by Robert Clark

Photo by Star Black. Courtesy of the Academy of American Poets | www.poets.org

Not everyone’s idea of fun is a three-hour documentary, with about ten minutes that are not silent, about a strict order of monks. 

But when Into Great Silence opened at Film Forum, Rachel Wetzsteon and I were near the front of the line.  We even  enjoyed one of those New York-specific blessed moments: two monks in cassocks with cowls sat a few rows in front of us, elbowing each other from time to time in the course of the film. Rachel thought they were sharing a reaction to seeing some Rules of the Order broken on screen.  I thought they just appreciated that the film showed the beauty of their cloistered life.     

The cliché of the priest — or even the Goddess — of Art, a rarefied and detached creature, was antithetical to Rachel’s practice as a poet.  She gave her readers a sensually and intellectually engaging sense of exactly what it is like for an imaginative and passionate young woman to live in Manhattan today.  Yet the discipline with which Rachel wrote, taught, played and dreamed was, if not monastic, certainly the envy of many a less productive poet.  She did not admire the Pythoness, but she celebrated the gifts of solitary vision even while she was all too aware of the cost of isolation.

                                                       …Come back,
then, tenderly, to your old home; looking around
at the hungry and the hobbling, always be ready to speak,
and when they make ribald comments about the curious gleam
in your eye, gather them up and begin:
partners in darkness, friends, I have seen such wonders.

“Coming Back to the Cave”

But Rachel wrote far too many poems about love and delight for her readers to think that she disdained ribald comments. 

Several years later, we went to another film that we both greatly enjoyed, Once.  The plot concerns a male Irish street-busker and a young female Czech musician who meet in Dublin; it is too good a film for a spoiler.  Suffice to say that the struggles of the two artists to make music, keep body and soul together, and sort out their emotional lives is told with almost no sentimentality and only one improbable plot twist.       

As it happened, the actors in the film fell in love in real life, an opportunity to talk to Rachel again about the choice between perfecting the work and perfecting the life, a topic made fresh in several of her poems. One does not have to accept Romantic assumptions about the artist to admit that love or work often are, to some degree, a real choice.     

Rachel loved those who took that choice seriously, and among them particularly W.H. Auden, the subject of her excellent critical study Influential Ghosts, and the poem “In Memory of W. H. Auden.”  The poem suggests the tough-mindedness and humor that Rachel brought to all discussions of love.  She says that in Auden’s world there is

                       …little room for complaining,
how you forgave your watch and your body,

and how you surprised us with obvious but
unexpected pairings — you knew that knowledge
does not shun the lover’s embraces,
you knew that passion without precision

is like some awful parody of a book
on how to succeed; be one thing and be it
exclusively, the book says, and fly.

Her next line observes, “But if you fly like this you will plummet.” Rachel applauded Auden’s chameleon changes and moods, all of which were conveyed with “precision.”  How vulgar we are in our definitions of success and readiness to judge multifarious persons. 

One of Rachel’s greatest generosities to her readers has been to insist on precision in attacking such vulgarity and prejudice. The persons in her poetry are always myriad-natured, full of knowledge, brave and honest about failures of precision and compassion.  Rachel brought energy and insight to measuring the degree of truth in the small-r romantic ideal of endless striving, and its sometimes unbearable cost.

*