Rainer Maria Rilke: FOR THE SAKE OF A SINGLE POEM
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Rainer Maria Rilke with Baladine Klossowska at Chateau de Muzot (Switzerland), 1923
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Ah, poems amount to so little when you write them too early in your life. You ought to wait and gather sense and sweetness for a whole lifetime, and a long one if possible, and then, at the very end, you might perhaps be able to write ten good lines. For poems are not, as people think, simply emotions (one has emotions early enough) – they are experiences. For the sake of a single poem, you must see many cities, many people and things, you must understand animals, must feel how birds fly, and know the gesture which small flowers make when they open in the morning. You must be able to think back to streets in unknown neighbourhoods, to unexpected encounters, and to partings you had long seen coming; to days of childhood whose mystery is still unexplained, to parents whom you had to hurt when they brought in a joy and you didn’t pick it up (it was a joy meant for somebody else); to childhood illnesses that began so strangely with so many profound and difficult transformations, to days in quiet, restrained rooms and to mornings by the sea, to the sea itself, to seas, to nights of travel that rushed along overhead and went flying with all the stars, and it is still not enough to be able to think of all that. You must have memories of many nights of love, each one different from all the others, memories of women screaming in labor, and of light, pale, sleeping girls who have just given birth and are closing again. But you must also have been beside the dying, must have sat beside the dead in the room with the open window and scattered noises. And it is not yet enough to have memories. You must be able to forget them when they are many, and you must have the immense patience to wait until they return. For the memories themselves are not important. Only when they have changed into our very blood, into glance and gesture, and are nameless, no longer to be distinguished from ourselves – only then can it happen that in some very rare hour the first word of a poem arises in their midst and goes forth from them.
– Rainer Maria Rilke
from THE NOTEBOOKS OF MALTE LAURIDS BRIGGE
(the poet’s only novel)
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Click to enlarge
Rilke manuscript facsimile: “Sonnet I” from the Sonnets to Orpheus [Part One]. Presented as a gift to Katharina Kippenberg during a visit to Muzot in February 1922
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Click to enlarge
Rilke manuscript facsimile: “Sonnet I” from the Sonnets to Orpheus [Part One]. Presented as a gift to Katharina Kippenberg during a visit to Muzot in February 1922
August 30th, 2009 at 9:41 pm
Wow, powerful quote from Rilke! Thanks for sharing, Al !
October 4th, 2009 at 8:59 pm
Hello, Mr Young – I spotted you on a flight to Seattle last month. Ooh! A poet sighting! But I couldn’t remember your name. I bought your last book (after your Poetry & Pizza reading and enjoyed it and remembered the name of it – Coastal Nights and Inland Afternoons. I leaned over to my partner and said you had been California’s poet laureate but I couldn’t remember your name. He suggested I stride up to you when we deplaned and say, “Bob Hass! How’ve you been!”
Sadly, we had to rush to catch our connection to Anchorage, where we would attend my sister’s wedding, so I didn’t have a chance to try that gambit. Of the six days we were in Anchorage, it rained a little each day except the day of the ceremony, when it was sunny and warm. The couple incorporated some Rilke in the ceremony but I’m afraid I got a little annoyed by Rilke’s infinite distances.
I hope your travels are smooth and pleasant.
October 4th, 2009 at 10:28 pm
5 October 2009
Charleston, SC
Thank you, Glenn Ingersoll. I do remember the Poetry & Pizza benefit reading at Escape from New York Pizza, where I read with poet-novelist Mary Mackey. What a treat! The Widow’s War, her new novel, set during the Civil War, returns to the quintessential American issues of slavery vs. freedom, or right vs. wrong.
No, Rilke isn’t everyone’s cup of tea. I happen to find refreshing the passage I’ve posted from Malte Laurids Brigge. We’re in the midst of an era — in the United States anyway — where poets in Masters of Fine Arts programs are largely ignorant of any body of poetry except the poems of their grad candidates and colleagues. The emphasis on confessional detail in contemporary poetry seems at times so overwhelming to me that even the despair and tedium it triggers in me dissolves into pointlessness.
Rilke was calling for poets to concern themselves with the depth and range of life beyond ego and career. I can see, though, where you, like others, may find “his infinite leaps,” as you call them, annoying.
I thank you for taking the time to connect and weigh in. Next time you see me, just smile and say hi. I’ll respond likewise.
From Charleston — which right now is shining and October-sharp — I head for Jackson, Mississippi, my own home state.
December 11th, 2009 at 4:12 pm
Thanks for posting this, am I OK to use this information for a school project?
December 15th, 2009 at 10:51 pm
Do feel free to use in a school project any information you find useful in this post. Take pains, though, to cite sources.
– A.Y.