Hayden Carruth (1) (1921–2008)

I'll be honest. I'd never heard of Hayden Carruth until I heard Garrison Keillor talk about him one morning on The Writer's Almanac a month or two ago. Told us that Carruth won the National Book Award for Poetry in 1996 for his book, SCRAMBLED EGGS & WHISKEY. A great title, which got my attention, so I looked around online for more info on Carruth. All the cheap copies of SE&W had already been scarfed up (hey, the power of Garrison), so I thought I'd try this book of essays since I'm not the sharpest tool in the kit when it comes to poetry. And I liked this book, mostly. See, Carruth had a really speckled kinda career. He himself tells us here that he's been in and out of the "hatch" a couple times - i.e. insane asylum. The first time, in his late twenties, he underwent a series of electro-shock-therapy treatments, then moved into his parents' attic, and rarely emerged from there for nearly five years. But he finally got help from a sympathetic shrink, who became a lifelong friend. There are really only three sections in RELUCTANTLY: AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL ESSAYS, and you can tell, in reading them, that he was indeed "reluctant" to write any of them, but had given in to the entreaties of friends and readers to write frankly about his life, particularly about his bouts with mental illness, the several woment and marriages, and about his 'suicide,' which is what he calls it - not an 'attempt' - but the real thing. Because, he points out, he did a good job, taking a massive dose of multiple prescription pills, and was technically dead, and then brought back.

Carruth has a few different methods of dealing with these parts of his life, he vacillates between talking about his education and his love affair with words and the English language - and can get quite abstruse, even boring, about this - and simple story-telling of his childhood and youth, a bit about growing up during the Depression and his service with the Army Air Corps as a cryptographer in Italy during WWII. And those latter things are fascinating, as are the parts about his wives, lovers, family and friends. When he keeps it simple, it's great. But when he tries to actually figure it all out and gets all philosophical on you, it's not so great. He also rubbed shoulders with quite a few famous poets during his time as an academic at Syracuse University towards the end of his life, but he doesn't do a lot of name-dropping. Of course, how famous are many poets, really?

Bottom line: Hayden Carruth lived a very interesting life. He had multiple demons - insanity, alcohol, insecurities galore, etc.- but he did the best he could in dealing with them, and in the process he managed to produce a couple dozen books of prose and poetry. He died in 2008 of complications from a series of strokes. I liked this book enough that I will try to read some of his poetry soon. And there's another book I might try sooner, called LETTERS TO JANE, a correspondence he had with poet Jane Kenyon during the last year of her troubled life. I already know a bit about her from having read Donald Hall's fine memoir, THE BEST DAY THE WORST DAY: LIFE WITH JANE KENYON. So yeah, I think I'd like to read Carruth's letters to her. And this book? No reluctance on my part. Highly recommended.

- Tim Bazzett, author of the memoir, BOOKLOVER… (more)

This anthology had a lot of interesting poets in it. My problem was how to read it. It is arrange chronologically by the year of the author's birth. Sometimes the poets sitting near each other have a lot in common either in period or style or interests, sometimes not. So if you read in order, which is what I tried to do, you're often jerked around from one school of poetry to another only to go back to the first a few poets later. If you just look for your favorites, you miss the point which is to discover gems by little known poets. I finally gave up, though I did meet some interesting new (to me) voices on the way.… (more)