I PACKED FOUR BOXES of papers in my office, and I threw out lots of things. This cleaning is helping me move forward. I put the chin-up bar in the door and hit my head on it twice because I forgot it was there. Then I took it down and put it in another door. I think if I really cleaned up my office it might be easier for me to finish the introduction, and if I finish the introduction I think I could call Roz with genuine confidence in my voice and tell her that yes, I'd been too much of a wallower in self-doubt but that things were on the mend and I wanted her to come back. I'm about one-seventh done with cleaning the office. Still quite a ways to go. One corner of the room is starting to get that spare, empty look. I do love that spare look.
One of the piles I packed away was a small heap of reviews of my third book of poems, Worn. Not many of them. It wasn't a good book. Too political in an easy-breezy sort of way. A copy of Rain Taxi had a thoughtful reaction to it by Renee Parker Task. Charles Simic mentioned the book in one of his omnibus pieces in The New York Review of Books. It was just after Worn came out that I read Amy Lowell's book Six French Poets. In it Lowell observes that Henri de Regnier had just passed his fifty-first birthday. And she says: "Poetry seems to be, for some strange reason, a young man's job." This slapped me in the head like a big heavy cold dogfish. Poetry is a young man's job. What a frighteningly true thought. Poetry is like math or chess or music-it requires a slightly freaky misshapen brain, and those kinds of brains don't last. Sometimes if you can hold on into old age you can have another late flowering, like Yeats-much of adult-hood crumbles and falls away, and you're left with highly saturated early memories and a renewed urge for rhyme. But that happens rarely.
Also as I was cleaning I came across a small paper bag with several strands of raw beads in it. I'd bought them for Roz in a store on Second Avenue in New York. Roz strings beads, she's very good at it, very quick-she can watch a Chinese movie with subtitles and string beads at the same time, which is very impressive-and as I was walking toward Penn Station I found that I was passing through some kind of wholesale bead-supply neighborhood, with store after store selling raw beads. In each store the strands hung on hooks, arranged by color, strung on fishing lines, and when you went in you felt as if you were in some strange sort of crystallography experiment. I bought some pale gray green-veined beads and some smoky deep-red ones that I thought she would like-they weren't horribly expensive-and I hid them in my office for her birthday and now here they were. And it wasn't as if I could call her up and say, Roz, I found a bag holding several strings of raw beads from New York that I was going to give you and would you like to come on back and live here again and string them expertly the way you do while we watch movies together? Because she'd moved out. It was not a nice or welcome development for me for her to move out, it hurt me badly, I'm tottering, but I suppose I deserved it. And now what?
IT'S TIME FOR BED. And here's what I'm going to do. I'm going to get in bed, and I don't have anyone to sleep with now, so what I do is I sleep with my books. And I know that's kind of weird and solitary and pathetic. But if you think about it, it's very cozy. Over a period of four, five, six, seven, nine, twenty nights of sleeping, you've taken all these books to bed with you, and you fall asleep, and the books are there.
Of course it was better when I had Roz in the bed with me. But I don't have her now. Her warm soft self was extremely comforting, and it's not there. I could cup her upward hip or one of her dozing boobies with my hand. Good times. That cupping is rhyme-the felt matching of two congruent shapes. And now where she would sleep are these books, and they're lying there in leaning piles, and sometimes they slip off and nudge me in the eyebrow with one of their corners.
Some of the books are thick, and some are thin, some of the books are in hardcover and some in paperback. Sometimes they get roiled up with the pillows and the blankets. And I never make the bed. So it's like a stew of books. The bed is the liquid medium. It's a Campbell's Chunky Soup of books. The bed you eat with a fork.
I'm hoping that someday I'll have to clean them out and that somebody will return. But for now, this is what I've got.
I ALWAYS SECRETLY want it to rhyme. Don't you, some of you? Admit it. You open the latest issue of a magazine. Could be Harper's, could be The Atlantic, or The New York Review of Books, or The New Yorker, or the TLS. Or some swanky literary magazine. You locate the poem, because you're naturally curious to see what this week's or month's trawl is-what it is that was, in the busy mind of that poetry editor, most pressingly deserving of publication. And you look at the poem. There it is. You take in the title-"Way Too Much." Way Too Much: Okay! And then you check the name of the writer-hmm, Squeef Corntoasty, never heard of him. Or: I sure have seen Squeef Corntoasty's name popping up in a lot of places lately. Or if it says "translated from the Czech by Bigelow Jones," forget it, you instantly move on, because translations are never good.
Well, wait-that's not fair. That's ridiculously unfair. I've read some wonderful translations. Translations of Transtromer, for instance. But my heart does droop when I see that it's a translation.
But let's say this poem is one hundred percent original work. How are you going to approach it? How about we just sort of touch the first line. Just a glance. Take it in, guardedly, without really reading it. Maybe just the first phrase: "I try to sit up straight." And then you break away to go down the words on the right-hand side. Right down the outer edge. "Pain," "truffle," "start," "shelter," "an," and "bell." Ah. Now you know: it doesn't rhyme. Once again they've done it. They've stabbed me right in the god-damned lung. Once again they've rejected the whole five-six centuries of our glorious tradition.
But all right-that's fine. It's a plum, not a poem. That's what I call a poem that doesn't rhyme-it's a plum. We who write and publish our nonrhyming plums aren't poets, we're plummets. Or plummers. And some plums can be very good-better than anything else you might happen to read ever, anywhere. James Wright's poem about lying on his hammock on Duffy's farm is a plum, and it's genius. So is Elizabeth Bishop's poem "The Fish," of course. "I caught a tremendous fish"-genius. So you think maybe this plum-poem is good in its own uniquely free kind of way. Is it? You read a line or two. No, it isn't. In fact, it's oozing with badness. It's so bad. How can it be this bad? How can this bad plum be sitting here, in type, in front of me? I don't get it.
Or maybe it's one of the very few that do rhyme. These are even worse, sometimes, because the rhyming is so painfully inept-like unclever Ogden Nash gone squiffy.
And yet if you go back and look at old editions of The Nation or The New Republic, which published a lot of poetry back in the day-or if you go farther back, to Reedy's Mirror or The Century magazine-and if you hunt around for a while in some of those periodicals, you'll find that most of the poetry in them is just there as decoration. It's a form of ornament, like a printer's dingbat. A little acorn with a curlicue. Or the scrollwork on a beaux-arts capital. It's just a way of creating a different look on the page, and creating the sense on the part of the reader that he's holding something that is a real Kellogg's variety pack.
The magazine is going to have some kind of big thoughtful political piece about Teddy Roosevelt, say, and then it's going to have a bit of serialized fiction, and it's going to have some "cuts"-that is, some art-and a few color pages tipped in, maybe, if it's The Century magazine, maybe by Maxfield Parrish, and it's going to have some poems. The long nonfiction piece comes to an end, and it's about being a stevedore in Baltimore, something like that. And then at the bottom of the page is this poem in two columns, with six stanzas, and each stanza has indentations, and the conventionality and vapidity of it will stun you. "The shades of summer's bosky hue, o'erlie thy modest floobie doo." The editors of The Century didn't expect you to read that poem with your full mind. They knew it was just some rhymes thrown pell-mell together with some cornstarch. They knew full well, because this is America, land of bad poetry. Yes, sir! Bad poetry, sir! Loads of it in the back, sir! Just keeps coming. Tipped in. The shovel eases the soft tonnage of poetry over the rim, and it just pours into the pit, pluth. The pit of what has been said. And the lost gulls are flapping and calling-peer! peer!
And yet we still want more. There's still that craving. Give us more, give us new. The hope. The hope that really does: it springs eternal. "Hope springs eternal in the human breast." That's clean crisp iambic pentameter. And I have some tips to pass on to you about iambic pentameter, how it's all a misnomer, as I said. But that's for later.
"Dear Paul Muldoon, Here's some new work, I hope you like it, all the best, Paul." Boy, I wish he didn't have my own name.
I USED TO SIT there in class, breathing, wondering, What's the teacher going to think of next? What's she going to teach us? Anything? I don't know. I'm just sitting here. I have no idea what's coming next.
And one time, she said, Today we're going to learn something new, and this thing is called "haiku." She wrote it on the board. And I thought, Interesting word, "haiku." Nice K.
Somebody discovered haiku way back about a hundred years ago. Obviously it existed for a very long time in Japan, but he discovered it in English. What was his name, that poet? Not Edwin Arlington Robinson. One of those guys who is known now for discovering haiku. And he called it: HOKKU. Hokku. He decided that hokku was a powerful force for order in English.
And he was wrong.
But I didn't know that. We're all sitting in the class, at these new desks. This was the sixties, and there were new desks that had recently come in, which had nice metal casters. They moved very smoothly over the linoleum of the floor. They didn't make the elephant trumpeting sounds that the wooden chairs made. They slid. And we were sitting at these smooth-sliding desks. Sun was pouring in. And they did have a groove to put your pencil in. Although I never put the pencil there.
In some cases they had an under area. Where you looked under, and there were months of your spelling worksheets crushed in. When the teacher told you to clean out your desk you just reached your hand in and you were like an excavator and you grabbed the crumpled paper and you just pulled it out and let it fall directly into the trash can.
So the teacher said: we're going to learn something new today. A new way of writing poetry. It's called haiku. And it's going to allow you-to make art.
And it has a couple of different lines, three lines, and one line has some arbitrary number of syllables, and another line has another arbitrary number of syllables, et cetera. And I heard her describing this, and I knew, even then. I knew even then that it was bogus.
This, children, is a kind of poetry that makes perfect, thrilling sense in Japanese, and makes no sense whatsoever in English. That's what she should have told us. This form is completely out of step with the English language. And the person who foisted it on us-that person was a demon. Even at the time I knew that it wasn't right. Seven syllables, eleven syllables, five syllables? Come on. How does English poetry actually work? It doesn't work that way. I don't actually know Japanese, but haiku in Japanese had all kinds of interesting salt-glaze impurities going on that are stripped away in translation.
And yet Basho was good-even in translation he is still good. And I've read haiku poems in English that have an interesting tripartite squashedness to them. A few years ago Roz and her best friend from college wrote emails back and forth to each other in haiku. They had a fun time doing it. So what am I fussing about?
AFTER WE ALL LEARNED how to do haiku, the teacher said, And now children, today we're going to write a poem in something called free verse. It can be a poem about bumblebees, or a poem about shadows. It can be a poem about making muffins. Brownies. An egg hatching. The woodpecker's eye. In fact, it can be a poem about anything fun and beautiful and deep and sad and wondrous and strange and interesting and true and perfect and maybe even a little bit frightening. And you have to write it. I'm assigning it to you. And here's the one thing I'm going to tell you.
One thing. Here's my so very important piece of wisdom, that I'm going to impart to you now. This is the wisdom. Are you ready, children?
It-Doesn't-Have-To-Rhyme. No, it doesn't have to rhyme! Don't trammel yourself, don't crib and confine yourself, by rhyme. It doesn't have to rhyme. Because you want your poem to burble up. You want it to flow out, as a newborn self. Like a little sprout of a tulip bud, just busting out of the earth.
Now, of course, I think: tulips rhyme. One tulip leaf goes this way, and the other tulip leaf goes that way. Their forms talk to each other. There's symmetry. There's a central stalk, and there's mirroring. Most definitely the tulip rhymes. Nature is full of rhymes.
But never mind, this was the axiom that she was passing on to us, because she'd learned it from the culture at large. "It doesn't have to rhyme." And in imparting this she was promising us that all the pantries of art, all the breakfast nooks of art, were going to be opened up to us hencefor-ward. She was flinging open the window for us, and those gingham curtains were just billowing and we could smell the pies cooling there on the sunny windowsills of child-hood.
What did she really mean by "It doesn't have to rhyme?" Did she mean it could rhyme but it didn't have to? No. She meant Don't rhyme. She meant: I am going to manacle your poor pliable brains with freedom. I'm going to insist that you must be free. She wrote "FREE VERSE" on the board.
And I sat there on my chair with the very smooth casters and I thought, What does she mean it doesn't have to rhyme? It does have to rhyme! It's got to rhyme, because rhyme is poetry. Where did Little Miss Muffet sit? Did she sit on a cushion? Did she sit on a love seat? No, she sat on a tuffet. And if it doesn't rhyme it's just guano. "Guano" was one of my favorite words back then-I'd learned it from Tintin.
But I said nothing, like the craven fourth-grader I was. I went ahead and wrote a poem. It was free verse, but it had one rhyme at the end. It was about a droplet of water quivering gracefully at the end of the tap before falling into "the land they call / Disposal." It was a terrible poem. But my mother liked it, and it was remarkably easy to write. And that was the beginning of my career.
MY FATHER WORKED in the legal department of a company that made industrial mirrors. He was a good explainer and a soapbox-derby enthusiast. He explained to me how lasers worked, and when I started reading poems in college he often looked over my shoulder and said, "What are you reading-a poem?" He knew John Masefield's "Cargoes" by heart, and E. E. Cummings's poem about the watersmooth silver stallion, and he would recite them with his fists clenched if we asked him to. His motto was: "Don't force it." He died only a year after my mother did. I miss them both every day.
Tennyson's father was a beast. He was a violent alcoholic and an epileptic, and he was horrible to his sons. From the age of twelve on, Alfred Tennyson was home-schooled by his fierce, crazy father. When Tennyson Senior was drunk, he threatened to stab people in the jugular vein with a knife. And to shoot them. And he retreated to his room with a gun. A bad man. And eventually he died. Tennyson was liberated, and he began writing stupendous poems. Were they stupendous? Or were they only good? Or were they in fact not good at all? I'm not sure.
Last night I watched two episodes of Dirty Jobs and then went upstairs to bed after thinking that my poetry was not for shit, frankly. If I may be pardoned the expression. I got in bed, and I realized that what I wanted was to have some Mary Oliver next to me. If I had some Mary Oliver I would be saved. I didn't want to read any more of the Cambridge Book of Lesser Poets edited by Squire, and I didn't want another chapter of my friend Tim's book on Queen Victoria, I wanted Mary Oliver, so I went downstairs and got my new paperback copy of her New and Selected Poems, Volume 1 and went back upstairs again. And I immediately felt more sure of what I was doing because I was reading Mary's poems. They're very simple. And yet each has something. I like almost every one of her poems. That's not even true of Howard Moss or of Louise Bogan. It's certainly not true of somebody like Tennyson or Swinburne.
At some point you have to set aside snobbery and what you think is culture and recognize that any random episode of Friends is probably better, more uplifting for the human spirit, than ninety-nine percent of the poetry or drama or fiction or history ever published. Think of that. Of course yes, Tolstoy and of course yes Keats and blah blah and yes indeed of course yes. But we're living in an age that has a tremendous richness of invention. And some of the most inventive people get no recognition at all. They get tons of money but no recognition as artists. Which is probably much healthier for them and better for their art.
I LOOKED INTO THE FRIDGE dipping my knees to ZZ Top while my dog Smacko slept on the floor. He's used to the TV, and he's used to loud music. It bothered him when he was a puppy, but he's smart and he knows somehow that the sounds aren't real. What bothers him now are ear mites and fleas.
Roz was very good at combing his undercarriage for fleas. He was my dog before she moved in, but even so she loved him to distraction. I would sit in a chair and she would sit on the floor with Smacko on his back next to her, and we would talk as she went hunting through his fur with her fingers. She'd find the fleas even when they were hiding in the fur just around his tiny turret. When she got one she would drop it in a glass of soapy water. Smack would narrow his eyes in sleepy pleasure at being groomed. I don't groom Smack nearly as much as Roz did, and I should. Everyone says this summer is a very bad one for fleas.
Louise Bogan said that Theodore Roethke made her "bloom like a Persian rosebush" during their long happy sex weekend together.
If I had a ponytail, which I don't, I'd cut it off with four slow scissorcuts and bury it in the garden with the rubber band still around it.