U of Ideas of General Interest -- April 1999
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Contact: Andrea Lynn, Humanities/Social Sciences Editor
(217) 333-2177; [email protected]
LANGUAGE
Poet examines his life, hopes others see their reflections in his work
CHAMPAIGN, Ill. -- Somehow, in his new slim volume of 23 trim poems, the award-winning poet Michael Van Walleghen has packed a world of animals, a universe of heavenly bodies, and beyond that, a lifetime of personal memories and the echoes of our prehistoric fears.
With "The Last Neanderthal" (University of Pittsburgh Press), his fifth collection of poems, Van Walleghen confronts his own life not only in hopes of understanding it, he said, but also "in the faith that the personal will eventually become the universal. It may be paradoxical, but I think that's how literature achieves a universal dimension."
In his collection, Van Walleghen, a winner of the 1980 Lamont Award, moves linearly from childhood -- a spare vacation cottage, complete with frogs, to teen and young adult years, to middle age -- a visit to the doctor's office to check on what one day may become a frog-sized prostate. (Frogs, we learn from a waiting-room magazine, are becoming extinct). But within his poems, objects, time and space morph back and forth. In the title poem, the waiting room becomes an operating room and then a cave, where a Neanderthal hunkers over a roasting frog, "his low forehead wrinkled suddenly/by something he hears out there-- /a car whizzing by in another dimension./ It's possible. If he can imagine it/why not? Meanwhile, the frog/looks almost done./A small frog/the size of a baseball or an enlarged/prostate maybe. He can see it clearly./A middle-aged man much like himself."
Van Walleghen, a professor of poetry at the University of Illinois, uses such words as magic, mystery and accident to describe the process of writing poetry. While he finds it difficult to say which is more important, the idea or the language, he acknowledges that his chief desire is "to use language well, to make it elegant." His images are crystal-clear, arresting and often elegant: "an octopus of feedback cable," a "forty-watt flashback," a planet tilting toward dusk. What triggers a poem, Van Walleghen said, is never a specific idea. "I sit down with a vague itch, a need to do something, a longing, perhaps, for some kind of beautiful thing. I don't quite know what I'm doing until I see it being done. It's a mystery."
Similarly, themes develop themselves, he said. "They keep coming at you. You find yourself in the middle of another poem about this, or another poem about that. And although you might be writing about a tree, this theme will simply intrude."
Van Walleghen concedes that he may be obsessed with perfection. He rewrites "constantly, from the first word. I work line by line. I'm listening, figuring out. And when I reach the end, that's it. I'm not about to go back."
The poet suggested that for him, poetry is a way of creating perfection in an imperfect world. But there's a heavy toll. "It takes whatever you've got -- whatever your IQ is. There is nothing about poetry that after a while is easy."
-ael-
RSS