, and lasting friendships. Woven throughout are reflections on the writer’s craft coupled with a classic coming–of–age tale that does for Boston in the 1980s what Hemingway’s A Moveable Feast did for Paris in the 1920s and Broyard’s Kafka Was the Rage did for Greenwich Village in the 1950s.

Restless with curiosity and enthusiasm, The Education of a Young Poet is a singular and universal bildungsroman that movingly demonstrates, "in telling the story of one’s coming into consciousness, all languages are more or less the same."

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781640091108
Publisher:	Catapult
Publication date:	10/09/2018
Edition description:	Reprint
Pages:	192
Product dimensions:	5.56(w) x 8.20(h) x 0.57(d)

About the Author

David Biespiel is the author of A Long, High Whistle, a collection of pieces drawn from his long–standing column in The Oregonian about writing and poetry that won the 2016 Oregon Book Award for General Nonfiction. He has also written five books of poetry, most recently Charming Gardeners and The Book of Men and Women, which was named one of the Best Books of the Year by the Poetry Foundation and received the 2011 Oregon Book Award for Poetry, and a book on creativity, Every Writer Has a Thousand Faces. He is the editor of the Everyman's Library edition of Poems of the American South and Long Journey: Contemporary Northwest Poets, which received the Pacific Northwest Booksellers Award. He writes the Poetry Wire column for The Rumpus. Among his honors are a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in Literature, a Wallace Stegner Fellowship, and a Lannan Fellowship. He lives in Portland, Oregon, with his family.

Read an Excerpt

THE EDUCATION OF A YOUNG POET:

Elma

My life in poetry began when Harry Borg left Ukraine for America in 1910.

Life is not the exact word. Since Harry was born in Cherniostrov in the Pale of Settlement in 1879, and I was born in Oklahoma in 1964. Between us is his eldest son and that son's eldest daughter and that daughter's youngest son, me.

Harry and me left Cherniostrov by train for Lviv—he was going on ahead of his wife and their two small sons. From Lviv we found passage to the States. Then we went by train again to Iowa. We were looking for a place we could afford. There was a young fellow near Elma, 160 miles north of Des Moines, who offered us something. Later there was a cart and a mule and then peddling rags and pots, second-hand coats and slacks and blouses, every day except Friday nights when, even if on the road and miles from Elma, Harry would take shelter overnight in a customer's barn to make Shabbat.

Riding the trains across the heartland was really in vogue in those days. The cornfields were like a green ocean with shoals and shallows and waves. You could see humpback whales in the wind through the stalks, whales shivering in the underside of the midwestern air. Then suddenly, like a lighthouse, there'd be a silo. The wind was soft as flannel, too. The oaks longed for the sparrows and the sparrows longed for the sky and the sky longed for a wife. Days of rain blushing with passion and a quivery blessing. Me and Harry would stare and stare, smearing our eyes against the windows of the train. We were travelers who noticed every sun-weathered brick in the towns.

That summer the Iowa rivers receded under the trestles from the spring floods that had blossomed in July. The headstones in the cemeteries long ago had taken to peeling. At night the moon bristled over the open porches with the wicker chairs empty of their celibate lovers. The crossroads were like sideburns turned to gravel. We tumbled along the tracks, a little stoic, a little proud, a couple of puzzles needing to be solved. The dappled rows of shaggy corn sloping toward us plunged back into the velvet, green, windy distances. The rattle of the train faded again and again to the muffle of our sleep.

This was a time when polio was raging. There were 186 cases in Iowa that year. This was the summer of Halley's comet, too. Me and Harry could see it all right even from the train. It was no apparition. It was a match struck against eternity, an eyeless orphan. In 1986 I would look for Halley's comet again. I was living in the haze of cheap weed in Boston on Glenville Ave. near the expressionistic trees of Ringer Park. In Elma, though . . . Harry found Elma to have the kind of personality that was its own avant-garde. You couldn't erase Elma. Year after year the population decreased. But still the town remained. In 1910 Elma was eight hundred people and about to be redesigned with an orthodox Jew. Back then Elma was a town of aching look-alikes. There was the aroma of wood burn and laundry on the line. White farmhouses and neat fences. It was a place you could live in all your life but if you're weren't born there you were always an outsider. Every stranger could be a murderer. Harry arrived like new foliage.

I don't know the first thing about Elma really. The house me and Harry found had no broom and no locks, and the old siding clung to the building like a child to his mother's leg. We were like a work of art, Harry and me. When we were naked, you'd have thought the bottom of us was trying to escape the top. Our legs were deliberate, pointed, meager. Our chest was stout as a fire hydrant. It was tough to make us smile. This was so long ago. I can see one small room, that's it. It was a room where you could hear voices but no one was there. There was a chair and table and a rug. The silence of Iowa could fill that room from floor to ceiling, every hour. The silence was an unmentionable smudge. Only the habit of Harry's voice talking Yiddish would deflate the room's quiet. And the distant bark of dogs.

This room became the walls of every stanza I've ever known.

Harry talked to himself in those days in phrases like little sketches of poetry, without dropping his chin into his hands in contemplation. He'd assemble each syllable into a chant, an intonation. He'd talk to himself in the kitchen at morning and on his mattress at night. He'd talk to himself in the stairwell and on the way back from the market. He'd talk to himself while standing alone in the room, I remember that. What a time in America, he would say to himself. No war beginning or ending. Look at these simple pleasures of light and wind and stars, he'd say. What could be more attractive than Elma, Iowa, he'd ask, that God in his wisdom saw to building it up around the new train depot. He'd want to smile but it was a smile of cheap rent and cheap joy. There was dirt all right in 1910. Reams of it. What is dirt but life, he'd say.

Once I asked Harry why, or maybe it was how could you leave your wife, Rose, and your sons, Joseph and Irving, for America, and how long are you willing to wait to reunite? He turned to talk to the bathroom mirror then about the encryptions in his face that revealed nothing about how it was all going to turn out. Was your marriage, I asked, happy or unhappy? Were there disappointments? Let's not talk of dreams, he said, but of life in broad daylight. Let's talk of being a father but without sons in the house to listen. About duty. About right and wrong. Unruffled faith and limitless God.

There was so much praying alongside the talking, too, about the forgotten and the damned and the swollen heart. All this talking to himself Harry did in a language no one understood. This was the first pure poetry I ever knew. Sung out loud more or less to no one on a theme of longing. Wife. Sons. Rags for clothes. Snow. Stalks of corn. The unrepeatable finitude of sex and mute caresses of the mind. And of the Sh'ma spoken to the Iowa dust. "Hear, O, Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is One"—spoken to the Iowa birds pecking on the ground.

For ten years he talked and prayed to himself, talked and prayed to the empty rooms.

Prayer was his beauty-utterance. He prayed about the lessons life could teach and about going along for the ride. He prayed about being wrong and feeling alive and then feeling lucky. When he heard the flies sing to him, he prayed about how easy life had become. When he heard the rain on the roof, he prayed about how hard life had become. He prayed about envy and jealousy and corruption and success. He prayed about the endlessness of truth and the endlessness of lies. Those Friday nights miles from home, cloudy or sunny or snowy or in blistering heat, there was Harry making Shabbat alone but for the rats in a customer's hay barn, where he would quietly rest in the presence of God, opening his soul as a man does, concerned only with the moments of time and his momentary sharing of the eternal. The hay bales would go dark as the night left him powerless to the forces of circumstance. Next day he'd gather his belongings into his rag cart and return alone to Elma.

Even in sleep he had dreams in the form of prayers about nerves and worries over money. There were prayers about gathering stones and breaking stones, about towns with no houses but a sheriff returning alone. One of his dream-prayers he had again and again was a rabbi telling him, "Look, young fellow, I'm going to tell you a few things about your reputation." But then he never did. The dream-prayers would fade and return. He'd awake weary and resigned. And resume his talking. He talked to himself every waking minute he was alone, talked to himself alone for ten years like that, talked to himself and talked to me in something resembling poems no one can remember—before at last by train in the winter of 1920 with a flowering white snow falling, a snow falling like stars filling the air, his wife Rose and sons Joseph, now thirteen, and Irving, now ten, arrive at the depot in Elma with a featherbed and two silver candlesticks. The older one had the sharp eyes of a boxer; the younger was tender, his hands like the soft leather on a baseball.

And Harry says to me, now my poetry belongs to America.

The first night Joseph Borg spent in Elma, Iowa, he woke up before dawn because he had to pee. He shook his silent father awake. For a moment he stared into the face of that strange man who he had not seen in ten years. Joseph didn't know a lick of English—he stared at his father's face the way a poet stares at a blank piece of paper where mostly the soul is at stake. He stared at the face like diving underwater against all odds of survival and finding there coincidences and afterthoughts, confessions of the weak who have little to say, finding smells and sounds and the passions of the body.

Pee in the snow, Harry said.

From the eaves of the house I could see thirteen-year-old Joseph tiptoe out the front door and lean over the edge of the porch—


I attach tags, carve initials, pee on fireplugs

• utlining my territory


—so says Philip Whalen about peeing outside the dorms at Reed College thirty years later when he is the roommate of my cousin, Moshe, who is a first cousin of Ruth—who, in 1935, fifteen years after that night on the Iowa porch, would elope with Joseph in Chicago and become his wife. That night, watching Joseph's limber body above the snow, seeing his strong-willed teenage face with its sharp nose like something out of a folktale, I understand I could never take a dispassionate view of memory.

Perhaps the hardest thing about my education as a poet is watching the past reverse itself. It's like undressing. First you remove the jacket, then the shirt, the undershirt, and then you stand bare-chested in the cold air. Then you step out of the trousers but no underwear or socks. Memory torments you like that. And when memory looks down the street of a small Christian town in America before dawn with the eyes of a thirteen-year-old Jewish boy who is standing half-dressed on the porch, and the stars grin at the secrets of the world, memory zips up its pants against the wind and carries on.

Then Joseph slipped. He was turning to go back into the house and lost his footing and nearly collapsed on the wood porch before he caught hold of the frozen railing. He hadn't meant to be in a rush. The cold air was pleasurable against his bare skin. But he understood that the earth and everything around him was so different now. Even his gait seemed messed up. Hurrying into the dark house with its fantasia of squat rooms, he began to float instead of walk. He floated backward and stretched his neck to see his way. He floated as in a painting by Chagall into the small kitchen above the countertops and sink and didn't stop to think about how strange it was to be in the air. A little blood was coming out of his hand where he'd cut it catching his fall. But he didn't find that strange either. Being hurt was the same as being humorous, he knew that already, same as being fatherless. Or nearly fatherless, he reminded himself, as he floated now down the hallway past his sleeping father and mother, his hair touching the ceiling, his arms sprawled. He began to float even lighter now, his fingers loose and the night air swelling around his body. He could see the footprints in the floors where his father had been walking for ten years. Those footprints and the frightening sounds they had made came up the stairs, padded through the halls, stumbled and straightened up. Joseph floated, powdery and white, bobbing up and down, his heart undestroyed. He wanted to babble and sing but instead smiled. And then he floated over to the narrow bed he was sharing with his little brother. Not falling into it but arriving as at the end of a triumph.

Joseph would always remember this night as a kind of improvised awakening. He would think of it when he had nothing else on his mind, the way one thinks of sex, always believing that it clarifies things for him, that he could understand other people through the filter of the night he flew in the house in Elma. Sometimes he saw it as a dream or as a memory. Other times he heard it as a song, a prayer. He'd be flying monotonously and then there'd be a variation—he'd sprout wings! he'd become an angel!—and then he'd hear the melody again. He could hear the song building and building in him, mounting and then descending, collapsing as he collapsed into bed.

Other times the memory was a question-and-answer routine. He would ask about simultaneity and answer about despair. He would ask about sadness and answer with proverbs. The questions and the answers synced up into a kind of rhythm about snow and sleep, birth and pain, but now in a language neither of us understood back then. This new English would sound like a chime to Joseph, a loud chime in a silent house. The chiming had a clear beat that sounded like, "Why should things be easy to understand?" It had a rhythm that meant, "Not every puzzle is intended to be solved." Joseph would hum and hum the passages of the chiming labyrinths of syllables. Once he reached the end, he would turn that into the beginning. He could hear the locks of words unlock like a truth to be grappled with. He would go on hearing the chime and the patterns they made in the mind, his and mine, and—on his knees, straining his neck—he would try to work them out into his new words but they didn't always match the design. He'd try to connect the points of sound.

From that, I discovered, a writer will find his own voice in the distortions and discolorations of the mouth.

Table of Contents

Elma

Pedagogy of the Oppressed

Pretending Not to Pretend

Old Friends

Against Our Will

From the Earth to the Stars

Nighthawks

Drink

Texas Roses

Defeat

Not That Town

Primal Talk

The Dugout

Something's Happening Out There

The Pale of Vermont

The Suit

Acknowledgements

Editorial Reviews

Praise for The Education of a Young Poet

“Filled with unassuming but riveting observations . . . that show not only how important poetry is to daily life but also how it’s, in fact, inextricable from life. This book will make you appreciate poetry more. And if you’re a poet, it will make you proud to be one.” —The Rumpus

“Scenes flow breathlessly across the page.” —Los Angeles Review of Books

"As a match newly struck, The Education of a Young Poet recovers a dream–like glow of this world . . . The author’s journey restores our sense of the visionary power of language." —The Carolina Quarterly

"Biespiel’s memoir delivers with wit and intelligence exactly the kind of inspiration any young writer requires: A voice and a past and a story to tell."" —Empty Mirror

"In his beguiling voice . . . Biespiel shows himself to be exhilarated as much by failure as by success in writing; his poetry reveals aspects of his inner world to him and shows him how to live better. Biespiel’s supple memoir of becoming a poet will surely inspire other writers to embrace the bodily character of writing and feel the power and, sometimes, the emptiness of the act of writing poetry." —Publishers Weekly (starred review)

"Poet and critic Biespiel's (Charming Gardeners; A Long High Whistle) lyrical fugue of a memoir charmingly mixes meditation and memories, spans generations and oceans . . . Poetry lovers will be enthralled . . . This book is fascinating and sometimes even enchanting."" —Library Journal (starred review)

"Lyrical, affectionate . . . Graceful reflections on creativity." —Kirkus Reviews

"I love the scope of The Education of a Young Poet, which opens fifty years before the author's birth. What better way of expressing the idea that poetry, like all art, is a matter of lineage, growing in equal part out of what we learn and who we are? Indeed, what David Biespiel has in mind here is less a craft book―although there are great craft riffs―than a memoir, a kind of portrait of the artist as a young man. 'Feeling alien within the familiar,' Biespiel describes it, the sensation of being a new poet. It's as good a description as I've seen for the mix of distance and proximity, alienation and empathy, that all art requires, and perhaps most especially that of poetry." —David L. Ulin, author of Sidewalking

"What a memorable, companionable, and singular book. I can't think of another contemporary memoir that has this mix of political and literary intelligence, all embedded in a personal story that is told with great candor, historical consciousness, and wit. How I wish it had existed when I was a young poet!"" —Christian Wiman, author of Hammer Is The Prayer

"Whether he is writing about poetry, politics, competitive diving, or the glories of great conversation, Biespiel’s recurring subject is the tension between freedom and discipline―between the sublime release of our own wildness and the precision that comes only from exquisite self–control. Part memoir, part ars poetica, The Education of a Young Poet is a feast: of language, of memory, and of insights into how one young writer came into his own."—Patrick Phillips, author of Blood at the Root and Elegy for a Broken Machine

From the Publisher

2017-07-12
Tracing the evolution of a poet's passion.Growing up in Houston in the 1970s, award-winning poet Biespiel (A Long High Whistle, 2015, etc.) had no aspirations to be a writer. Even as a high school student, though, he loved language. He studied Latin with an inspiring teacher, and as an English major at Boston University, he was entranced by the poets he discovered in the Norton Anthology of Modern Poetry: Whitman, Yeats, Stevens, and Auden, among them. Working in a Boston bookshop, he writes, "nearly perfected the romance of myself as a liberal intellectual." He was inspired, as well, by the elegant speeches of John F. and Robert Kennedy: "part of the reason I became a writer," he writes, "comes in part from memorizing those words and wishing to embody them in my own." However, for Biespiel, appreciating others' words seemed a world apart from writing, a process that accrued "word by word, phrase by phrase, line by line." He brought to the process lessons he had learned during training as a competitive diver; diving, "a sport of continual adjustments," taught him "that every time I start a new poem I'm having to learn to figure out how to write poetry all over again." Diving became "a peculiar sort of model for literary life—for training, for discipline, and for patience." The author's literary life began in a small town in Vermont, where he felt "far removed from the bright streets of my East Texas upbringing" and from his family's Jewish immigrant origins. "It was like I was taking revenge against my life." From the work of poets like Seamus Heaney and Yves Bonnefoy, Biespiel hoped to learn "how to get my poems to open up to me. And I could hear my poems pleading back to me to be patient. I was lit up with lust for my writing." Lyrical, affectionate anecdotes about friends and family round out the author's graceful reflections on creativity.

Kirkus Reviews