Collected Poems by Ursula K. Le Guin
edited by Harold Bloom
It's one of my goals to own and have read everything Ursula K. Le Guin has ever written, but I have never read any of her poetry. Thus, the release of this Library of America edition was a big help; it contains all of her books of poetry, from 1975's Wild Angels to 2018's So Far So Good, as well as a number of previously uncollected poems and some prose writing about poetry (mostly her introductions to her own books, though in classic Library of America fashion, these are placed at the end for some reason, not where they ought to actually go). I don't think poetry benefits from sustainedly reading over seven hundred pages in one go, so for the past couple months I've dipped in and out of this between Hugo finalists.
I would say I am largely not a poetry person, but I do have my likes, such as Anne Sexton and Christina Rossetti. Alas, Le Guin is not to my taste as much as either of them. Certainly she is not bad, but I just did not like a lot of what I read here—certainly not as much as Harold Bloom, whose praise in the introduction is enthusiastic but largely inscrutable as far as I was concerned
Still, a couple points I can make:
(Normally when reading books of poetry, I mark ones I enjoy and want to come back to later by dog-earing the page. However, I am not going to dog-ear a nice Library of America hardback! So in this case, I used my phone's camera to snap pictures of particularly enjoyable poems. The downside of this approach is that on occasions when reading without my phone nearby, I had no way to note those poems, so there are gaps in my coverage of the book. Also it's a plan that didn't occur to me until I was some way into my reading! In my comments below I will link to the poems I can find online, and excerpt in some cases, usually when I can't.)
Getting to read her poetry in order is interesting in a couple ways. One is that you see her development as a poet; she starts with largely free verse, but seems to experiment with more formal, well, forms as she goes. And maybe it's the Victorianist in me, but I found those much more to my taste.
You also get to see what an increasingly central role poetry played in her literary output. There are seven hundred pages of poems here; when you are on page 350, you might be halfway through her poetry, but she is over sixty years old. She produced more than half of her poetic output in the last two decades of her literary career. That said, this was at least partially because she couldn't write novels anymore as she got older; I remember her announcement that Lavinia (2008) would be her last because it was all she was capable of, even though she didn't die for another decade. She captured her sadness over this in her poem "The Old Novelist's Lament" (2018):
I miss the many that I was,
my lovers, my adventurers,
the women I went with to the Pole.
What was mine and what was theirs?
We were all rich. Now that I share
the cowardice of poverty,
I miss that courage of companionship.
Le Guin writes a lot about nature, which is not particularly to my taste. I get why she does this, there is a very good speech by her included here about the Anthropocene, arguing that attention to nature is a political project in an era where we largely see nature as a resource to be exploited. I agree with this in principle, but in practice, I find nature poems pretty boring. Still, not to be too much of a grump, I did like her cat poems, such as "Black Leonard in Negative Space" (1978):
All that surrounds the cat
is not the cat, is all
that is not the cast, is all,
is everything, except the animal.
It will rejoin without a seam
when he is dead. To know
that no-space is to know
what he does not, that time
is space for love and pain.
He does not need to know it.
As a parent who has read her picture book Cat Dreams aloud many times, I am not surprised she has a good grasp on cats. Though a cat poem is probably not a nature poem now that I think about it!
I was pleasantly surprised by her translation of the Tao Te Ching (1998). To be honest, I had not expected to get much out of this, expecting somewhat woo-woo life advice I guess, which seems a bit of a disservice to an important philosophical tradition now that I write this, but it was true. But there is genuinely good stuff to be found in here, stuff worth holding onto and remember. For example, take this stanza from "Proportion" (scroll down at the link to hear it read aloud):
You can't keep standing on tiptoe
or walk in leaps and bounds.
You can't shine by showing off
or get ahead by pushing.
Self-satisfied people do no good,
self-promoters never grow up.
I wouldn't claim it's groundbreaking, but it resonates. And of course as a literary studies academic, I found a lot to enjoy in Le Guin's accounting of her own method of translation and her footnotes about choices she made.
Le Guin is often at her best when she is angry. There is a lot to be angry about here; like I said above, over half the book comes from (relatively) late in her life, and it seems to me that 9/11 in particular was a key moment for her, with lots of poems from 2001 onwards about peace and war and liberty and injustice. I particularly liked "Peace Vigil, March, 2003" (2006), about a man who wanders into a peace vigil the speaker is attending:
Spring night in time of war. A big man
with a big ragged backpack
wandered into the circle and stood
looking around, till somebody
spoke to him, somebody gave him
a candle, somebody lighted the candle.
Then he sat down on the wet pavement
right in the empty center of the circle.
He sat huddled up over the candle,
holding it in one hand, and holding
the other hand over it to get warm, and then
he would change hands. . . .
Some of her translations of the Tao Te Ching capture the antiwar sentiment well, too, actually, even though they precede 9/11. Take this stanza from "Against war":
It is right that the murder of many people
is mourned and lamented.
It is right that a victor in war
be received with funeral ceremonies.
Additionally, I once read an interview with Le Guin where she said to the interviewer, "Thank you for noticing that some of my stories are funny. A great many critics never have." She can write funny poems, and those are often her best. There is a particularly goofy one, "On David Hensel's Submission to the Royal Academy of Art" (2006), about a real situation where an artist sent his sculpture of a human head and its plinth in for display separately—and the museum rejected the sculpture but mistook the plinth for a work of art and put it on display! Her "Found Poem" (1986) is funny enough that I read it aloud to my wife and she laughed too. But it's also kind of sublime and beautiful, a really clever moment captured in a few lines.
Perhaps her very best, then, are the ones where she is both funny and angry, combining absurdity and injustice into powerful statements. At its best, the book embodies Le Guin's own poem, "Read at the Award Dinner, May 1996" (1999):
Above all beware of honoring women artists.
For the housewife will fill the house with lions
and in with the grandmother
come bears, wild horses, great horned owls, coyotes.
I think if they were all like this, I would have loved this book. As it was, I liked it, but it certainly had many moment worth loving. But of course, seven hundred pages of poetry are never going to be one hundred percent to one person's taste, I imagine, least of all mine.
