I WENT ON A BLUEBERRY-PICKING DATE with Tim and Tim's new girlfriend Hannah and Hannah's friend Marie. I kind of liked Marie. She wore flowing scarflike garments and some kind of weird perfume, and she knew a lot about Dorothy Parker. She stuck her head inside one of the taller blueberry bushes and then she said, "You know, the really good ones are deep inside."
I said, "Are they?" I stuck my head in, and Marie was right. If you push your head way into the green shadow of the bush and then you look up, you'll find amazing pendular arrangements of giant almost-black berries hanging everywhere. Nobody's seen them but you. They've been there all along, growing an ever darker blue and ever more engorged with rainwater, and yet no previous pickers have found them because they did not know to push their whole head into the blueberry bush.
"You have the gift," I said. "But I don't think you're going to develop any feelings of affection for me. Am I right?"
"Let's just pick blueberries," she said. So we picked a whole lot of blueberries, and then the four of us walked to the water and smelled its mumbling muddy smell, and Tim suddenly held out his arms and said, "Look at this river!"
I said to Marie, "Can you give us a taste of some Dorothy P?"
Marie lifted both sides of her scarf and said:
Devil-gotten sinners,
Throwing back their heads,
Fiddling for their dinners,
Kissing for their beds.
We all went "Oooo." Then Tim and Hannah began to walk back up toward the porch where you weighed the blueberries and left the right amount of money in a little wooden box. I made a tiny flinch of embarrassment as I saw the two of them hold hands. Marie and I walked behind them, not knowing what to do with our arms.
"So do you, ah, blame Walt Whitman for the death of rhyme?" Marie asked, conversationally.
I said, "Just because he said rhyming was intrinsically comic, that it was for inferior writers? No, that's just Walt talking out his back hatch. Which he was wont to do. Rationalizing his own inabilities. He wrote some things of genius, and he made his own rules." I paused. "What's that odd rattling sound?"
The sun was dipping behind the trees, and a frizzle of wind had risen up from somewhere. We listened. The sound turned out to be coming from several small windmills that had begun turning. We walked up to one and looked at it.
"Looks to be made out of a beer can," said Marie.
"You are right," I said. It was a Pabst beer can, cut and fanned out to make a windmill. When it twirled, it frightened berry-eating birds away. "That was a nice stanza you said back there," I said. "Some would say that it was trochaic trimeter, but they would be wrong in my opinion because it's a four-beat line."
"Oh," she said. "Glad to know that."
When we reached the car, we smiled and waved goodbye.
I TOOK A DIFFERENT EXIT on the highway because I wanted to go to Roz's place. As I drove I thought, no, it really wasn't that Whitman killed rhyme, it was that Jules Laforgue translated Whitman into French. The translating exoticized him, and then one day Laforgue wrote Gustave Kahn and said, Gustave, my frere, I forgot to rhyme. Because remember, a lot of French free verse is only sort of free. It rhymes and it scans, it just doesn't follow the superstrict rules that Boileau laid down way back in the day. But we aren't really conscious of the traditionalism of the French symbolists because French vers libre in English prose translation doesn't rhyme. The death of rhyme is really all about translation. Everybody started wanting to write poetry that sounded like a careful, loving prose version of some sweet-voiced balladeer from a faraway land. Everybody read the prose in their own language, and then they imagined the glorious versificational paradise that they didn't inhabit but that was glimmering greenly there in the distant original. The imagined rhyme-world was actually better and more lyrical than if they had the original poem in the original language with the actual rhyme scheme in it in front of them.
It happened first in French with Poe's poems. Poe was the juiciest rhymer of the nineteenth century-before Swinburne, that is-but Mallarme in his wisdom translated Poe into exquisitely rhymeless French prose, and then Mallarme published his reverent prose translations in a book, with line drawings by Manet. I don't own the book, because it's valuable, but I looked at it in a library once.
So then the French prose translations of Poe fed back into English poetry-and real rhyme, as opposed to imagined rhyme in a different language, began to seem somehow too obvious, too easy.
And the main thing was, it was kind of old Tim to want me to meet Marie, but I just wasn't going to call her up and ask her out. I wasn't going to do it. For one thing, she hadn't liked me that much. Her first impression was not dazzlement, understandably. So I'd really have to huff and puff to pique her interest. And although, yes, I liked that she had written her thesis on Dorothy Parker, and although yes I thought her scarf was colorful, in a way it made no dang difference because I wanted to be in the kitchen with Roz while she picked fleas off my dog, with the dishwasher humming warmly in the background.
I THOUGHT AGAIN of standing in the field of blueberry bushes listening to the rattle of the Pabst beer can windmills. And then suddenly I remembered a certain photograph that is printed in Karl Shapiro's autobiography.
In Karl Shapiro's autobiography there's a picture of Shapiro sitting at a round table with some of his students, and one of his students is Ted Kooser. Ted Kooser is an agreeable-looking young man with sticky-outy ears, and he's sitting in front of two beers-Pabst beers. Pabst is what reminded me. One of the beers may belong to the person who is taking the photo-who may be Karl Shapiro's wife, or another student, it doesn't say-or it may be that the two beers were both drunk by Ted Kooser himself. They look that way, but I doubt very much that he's an overdoer of beer. He just doesn't strike me as one.
Karl Shapiro's poems were included in a very important anthology, The Oxford Book of American Verse, edited by F. O. Matthiessen. Matthiessen lived very near Portsmouth, in Kittery, Maine, with his lover, a painter. Several editions of The Oxford Book of American Verse came out, and each time Shapiro's poems were inside. And then F. O. Matthiessen jumped out a hotel room window in Boston, because he was lonely and sad and upset about the purge of former communists. This was the fifties and things had gotten crazy, and Matthiessen jumped.
So Oxford waited politely for some years, and then they hired a different anthologist, a man named Richard Ellman, who was big on James Joyce, to edit The New Oxford Book of English Verse. Ellman hated Shapiro, because for one thing Shapiro had sharply criticized the Pound-Eliot-Joyce axis, and so he, Ellman, dropped Shapiro's poems from the anthology. Just expunged him-blotted him right out. Shapiro was gone from the Oxford anthology. And he really never recovered. In his autobiography he said it was like dying.
Many years later, Ted Kooser, Shapiro's student, became poetry consultant at the Library of Congress, a.k.a. Poet Laureate of the United States. And another edition of the Oxford anthology came out. Now it's called The Oxford Book of American Poetry. "Verse" sounded too tea-tableish by that time. This new new version is edited by David Lehman, a poet-and guess what? Karl Shapiro is back in. So it all comes around. Ted Kooser isn't in it, and I'm not in it, but I never was, and I don't mind.
Roz wasn't there when I got to her apartment. I left a container of blueberries by her door. I put a really big smoky one on top, and a leaf.
THERE USED TO BE a position at the Library of Congress called "poetry consultant." Which isn't a very news-worthy title. The first poetry consultant was a man named Joseph Auslander. "Auslander" means outlander. And Archie MacLeish, who became Librarian of Congress in 1939, didn't think much of Auslander's poetry. So the man was gently pushed aside. And then began a long line of poetry consultants. Louise Bogan, and Elizabeth Bishop, and Leonie Adams, and others were all poetry consultants. William Carlos Williams was going to be a poetry consultant in the early fifties, and then it came out that he had a taint of communism in his past-suddenly William Carlos Williams couldn't be the consultant.
Then, many years after that, sometime in the eighties, the library did a brilliant thing. And I don't know whose idea it was. Maybe it was Daniel Boorstin's idea. Maybe it was Billy Collins's idea. I don't know. I don't know anything really about Billy Collins except that he's Mister Bestseller. Maybe it was Robert Penn Warren's idea.
But they thought, Let's get these people in but let's give them the old fancy title, the honorary title that Tennyson had. Let's call them "poet laureates." What does "poet laureate" mean? Nothing. It means a person with laurel branches twined around his head. Which is not something people do much now. A little headdress of leaves, a little fancy, leafy hat. Nobody does that now. But even so we're going to copy the English model, and we're going to say, Okay, Tennyson was the poet laureate, and after him there was somebody, was it Bridges? Somebody innocuous. We're going to have these people come, and the publicists are going to go wild and they're going to say Billy Collins, Poet Laureate. And before that Robert Pinsky, Poet Laureate. Maybe it was Pinsky's idea. He's a pretty smooth dude. He used to be the poetry editor of The New Republic. Rejected some things of mine and more power to him.
And then in time it became retroactive. So the publicists would say that such-and-such poetry consultant-Louise Bogan, maybe, or Elizabeth Bishop-were the poet laureates of their time. "A position now known," the press kit would say, "as Poet Laureate of the United States." Even a guy like William Stafford was the poetry consultant. It was very different from the English model, because there were term limits. You were only poet laureate for a few years, not for your lifetime. Very different indeed from the English way, in which you were appointed like a Supreme Court Justice and served till you went gaga, or died.
Now, John Dryden was an early poet laureate of England. Dryden is one of those poets who wrote many thousands of lines of poetry and left very little of himself behind. His biographers have a hard time figuring out what he was up to in any given year. He lived through revolution, restoration, plague, and fire, and all we have is his published writing and a few letters to go on. But it's enough. It's all you need. Dryden defended rhyme against Milton, who said it was barbarous. He was funny, he was easy, he was a great prose writer and a great rhymer. This is unusual, in that most good poets can't write good prose. The better the prose they write, the worse the poetry. The better the poetry, the worse the prose. Except for letters. Poets are good letter writers. Elizabeth Bishop wrote absolute killer letters. Louise Bogan wrote killer letters, too, and funny, jabbing reviews. Those two sit way over here in the twentieth century. Whereas Dryden is over here in the seventeenth century. He was a short man. Elizabeth Bishop was a short woman.
Louise Bogan was a tall woman. She read in a very formal manner, with an exaggeratedly correct upper-class accent. She says, "This, is Louise Bogan, and I'm going to read a poem called-" whatever. And then she reads it slowly, with great pauses. And it's very very compressed, and that's what I like about it, it's packed, it's like a shoe in a shoe tree. A Ted Roethke poem is like an empty shoe you find at the side of the road that some manic person has cast aside on a walk, but Louise Bogan's poems are like cared-for shoes in a closet, tight and heavy around their clacking wooden trees.
TODAY THE CLOUDS have been sprayed on the sky with a number 63 narrow-gauge titanium sprayer tip. I don't want to sit in the barn just now, so I'm sitting out near the "thorny brambles," as I call them. I know very little about them except that they grow and grow and that they cover the hillside now, and when I pass by them with my lawnmower buzzing they catch at my shirt and my arm with their remarkably hooklike sharp thorns. Roz says they're a species of rose.
I've done nothing all week. Had a call from Victor and talked more about the reading series. Measured Nan's room. Drove to Portland listening to a CD of Elizabeth Bishop reading "The Fish." Cried, beating the steering wheel, because she was so good and she sounded so young. Booped the horn by mistake. Apologized with hand gestures to people around me on Route 95. Toured the Longfellow house in Portland while a group of kids from poetry camp chanted, in unison, "I shot an arrow into the air." Thought I saw John Green-leaf Whittier lurking in the shadows of the dark Longfellow kitchen, studying the gnarled blue tree in a large china tureen. Nodded at him. Opened a very unpleasant bill on my return. Ate a sandwich at a cafe with a nice short woman I met at the video store. Threw out my jaw because the bread was so crusty. Agreed to review two books to raise money: one a book of the art of Boris Artzybasheff, a surrealist illustrator who painted a lot of covers for Time, and one an interesting book about steam trains and poetry in the nineteenth century. Am I becoming a critic? Fine, I don't mind.
Then yesterday, another minor adventure in self-mutilation. I'd bought a big round loaf of bread from the bakery, and I cut off the nub end of it, and I did not put butter on it. I have something quite remarkable to tell you about butter, but maybe that's for another time. Oh, might as well tell you now. Unsalted butter is flavored. For instance, I buy unsalted Land O' Lakes butter-but this observation applies to all major brands of butter-and I didn't realize this until Roz pointed it out a few years ago. Roz has very keen tastebuds. All unsalted butter has so called "natural" flavoring. Real butter is flavored with butter flavor. Just think about that. I didn't believe it till I read the ingredients. Butter-flavored butter. When you know that fact, you'll taste it and it'll drive you nuts. How long has this outrage been going on?
So I had a slice of bread, and a few calamata olives, and I started singing "Saved by a woman," by Ray LaMontagne, at the top of my lungs, while cutting a second slice, and I got a little jiggy with the bread knife, which is new and sharp with squared-off serrations, and I cut off a small dome of my fingermeat. It was very similar to cutting off the end of the loaf of bread, except that it hurt. I said some bad words and bled on the bread, and then I went upstairs to the bathroom and did my best to reposition the sliced-off part where it was supposed to go, and although the blood continued I was able to encircle the fingertip-my left hand's index fingertip- with two Band-Aids. It was the same finger that had crashed into the doorjamb, if you can believe it. I didn't call Roz because two cuts on the same finger is an embarrassment, and I've gotten quite good at self-Band-Aiding. I hope the skin is going to graft itself back on. I lay on my bed and stared at the ceiling, worrying about my credit-card debt and eating calamata olives. And now it's Thursday.
THURSDAY IS THE DAY of fear. On Monday you're in great shape because you've got the whole week. Then Tuesday, still pretty good, still at the beginning more or less. Then Wednesday, and you're poised, and you can accomplish much if you just apply yourself vigorously and catch up. And then suddenly, you're driving under that huge tattered banner, with that T and that H and that U and that frightening R and the appalling S-THURSDAY-and you slide down the steep slope toward the clacking shredder blades that wait on Sunday afternoon. Another whole week of your one life. Your one "precious life," as Mary Oliver says. You don't have too many Thursdays left. There are after all only fifty-two of them in the year. Fifty-two may sound like a lot, but when Thursdays come around, fifty-two doesn't seem like a lot at all. I just wish I had more money.
Karl Shapiro taught. Ted Roethke taught. Money is a problem. I think I'm going to have to start teaching again.
No, no, no, no, no. I can't. I can't teach. It killed me. Those nice kids stunned my brain. I'll never recover from that year. I can't do it again. Any fate is preferable. It was death on toast.
The first week I told them to memorize a couple of poems, and I said, Here's what a poem is. See this glass of water? This glass of water is an essay. Perfectly fine thing for it to be. A literary essay-a piece of "creative nonfiction." But dip a spoon in that glass of water and scoop some of it out and hold it over a hot fry pan so that a few drops fall and sizzle and quickly disappear. That's a poem. And they nodded. They got it. And while they nodded I remembered when my mother would lick her finger and then touch the iron and I'd smell the tiny innocent smell of her fried spit. I remembered how I really liked that smell. But I didn't tell them that. Because there are limits to what you can tell students. I just made a little drumroll on the table with my fists, and I said, So guys, I want you to get some poems by heart and I want you to rhyme me up some nice little sizzlers.
And they tried. They were eager kids. They worked at it. But they weren't rhymers. And this is what everyone who teaches poetry discovers. If you ask grade-school kids to rhyme, it may sound jingly, but it's an appealingly artless jingle. If you ask college kids to rhyme, however, they're going to sound awful. Because the percentage of genuine rhymers is tiny. If you ask them to write a poem that doesn't rhyme, on the other hand, it's not so clear that they lack the basal gift. They may come up with something that has a rawness and a quick quiet stab of honesty and even wit sometimes-if you don't ask them to rhyme. And so there you are, a person who has loved rhyme all your life, and what are you saying to the impressionable people you are teaching? You're saying, And remember-it doesn't have to rhyme.
So I learned that lesson first, and it was a painful one. But there was a larger unhappiness, too-a darker kind of knowledge that sprouted and blossomed and uncoiled its thorns in me over the semester. Which was that I was being paid to lie. My job was to lie very gently to these trusting, sleepy, easily wounded students, over and over again, by saying in all sorts of different ways that their poems were interesting and powerful and sharply etched and nicely turned and worth giving collective thought to. Which they were unfortunately not. One student wrote some good poems. And maybe she would go on to something, who knows? But most of them-no way. I remember one of her poems used the phrase "his goldfish hair."
So I was a professional teller of lies. And if I kept teaching, I would be telling more and more lies to more and more of these students, year after year. Soon they and their poems would merge. I pictured one of those pale inhuman computer-generated faces that you get if you superimpose a thousand real faces. All the individual voices in all of their individual poems would blend into one ghostly student megapoem-and it would float there, hovering, staring at me, waiting for me to tell it that it was good work. And I knew what the very first word of the megapoem would be. The first word would be: "I."
I. Now "I" is a really good word. It's a useful word. For instance, Elizabeth Bishop starts off "The Fish" with "I." "I caught a tremendous fish." And I've begun many a poem with "I." Because you've got to. And what I understood was that my own dear students were destroying "I" for me. Which is another way of saying that they were destroying me.
SO I QUIT. I did it in the second month of the spring semester, on a Thursday. There was a new batch of students around the table. Same overbright classroom, same malevolent chairs. The one good poet had gone off to Taiwan, and I missed her faint perfume of promise. They all handed their week's work in, and I lifted the pile of fresh poems in the air to feel its weight. It was unusually heavy, because one of the poems was twenty pages long. I knew who it was by. It was called "Pythagoras Unbound," and it was by an overeager boy who talked a lot about Czeslaw Milosz. I skimmed the first page and I saw the word "endoplasm" and I went cold, like I'd eaten a huge plate of calamari. As the hour was ending, I said, "Folks, just a heads-up. I want you to know that I won't be able to read some of the poetry that you've just given me. I will be writing a 'U.R.' on some of your poems. What does U.R. mean? It means 'Un Read.' I will want very much to read every word of all your poems, because my duty as your instructor is to read them, but in some cases I will not be able to, because, I'm sorry, I can't. And so for some of you the grade that I give you will be based from here on entirely on class participation. Or if you're silent and shy and thoughtful and don't talk at all in class, that's all right, I fully respect that, I'll just grade you on those sudden gleams of thoughtful insight that I detect in your eyes. An alert look in your eyes is probably more predictive of your future success than any poetry you will write any time soon."
The students listened with hurt puzzlement. They didn't like the U.R. idea. They wanted me to read their poems. Who else would read them? And when else in their lives would they be so alive and so full of the wish to do something new and good? I realized I'd gone too far. "I'm just joshing," I said. "I'm looking forward to this new work. Thanks for it. Have a great weekend."
After that class I went to the dean and told her I wasn't coming back in September. And that was the end of my teaching career.
ELIZABETH BISHOP was a short woman. She wanted to be taller. She had amazing up-floofing hair with a streak of white. And she didn't like the idea of teaching creative writing. She wrote May Swenson: "I think one of the worst things I know about modern education is this 'Creative Writing' business." But she did it anyway. She didn't want to be a drunk, but she was. Sometimes, she said, she drank like a fish. Lota, her Brazilian lover, wanted her to take antabuse and she didn't want to, and she left Brazil. Then Lota went into a gloom and killed herself.
Today I was punching down the garbage with my fist in the tall kitchen can, to make more room before I had to take it out to the barn-going, Yah, yah, punch it down!-and my right thumb caught on the wavy edge of the lid of a tunafish can and I sliced it. Not too badly. Not off. I rinsed the cut in the sink, and I thought, What's with all these minor finger injuries? What's happening to me? I'm wearing three Band-Aids now. I'm a three Band-Aid man.
Everyone always wanted Elizabeth Bishop to read aloud "The Fish," because it's good, and she grew to hate it and to dread reading it. She wrote to Robert Lowell that she was thinking of rewriting it as a sonnet. Its prosiness made her unhappy. She'd moved on and forgotten why the poem is so good.
The poem is in this book here. Look at this paperback. Just white and yellow and blue, simple as can be. Elizabeth Bishop's The Complete Poems. Don't look at my Band-Aids, just look at the book. It's a Farrar, Straus and Giroux book and they always, in this era, had the most beautiful cover designs. Six dollars and ninety-five cents is what it cost me. Bob Giroux was her editor.
And here is the original bookmark, from the bookstore where I bought the book. The Grolier book shop in Cambridge. Little poetry shop on a side street off Harvard Square. It's had some tough times recently.
"The Fish" takes up three pages. It's long. It starts here, and it goes over here, and then it goes over to here. And every word on these three pages is worth reading. In her letter to I think it's Marianne Moore, she says that she feels very adventurous because she's not capitalizing the first letter of each line.
The way to read the poem is not to read it in the book, but to listen to her read it on a CD. She has a such a marvelously simple way of delivering it. She just seems to shrug it off her. It's of no interest to her that it's poetry. There's no fancy emphasis. It's almost flat, the way she reports it, and she has a slight midwesternness to her voice. It's so lovely, and she sounds very young and surprised that she's been asked to read it.
You know what "The Fish" is? "The Fish" is sort of like a Talk of the Town piece in The New Yorker if the Talk of the Town had died and gone to heaven. That's what it is, a perfect Talk of the Town piece. Except that it doesn't use the "we." And it didn't appear in The New Yorker-it appeared in Partisan Review. And I don't even care whether it's called a poem or not. It doesn't scan. She was a woman who was very capable of rhyming. Who liked rhyming. But this one is not a rhyming poem.
The Fish! The fish. "I caught a tremendous fish." Here's the situation. Elizabeth Bishop is in a boat, on her own, it seems, and she's caught a tremendous fish, that's come out of the ocean. What does the fish want to do? The fish wants to get back to the water. But she doesn't let it. She examines it very closely. She looks at its peeling skin and compares it to old wallpaper. She repeats the word "wallpaper" twice in two lines of a poem-an unheard-of prosiness. And then she bends closer, and she looks right into the fish's eye. She says it's larger than her eye but shallower. And that's true-we all know those shallow fish eyes. "The irises backed and packed / with tarnished tinfoil." She's really peering at that fish's eye now. And then, whoa: the eye shifts. The fish eye moves. Terror. We know right then for sure that it's alive.
All that careful slow description suddenly has a kind of near panic in it, because we know that the fish is out of its element, breathing in the terrible oxygen. The fish doesn't want to be described. That's what gives the poem its pull. The fish resists description because it just wants to be back in the water, and not to be seen, but she's insisting on looking at it and coming up with one simile after another. All these wonderful similes take time, and meanwhile the fish is starting to suffocate.
So we look at his skin, at his scales, at his swim bladder, which is like a peony, and his eyes. And then, we get to "the mechanism of his jaw." And here's where we learn about the fish's history-the five pieces of broken-off fishing line. And she describes each kind of fishing line. One line is green, and the others are black, and we hear all about them. And those lines are allegorical. They're lines of what? Of poetry. Because we know that other people-other anglers, other hopeful poets-have caught this very same ancient, real fish. Their lines are there, hooked into the fish's jaw, all the many other attempts to rhyme this old fish into poetry. Rupert Brooke has a beautiful poem about this very same fish. But Elizabeth Bishop's hooked it now, and she's not going to rhyme it, she's just going to tell us about it.
And that's what leads her to her last line, when she's there in the boat, and the fish is gasping and-ploosh-"I let the fish go." Because that's what you have to do. You take the moment, you do your best to describe it, it fascinates you, and then when you've done your best to give it to people on some printed page, then you have to let it go.
For the rest of her life, when she was asked to give a reading, they wanted her to read that poem. Till she completely lost track of the reality behind it and didn't want anything to do with it and wished the anthologists would pick something else.
And if you listen to her reading it, you'll notice that there's a tiny moment just after she says "And I let the fish go" before the tape hiss stops. In these old poetry recordings, the audio engineer always pulled the level down too soon, immediately after the last word, without any mental reverb time, and oddly enough it works beautifully. You hear "Ffff, and I let the the fish go, ffff-" and then silence. You're in the empty blankness before the next poem. The black water. The fish is already gone, out of hearing. Even the hiss of the tape, the water in which the fish swam, is gone. You have to return reality to itself after you've struggled to make a poem out of it. Otherwise it's going to die. It needs to breathe in its own world and not be examined too long. She knew that. The fish slips away unrhymed.
I think I'm going to go to RiverRun Books and look at the poetry shelves. When I see new books for sale there that I already own, it makes me happy. It makes me feel that there's part of the world that I really understand.