Correspondances

The playwright Edward Albee once wrote that the shortest way across Central Park was down the East Side, across the bottom on 59th Street, and up the West Side. Not direct, but faster.

In geometry, this would be a triangulation. In literature, it’s a metaphor. In Tom Stoppard’s play, Jumpers, he wants to prove god with language. Like Lewis Carroll’s word golf, where you turn one word into another, one letter at a time. In a metaphor, you morph a concept all at once. The jump is where poetry comes in.

Poetry works by metaphor. You set up impossible goals, two antitheses, such as the chaos of reality and the reassuring comfort of a universe controlled by god, and then you bridge them with language.

When I was at Columbia during the riots in ‘68, I was the only student on a committee with the sociologist Daniel Bell, the musical historian Jacques Barzun, and a variety of academics. The idea was to restructure Columbia so it would appeal to students. I was given a professor’s PhD thesis at midnight, and I had to analyze it in front of everyone the next morning. He wouldn’t give it to me until the last minute because he was worried that I, or someone else, would steal it. He was totally paranoid. It was called “A World Without Walls.” The idea was that there should be no boundaries between disciplines, between ideas. It was all one big idea. (So I suppose I did steal it.) Every course should be about everything. A musician should be able to bring philosophy to music. Each thing corresponds to something else.

I remember when Cathy and I stood at sunset in a room at the Hôtel Lauzun on the Ile-St.-Louis with our friends the Toulouses, where Baudelaire wrote much of his poetry, and hearing someone read this poem. Although Baudelaire was the first to defy the lyric tradition of writing only about the beautiful, still he dreamt of the gutter in some of the most elegant salons in history, high walls bright with wildly rococo paintings, outside the Seine and the Quai d’Anjou, the most elegant corner of Paris, now made even more ethereal by Baudelaire’s evil flowers.

This is a literal translation of Charles Baudelaire’s poem. My poem, “Leaves,” in this volume, is a freer version.