On the Duino Elegies

In which I discuss the origin story of Rainer Maria Rilke's poem and my interview with Portland poet Valerie Witte.

Rainer Maria Rilke

I’ve been obsessing over Lord Byron lately, for a variety of reasons but primarily because of his pedigree as a leading poet of the Romantic era, a period I’m thinking has much to offer a burning world that is wallowing in barbarism and stupidity. Not just Byron, though — more on him another day — but poetry in general. Particularly because I recently found myself immersed in an extended conversation with a poet.

But first, I want to talk about the singular Austrian poet Rainer Maria Rilke.

My favorite poetry story, which is also one of my favorite stories about any artist, is related by Stephen Mitchell in the foreword to his 1982 translation of Rilke’s Duino Elegies, which also includes his Sonnets to Orpheus. Here, he tells the poem’s origin stories, and it’s a mindfuck.

Mitchell reports that in 1910, Rilke had finished his novel The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge and was left “shattered and hollow.” After a couple years wandering around Europe, the poet accepted an invitation from a wealthy friend, Princess Marie von Thurn, to spend some time at Duino Castle on the Adriatic Sea. The story, Mitchell says, comes to us from Rilke by way of her memoir of him. He goes on:

“One morning in late January, he received a troublesome business letter, which he had to take care of right away. Outside, a violent north wind blew, though the sun was shining. He climbed down to the bastions, which, jutting out to the east and west, were connected to the foot of the castle by a narrow pathway along cliffs that dropped off two hundred feet into the sea. He walked back and forth, absorbed in the problem of how to answer the letter. Then, all at once, he stopped. From the raging wind, what seemed to him an inhuman voice, the voice of an angel, was calling: “Who, if I cried out, wold hear me among the angels’ hierarchies?” He took out the notebook that he always carried with him and wrote down these words, and a few lines that followed as if he were taking dictation. Then he climbed back up to his room, set his notebook aside, and (I love this detail) with true Germanic thoroughness, first answered the business letter and then continued the poem. By the evening, the whole of “The First Elegy” had been written.

“What kind of an event was this? That Rilke actually heard the voice of a nonphysical intelligence coming from the storm is possible. That the voice was Rilke’s own is certain: It speaks with the poet’s ‘I,’ in the gorgeous classical rhythms of Rilkean verse. But there is no either/or here. In such intensities of experience, the very idea of outside or inside is irrelevant; psychic resonance spreads through the whole universe of matter; what is given by God is given by the innermost self. Whatever the voice was, angel and self, it came from the depths of life, and it came with an incontrovertible sense of mission. Rilke knew that this poem was to be his own justification.”

Mitchell’s account of the writing of the Orpheus sonnets is similarly thrilling, in which Rilke himself likens the process to “taking dictation” from a wellspring he doesn’t understand, and he concludes:

“The whole experience seems to have taken place at an archaic level of consciousness, where the poet is literally the god’s or muse’s scribe. We are in the presence of something so intensely real that all our rational categories are useless. Who can respond to it without a shudder of awe?”

Late last month, I had the wonderful experience of corresponding with a poet from Portland, Oregon, and Rilke’s experience came up—because I asked her about it. She was totally game for that, and many other topics. My interview with Valerie Witte was published Monday at Oregon ArtsWatch in the Q&A format, which I’ve always loved because—notwithstanding some inevitable editing —it preserves the subject’s voice. You can read it in its entirely here.

I’ve done around ten or so of these Q&As for ArtsWatch in the last few years, and this one with Valerie—insofar as my enjoyment of what amounts to a collaborative process—surely ranks in the top three or so. After I finished reading her most recent poetry collection (which we discuss in the interview) I dived into an earlier work of hers, The Grass is Greener When the Sun is Yellow.

She co-authored that one with another artist, Sarah Rosenthal. I describe it at ArtsWatch as “a fascinating hybrid of poetry and elements of memoir and literary analysis within an epistolary construct.” I thumbed through it again last night, as it’s one of those pieces that rewards rereading. Conceptually, it’s one of the most interesting works of literary art I’ve encountered in recent memory.

That work will be followed by a companion piece, an essay collection titled One Thing Follows Another: Experiments in Dance, Art and Life Through the Lens of Simone Forti and Yvonne Rainer, to be published later this year.

I was so taken by The Grass is Greener and my conversation with its coauthor that I made a proposal and she accepted: When the “sequel” hits bookstores, Valerie and I plan to continue the conversation and discuss her project in its totality. We may also try to loop Sarah in, if she’s available. That interview or article, whatever form it takes, will be published here at Artlandia at some point—an exclusive!

Thanks all for reading, everyone. Your next Artlandia lands Wednesday, May 15. And a reminder: Artlandia will go on summer hiatus starting on the solstice and resume early in September.

Many sentences attempting to define poetry begin with “Poetry is … “ This is one.