By BRETT WARNKE
W.H. Auden once explained that if a generation gap existed, it was due to “those, old or young,/ Who will not learn their Mother Tongue.” Many writers fear for the survival or at least the strength of language—its muscularity, contours, and splendor—as well as its ability to be a vehicle for truth. Today, screens replace reams. Newspapers die. And White House hopefuls can’t name a single periodical they’ve read. In the last century, poets were increasingly pushed out of the public conversation. (Novelists seem to be next in line for the chopping block). Like Michael Ende’s fantasy novel, “The Neverending Story,” a grim Nothing seems to be growing. Ironically, it grows in a world of infinite, digitized, and instantly accessible somethings. Can the strength and beauty of language survive what Saul Bellow called “the moronic inferno” of the world today? Many of those in the scribbler’s trade express a haunted pessimism. But, extraordinarily and inspiringly, a local poet named Chris Waters is hopeful. In our interview he simply couldn’t comprehend the death of literature. “It’s not a loss that’s conceivable to me,” he said. “Then we’d be automotons, we’d be robots.”
Waters recently released a new book of poetry, “Ghost Lighthouses: New and Selected Hatteras Poems.” He does this as his former career as a professional academic has ended. Waters had many interests as a professor—Afro-French theatre, modernism, and the French writer Paul Claudel were just a few topics in his many publications during his years at (to name a few) Harvard, The University of Wales, William and Mary, and URI. While he was at the latter, he was nominated for the school’s Scholarly Excellence Award and has also earned two Pushcart Prizes nominations—one for fiction and one for poetry. In this excellent new collection of poems he writes, “The thing is though to live until/you die. Neither a peach-complexioned nor a prune-faced/zombie be.”
Waters is unsubtle about his priorities these days. His love has always been language, French and English. His license plate illustrates as much. Blazoned with “Poesie,” French for “poetry.” He is in his 80s and shows little hint of mental or physical diminution. He plays tennis, swims, collaborates with the South County Poet’s Group, writes, and spends his free moments sending his work out for publication. When Waters was teaching and researching, batches of rejected poetry used to molder for weeks in sad piles on his desk. “If you’re an honest teacher, you put your time into the classwork,” he said. But now, if rejection slips arrive, Waters will make note and send a half dozen more poems out by sunset. Waters’ wife of Dora of 31 years, his second, teaches both Italian and Spanish. He has 2 daughters and a son in New York, but rarely gets to see them. “Even New York is a distance when you’re busy writing,” he said.
“Ghost Lighthouse” often describes Waters’s retired life beside the teeming fronds and quivering beach grass in North Carolina. A humorous and personal pair of poems “Retirement (I, II)” wink at a world which expects the venerable author to slow down. He can’t. There’s too much to write about: “Golden years sounds like fuzzy brains, the point is/time to do what you haven’t done, or/doing more of it, and or better.”
But Winters isn’t solipsistic. He moves from his own world to that indifferent but galactic natural world he cannot stop noticing. In one poem, he eloquently describes an underappreciated mother, a blue shell crab: “Long before the she-crab’s final moult,/the randy jimmy starts to prance although/he has been known to court an empty carapace, or/even a sheepish brother. ….”Twelve months later, her two million larvae float/away, and she swims toward the open sea to die.”
His poetry is lush but never luxuriant and his words, selected with a jewler’s care, demand repetition. On flowers: “The roadside morning glories’ purple horns/had long since crumpled and, next on their vines, erectile, bursting, their replacements queued.” But not everything is beautiful. Some poems are misty with unease and have the effect of passing a bone peeking out from the soil: “I sat with the night wind as the oil lamp poured through the porch screen, onto the yard clutter—beach chair, handle-less rake, back-less stroller—then to the graveyard that hungered for more.” In another: “Croaking on the dry sand, croakers croak indeed/For all of that these pure fishes are less touching than a beached shark’s operatic struggle. Mouth puckered, glassily staring, convulsing. Winning, whatever its belly holds, our respect.”
Waters mentioned that a friend and fellow poet, Paul Petrie, spent last summer rewriting. Waters did no such thing. “I don’t rewrite,” he said. “I write out my work in long-hand and then push onto other subjects. I’ve never really had anything like writer’s block. There is always something new to write.” In “Beach Doings” he sums up the constant turnover of his mind in a beach scene, “People watch like cats. Things happen, don’t happen, it doesn’t matter, it does matter. Poems get done.”
Waters also taught in Africa. A previous poetry collection, a slim volume called “Senegal,” detailed the equatorial nation’s grisly history. One poem, “House of Slaves,” describes a sinister Middle Passage voyage where the dead are “fed to joyful sharks.” In “AFRICAMERICAUSTRALIA” Waters describes imperialism and its vehicle, the myth of Progress, that wiped out millions of indigenous people. But while a more didactic and less talented writer would flounder under such political topics, Winters excellently uses the voice of an unregenerate colonist describing his troubles: “We talk our language and they try it too. All to no avail./But, when they dare speak their own tongues, put them in jail. They ate stray roots and beasts. From the start, we were plowers, fencers, hoers of fields that stayed in place. This land’s ours.”
A few poems in the new volume,” like “Steam in August” have a hollow pregnancy. But these are very few. Whether Waters is memorializing his favorite cats, jeering at gulls who “winkle every crumb from their beeks,” or allowing the reader insight into the anticipation of becoming a father, “Ghost Lighthouse” glows with a brilliant light.
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