Jim Longenbach, estimable poet and critic, visited our humble scene a few years back and gave a terrific lecture and poetry reading. In the awkward making-conversation at Starbuck's preceding the events, we got to talking about the possibility of enduring work by current poets. JL is one of the most prescient and eloquent writers on poetry of his generation, and so I asked him why he didn't write more critically–not mean-spiritedly, like some, but acknowledging the flaws– of his contemporaries. It's clear they value his thoughts: witness Louise Gluck's dedication of her Collected Poems to him, and a remark Richard Howard made to me once that if anyone ever did a critical biography of him, he'd like it to be Jim Longenbach. Poets need critics: the poems come first, but the appraisal must follow, or the poems disappear. JL replied that since his own poems wouldn't be among the six or eight poets who would still be read in a hundred years, he saw no reason to write negatively about anyone else's work. He said he "didn't believe in immortality."
This conversation stuck with me because I found I didn't, and don't, agree. I don't think you can look at that particular I-word from outside. Isn't immortality an attitude of the mind toward the present? In fact, it's not about the future at all. Remember Strontium 90? The half-life of radioactivity? These things and concepts are on a time scale people aren't capable of grasping completely. So is the power of a word. Immortality is the concept humans have used since time immemorial to acknowledge and measure the radioactivity of words. Immortality is simply the present's assessment of the reach of language.
Shakespeare will soon be 500 years young. Some of us (not me, but I'm an ignoramus) have worn out our interest in the plays and have turned to a new mystery: the question of who "Shakespeare" actually "was." I've never been able to understand this quest except in terms of (mostly male) arrogance. Shakespeare is the half-life of his words, not a person. Five centuries ago no one (except maybe Nostradamus) could have possibly foreseen the 21st century, just as no one now can possibly understand 2520 except maybe in terms of gadgets. No one knows how those gadgets will interact with humans and with each other. And realistically, who cares? That's for the future to solve, though such speculation now is technology's version of the imagination.
Something in the brain needs whatever "immortality" is or stands for. It's an expansiveness, not a measurement of time, a necessary ingredient of the making of something in the present, not a statement about its endurance. All History wants is a few representative examples of what was going on in a given time–preferably good ones–and if your poems aren't among the select few, so be it. You didn't write for History; you wrote for yourself. And the idea of "immortality" just expands the present moment of writing to the limits of what you are capable of doing–it stops time for a while. What a gift.
So "immortality" isn't a thing; it's just one of those words, like "God" used to be, that lifts the world off our backs, lets us see the stars, imagine something bigger than ourselves. It's a grab bag of spiritual stuff, a smorgasbord of shit, a veritable … Enough. It's a fold of the mind that represents something necessary, but which needn't be explored every time out. It's not something to aspire to; it's something an artist can't do without.
Jim Cummins is retiring this July after 41 years at the University of Cincinnati.