How I began to write poetry is something I’ve been asked often and have attempted to answer elsewhere. But I’ve been thinking about the question of influence, and I must acknowledge that I might never have started to write poetry at all if it hadn’t been for Rilke.
I first read the poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke in my mid-twenties. I was about to get engaged and a friend of my mother’s gave me a book coupon as a gift. I bought myself The Selected Poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke, in Stephen Mitchell’s wonderful translation. Though I dipped into the book at the time, I left it behind and never looked at it again until a decade had passed.
When I returned home for good and all and I began to carry a book of poetry with me in my bag at all times as I would the keys to the house, I read Rilke again, for the first time. And I was transfixed.
There’s a certain kind of poetry that Anglophone Indian poets learn to admire: the kind of poetry that is cool and ironic, that privileges the detached observer and that relies on the image to carry the import of the poem.
I read Rilke’s poems to his ‘Beloved’, his Sonnets to Orpheus, the Elegies and I could detect no trace of embarrassment in the lyricism – even ecstasy – of his poems. Indeed, in Letters to a Young Poet (which is probably better known even than his poetry) he says to the young poet he writes to:
In the years when I began to write my first tentative poems, this was liberating advice. I had no way of knowing my creative from my uncreative moments, but I knew, when I sat down to write, that I needed to be in a certain state of attention in order to let the words flow.
These words, exhorting me to let myself be something other than ironic, and the example of Rilke’s own poetry, gave me permission to remove my armour, to be vulnerable through my writing and to go deep into places I had not thought would nourish poetry.
In his poem You who never arrived, one of his uncollected poems, Rilke addresses his Beloved as an always-desired and always-elusive entity. "I have given up trying / to recognise you in the surging wave of the next/ moment," Rilke says. And later, these lines:
There is something lyrical, metaphoric and metaphysical in Rilke’s poetry that sits at an angle to the times he wrote in and in which we live. There are ways to read his poetry that puts it in the context of his times and there is value in that kind of scholarship (as is evident in the poet Robert Hass’ superb Introduction to Mitchell’s translations).
As a poet though, I was free to respond directly to the poems while leaving aside, for the moment, the context.
What I still respond to in Rilke’s poetry is the central absence at the heart of life and impossibility of ever turning it into a presence; of striving towards it regardless, and of the act of will in delving, recovering and remaining open.
Rilke says, in his first Duino Elegy, “Who, if I cried out, would hear me among the angels’/ hierarchies?” In that one line there is all the bleakness and despair of existence as well as all the hope that someone exists who will at least echo the cry if not answer it. That cry echoes still and for all times.
Sridala Swami's second collection of poetry, Escape Artist, was published by Aleph Book Co. in 2014. She is an alumnus of the International Writing Program at the University of Iowa and blogs at The Spaniard in the Works.
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I first read the poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke in my mid-twenties. I was about to get engaged and a friend of my mother’s gave me a book coupon as a gift. I bought myself The Selected Poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke, in Stephen Mitchell’s wonderful translation. Though I dipped into the book at the time, I left it behind and never looked at it again until a decade had passed.
When I returned home for good and all and I began to carry a book of poetry with me in my bag at all times as I would the keys to the house, I read Rilke again, for the first time. And I was transfixed.
There’s a certain kind of poetry that Anglophone Indian poets learn to admire: the kind of poetry that is cool and ironic, that privileges the detached observer and that relies on the image to carry the import of the poem.
I read Rilke’s poems to his ‘Beloved’, his Sonnets to Orpheus, the Elegies and I could detect no trace of embarrassment in the lyricism – even ecstasy – of his poems. Indeed, in Letters to a Young Poet (which is probably better known even than his poetry) he says to the young poet he writes to:
Irony: don’t let yourself be controlled by it, especially during uncreative moments. When you are fully creative, try to use it, as one more way to take hold of life.
In the years when I began to write my first tentative poems, this was liberating advice. I had no way of knowing my creative from my uncreative moments, but I knew, when I sat down to write, that I needed to be in a certain state of attention in order to let the words flow.
These words, exhorting me to let myself be something other than ironic, and the example of Rilke’s own poetry, gave me permission to remove my armour, to be vulnerable through my writing and to go deep into places I had not thought would nourish poetry.
In his poem You who never arrived, one of his uncollected poems, Rilke addresses his Beloved as an always-desired and always-elusive entity. "I have given up trying / to recognise you in the surging wave of the next/ moment," Rilke says. And later, these lines:
Streets that I chanced upon,—
you had just walked down them and vanished.
And sometimes, in a shop, the mirrors
were still dizzy with your presence and, startled, gave back
my too-sudden image.
It seemed to me that his Beloved could so easily have been poetry itself – the search for words, the attempt to say the unsayable, the momentary shaping of an experience that has no essential shape of substance of its own.
There is something lyrical, metaphoric and metaphysical in Rilke’s poetry that sits at an angle to the times he wrote in and in which we live. There are ways to read his poetry that puts it in the context of his times and there is value in that kind of scholarship (as is evident in the poet Robert Hass’ superb Introduction to Mitchell’s translations).
As a poet though, I was free to respond directly to the poems while leaving aside, for the moment, the context.
What I still respond to in Rilke’s poetry is the central absence at the heart of life and impossibility of ever turning it into a presence; of striving towards it regardless, and of the act of will in delving, recovering and remaining open.
Rilke says, in his first Duino Elegy, “Who, if I cried out, would hear me among the angels’/ hierarchies?” In that one line there is all the bleakness and despair of existence as well as all the hope that someone exists who will at least echo the cry if not answer it. That cry echoes still and for all times.
Sridala Swami's second collection of poetry, Escape Artist, was published by Aleph Book Co. in 2014. She is an alumnus of the International Writing Program at the University of Iowa and blogs at The Spaniard in the Works.