IT'S HARD TO HOLD IT all in your head. All the different possible ways that you can enjoy life. Or not enjoy life. And all the things that are going on. The different rug patterns. The different car designs. The different radio shows that are coming and going. The new ads. The new crop of famous people.
And then there is, of course, always, and inevitably, this spume of poetry that's just blowing out of the sulphurous flue-holes of the earth. Just masses of poetry. It's unstoppable, it's uncorkable. There's no way to make it end.
If we could just-just stop. For one year. If everybody could stop publishing their poems. No more. Stop it. Just- everyone. Every poet. Just stop.
But of course that's totally unfair to the poets who are just starting out. This may be their "wunderjahr." This may be the year that they really find their voice. And I'm telling them to stop? No, that wouldn't do.
But wouldn't it be great? To have a moment to regroup and understand? Everybody would ask, Okie doke, what new poems am I going to read today? Sorry: none. There are no new poems. And so you're thrown back onto what's already there, and you look at what's on your own shelves, that you bought maybe eight years ago, and you think, Have I really looked at this book? This book might have something to it. And it's there, it's been waiting and waiting. Without any demonstration or clamor. No squeaky wheel. It's just been waiting.
If everybody was silent for a year-if we could just stop this endless forward stumbling progress-wouldn't we all be better people? I think probably so. I think that the lack of poetry, the absence of poetry, the yearning to have something new, would be the best thing that could happen to our art. No poems for a solid year. Maybe two.
FOR INSTANCE: here's a recent New Yorker. Actually, no-it was published almost six years ago. I got it from my pile. Pretty cover, as always. Or almost always. There have been some lapses, yes.
But this is what I mean. You lift it, you hold it, you flap it. And week after week, year after year, you hold it, you flap it. And say you open it up and flip through looking for the two new poems, and no: there would be no poem on page sixty-seven. And no poem on page eighty-three. They just simply wouldn't be there.
Let's have a look at this poem. Here it is, going down. You can tell it's a poem because it's swimming in a little gel pack of white space. That shows that it's a poem. All the typography on all sides has drawn back. The words are making room, they're saying, Rumble, rumble, stand back now, this is going to be good. Here the magician will do his thing. Here's the guy who's going to eat razor blades. Or pour gasoline in his mouth and spout it out. Or lie on a bed of broken glass. So, stand back, you crowded onlookers of prose. This is not prose. This is the blank white playing field of Eton.
And you can read it for yourself on page sixty-seven. Of this New Yorker. Alice Quinn. The magnificent Alice. This was back in the day, when Alice was the poetry editor. God bless that hardworking cheerful nice woman. She left recently and now it's Paul Muldoon, and I hardly know Paul Muldoon. And really I hardly knew Alice Quinn, to be honest. But at least she actually accepted some of my own poems. Thank you, Alice! And rejected some of them-damn her! Things that just hurt me to have them come back saying, This isn't for us. This one didn't quite work for us, but we're glad to have something from you.
"We're glad." The crafting of these kind no-thank-you letters. I assume Paul Muldoon will do it well, too. The really good editors have the gift. And they hurt so bad when they're nice. You get a turndown and then you flip through the magazine and you say, Why? Why did Alice accept this firkin of flaccidness here on page 114 and not one of my poems? Why?
I should probably send Paul Muldoon a poem. One of my flying spoon series, none of which I've finished yet. Some of Muldoon's poems actually rhyme, but not audibly. He's cagey that way. He teaches at Princeton. He's probably there right now, talking to students. "Hello, poetry students, I'm Mr. Paul Muldoon." He's a little older than I am, but not much. Oh, but the idea of starting all over again. I can hardly face it. "Dear Paul Muldoon. Glad you're on the case now at The New Yorker. We met briefly at that poetry wingding at the 92nd Street Y a few tulip bubbles ago. Here are some fresh squibs, I hope you like them. 'My feaste of joy is but a dish of payne,' as the condemned man said before he was publicly disemboweled. All the very best, Paul."
It's scary to think. Of course I'd kind of stopped sending things to The New Yorker even before Alice Quinn left. That's part of my problem, I think, is that I'd stopped already. And Paul will send them back, and he'll say, Great to have something from you, but these seemed a little… And then he'll have some apt adjective-"underweathered," or "overfurnished." "Elliptically trained." And I'll flip through the newest issue, walking back from my blue mailbox, hunting for the poem he chose over mine, and it'll be the same thing as always. The prose will have pulled back, and the poem will be there, cavorting, saying, I'm a poem, I'm a poem. No, you're not! You're an imposter, you're a toy train of pretend stanzas of chopped garbage. Just like my poem was.
HERE'S THE THING. I am basically willing to do anything. I'm basically willing to do anything to come up with a really good poem. I want to do that. That's my goal in life. And it hasn't happened. I've waited patiently. Sometimes I've waited impatiently. Sometimes I've "striven." I've made some acceptable poems-poems that have been accepted in a literal sense. But not one single really good poem.
When I look at the lives of the poets, I understand what's wrong with me. They were willing to make the sacrifices that I'm not willing to make. They were so tortured, so messed up.
I'm only a little messed up. I'm tortured to the point where I don't sleep very well sometimes, and I don't answer mail as I should. Sometimes I feel a languor of spirit when I get an email asking me to do something. Also, I've run up a significant credit-card debt. But that's not real self-torture. I mean, if you stand back from my life just a little-maybe thirty-five yards-I am a completely conventional person. I drive mostly within the fog lines. My life is seldom in crisis. It feels like a crisis now because Roz, who has lived with me for eight years, has moved away and left me, and I'm in considerable pain, but this little crisis of mine does not resemble the crises that Ted Roethke or Louise Bogan went through, or James Wright, or Tennyson, or Elizabeth Barrett Browning, with her laudanum. Or Poe.
One time, I remember, I was in a laundromat. It was a laundromat in Marseilles, France. "Marseilles." Do you hear that? It's a mattress of a word, with a lot of spring to it. "Marseilles." I was in there, doing my laundry, and I look over, and there's this guy there, this little guy. He was kind of pale, pasty looking. But moving with a methodical grace. And I said, Ed? And he looked up slowly. He nodded, cavernously. I said, Ed Poe? And he said, Mm-hm. And then he peered closely at me. He said, Paul? Paul Chowder? And I said, Yes, Ed! How are you doing? Been a long time. He nodded. I said, I see you're folding some underpants there.
He said, Yes, I am. Doing my laundry. You?
I said I'm doing my laundry, too. And I mean, if you're going to do your laundry, this place is probably as good as or better than any place I can think of. Marseilles, France. Or "Fronce," as we say.
And I said, Can I venture to ask how the poetry's going?
He said, It's going pretty well, pretty well. I wrote a poem, and I got paid for it, and it was in the newspaper.
And I said, That's fantastic. What's it called?
And he said, It's called "The Raven."
I said, Holy shit, Ed, "The Raven." Great title. What's it about?
And he said, It's about a man who has a visit from a raven.
And I said, That sounds really promising. What does the raven stand for? Death and fate and horror and government wiretapping and stuff like that? And he just looked at me. He wasn't about to explicate his poem for me. Which I understand. And I said, Well, listen, take care. I grabbed my bag of laundry. I said, It's been great seeing you. Stay happy. And he said, You too, it's good seeing you. We waved again. Take care, bye-bye. Watch out for the big swinging blade. And I walked out the door of the laundromat. Off down the street. And that was the time that I ran into Edgar Allan Poe.
GOD I WISH I was a canoe. Either that or some kind of tree tumor that could be made into a zebra bowl but isn't because I'm still on the tree.
It's late in the afternoon, and the bats are getting ready to go flying for bugs. Leigh Hunt has a poem about how this girl, Jenny, jumped from her chair and kissed him. I'm thinking of how difficult it is to look old poets in the eye. Their eyelids, which droop and have skin tags on them, like tiny pennants age has hoisted, fill me with a strange consternation. And I know that the old poets themselves are self-conscious-they're worried that people will see these two blinky pink openings in their face and think, Ugh, those look like flesh wounds with eyeballs tossed loosely into them.
I know that when my eyes get old and skin-taggy I'm going to be very happy to have glasses to hide behind.
Even now I have trouble looking people in the eye. You're supposed to "meet people's eyes." Meet them how? They have two eyes. You have to choose one. I start by looking at the person's right eye, intently, and then I begin to feel that I'm hurting the feelings of the person's left eye. As she's telling her story, she thinks, Why is he concentrating his attentions so fixedly on my right eye? Is he deliberately looking away from my left eye? Is there something wrong with my left eye? So then I shift over, and I stare into her left eye, till it's as if I'm falling down an optical pipe.
My eyes have to skip away, eventually. And when I'm asked a question I look out the window. People assume that I'm failing some kind of test of candor when I'm just not an eye-meeter, that's all. I'm just not going to meet your eye for any extended period. Period.
HOW ARE THOSE POETRY exercises coming? Did you do that thing I mentioned where you write down every real story somebody tells you or that you overhear in a twenty-four-hour period? Did I mention that exercise? Maybe not. I don't mean the stories that come to you on electric screens or through car loudspeakers but the ones from right around you. I overheard a story at the bank yesterday about a car-repair place that overcharged. And then somebody told me a story about a dog who ate a sock. The vet couldn't "shift it," so he removed the sock surgically and now the dog is doing well. And there were other stories, too. If you listen to them, the stories and fragments of stories you hear can sometimes slide right into your poem and twirl around in it. Then later you cut out the story and the poem has a mysterious feeling of charged emptiness, like the dog after the operation.
I'm not going to get all maudlin about why Roz moved on. She moved on, period. I know why. It's because I didn't write the introduction to my anthology. And I was morose at times with her, and I was shockingly messy. And I had irregular sleeping habits. And she was supporting us, and I was nine years older than she was. And I didn't want to walk the dog as much as I should have. And I got farty when we had Caesar salads. And I do miss her. Because she was so warm and so kind to me, and she taught me so many things. I squandered her good nature. I didn't take it seriously. I didn't see that it was finite.
ROZ TOLD ME, Just go up in the barn and write it. Referring to the introduction to my forthcoming poetry anthology, Only Rhyme. She said, Just go! Just go up there and write it! You want to write it. Your editor wants you to write it. I want you to write it. Write it!
I said I couldn't write it, it was too awful, too huge, it was like staring at death.
She said, Well, then write a flying spoon poem. Go up there and write something. You'll feel better if you do.
She was right, of course. So I went up to the barn. The second floor is empty and has very few windows. It smells like I imagine the inside of an old lute would smell. I brought up my white plastic chair, and I took notes, and I read, and I thought, and I took more notes, and I sang songs. It was a beautiful week in very early summer, and I felt as if I was sitting inside John Dowland's old lute. I sang a song that Sinead O'Connor sings, "She Moved Through the Fair." And I sang a song I wrote myself, that goes:
I'm in the barn, I'm in the bar-harn,
I'm in the barn in the afternoo-hoon.
I sang that one a lot. And I made up a new tune for Poe's "Raven."
But every time I actually tried to start writing the introduction, as opposed to just writing notes, I felt straightjacketed. So I went out and bought a big presentation easel, and a big pad of presentation paper, and a green Sharpie pen, and a red Sharpie pen, and a blue Sharpie pen. What I thought was that I could practice talking through the introduction as if I were teaching a class.
And in order to be relaxed at the easel, I drank a Newcastle. Also coffee, so that I'd be sharp. And still I wasn't sufficiently relaxed, so I drank some Yukon Gold that I found in the liquor cabinet. No, not Yukon Gold, that's a potato. Yukon Jack, a kind of Canadian liqueur. It was delicious. It added a slight Gaussian blur. And then some more coffee, so I'd still be sharp. Blurred, smeared, but sharp.
AT THE END of the week I didn't have the introduction. Roz looked sad and hurt, and I felt miserable. She said, "Well, are you at least making progress?" I said I was, because I was, I was making great strides. But toward what? I was having a gigantic hopeless exciting futile productive comprehensive life adventure up in the barn. I was hoarse from singing. I said I thought I'd probably have the introduction done after another week. Or at least a flying spoon poem as a fallback.
Roz pointed out that I was going to Switzerland very soon, and that was really the drop-dead deadline: get the introduction done before Switzerland. And I agreed that it certainly was. I went to a used bookstore and bought another anthology of Elizabethan verse-my fifth-and also the W. H. Auden/Chester Kallman edition of Elizabethan songs, with a cover drawn by Edward Gorey. I was pleased to have that-it includes actual musical settings.
And I spent some time on iTunes, where I found a song I liked by a group called The Damnwells. It's called "I Will Keep the Bad Things from You," and it's sung by a songwriter named Alex Dezen. At one point you can hear him turning the page. He's sitting there with his guitar, and he's doing this song, and he doesn't even know the words. He's just written it, apparently. He's just discovering it. And it'll never be as real for him as at that moment. He turns the page, and you hear the schwoooeeeet, and you want to cry.
Also I bought some software so that I could save the Flash video of Sinead O'Connor on YouTube doing her live rendition of "She Moved Through the Fair," which is even better than the one on iTunes. So I was moving forward, in a sense.
Roz said, But sweetie, you're spending all this money, and we don't have it. And that's true, we didn't have it. Back in the nineties I took a swoosh in the stock market, with money I got from my grandfather, and I did well for a while. That's when I met Roz and she moved in. I bought some shares of Koss Corporation, the headphone company, and then I split the hairy root ball and bought some Canon Depository Receipts. Then I split that hairy root ball. I bought Maxtor and then sold it. I bought stock in a tiny company called BeOS, and it doubled in a day and a half. Then I bought lots of bad stocks over several years and all the money shrank away, more or less. Roz was supporting us now, except for an equity loan on my house and a chunk of money I borrowed from my sister, who is not that rich. If, or when, I handed in the introduction to Only Rhyme, I'd get seven thousand dollars, because my editor, Gene, is very generous. Apart from that there was almost nothing due, just the odd thousand in honoraria here and there from book reviews or readings or panel discussions, like the one coming up in Switzerland. I can't teach. I tried it once at Haffner College and it practically unhinged me.
I said to Roz, "I know it seems excessive and a little odd, but I think this is the only way to really lay it all out fresh, and sing the pain." She nodded and she said okay, but in a very small voice. I could see she was losing faith in me and losing her love for me. And her respect for me.
BECAUSE WHO WANTS to be forced into the role of enforcer? Roz was a writer herself, and an editor; she wasn't a doubter and a prodder. She wasn't some calendar-tapping scold. She actually liked my poem "Smooth Motion"-she was first attracted to me because of it, I think. At least, she wasn't attracted to me for my looks, because I'm not smooth, in fact I'm pretty rough looking. Although I've lost some weight recently, and once Roz did say that I looked good in a certain subtly houndstoothed jacket that she helped me pick out.
She hadn't reckoned on having to be forever poking at me to get me to write one forty-page introduction to an anthology. And she didn't want to be arguing over money. And she wanted to adopt a child and I didn't-why? I don't know. I see these horribly spoiled rude selfish kids and don't want to risk being the father of one.
But I think if I'd just written even a tiny five-line poem about an inchworm on my pant leg it would have been fine. Anything, something. Roz commuted all the way to Concord to work for an alternative newspaper, but I think it would have been all right with her to support us for a little while as long as I was getting actual work accomplished.
But when I came down empty-handed from the barn at the end of the second week, that's when I really wounded her. She was standing in the hall putting her keys in her purse. Beautifully made-up. Smelling clean from her shower. She looked up and said, bravely, "So can I read it?" And I felt this horrible inner sensation: my caramel clusters of self were liquefying and pooling in the warmth of their own guilt. I said, "I'm sorry, honey. I don't have anything."
And that was it. My beautiful, patient, funny, short, loving girlfriend-the woman I'd been with longer than anyone else-moved out. She was right to leave me, but it felt really bad. Horrible, in fact. Plus I was broke.