I WOKE UP THINKING a very pleasant thought. There is lots left in the world to read.
For days I had a dissatisfied feeling. I couldn't focus. I was nervous about Switzerland. I'm going to be in a panel discussion there on "The Meters of Love," with Renee Parker Task, who's a hotshot among young formalists. Just the kind of thing I'm bad at. Being empaneled. All yesterday afternoon I thought about timed backups, and search results, and mermaids, and women wearing clothes, and women not wearing clothes, and I felt unlyrical. And then I got in bed and I read a short biography of Nathalia Crane in an old textbook, and I read a poem by Sara Teasdale, and I thought about turtles. And then, in the back of Mary Oliver's New and Selected Poems, Volume 1, I wrote, "Suddenly there is lots to read." I also wrote: "Mary Oliver is saving my life."
One thing I really like about books of poems is that you can open them anywhere and you're at a beginning. If I open a biography, or a memoir, or a novel, when I open it in the middle, which is what I usually do, I'm really in the middle. What I want is to be as much as possible at the beginning. And that's what poetry gives me. Many many beginnings. That feeling of setting forth.
Now. I want to make something clear. You may think we're in a new age, a modern or postmodern age, and yes, in a certain way we are. But as far as rhyme and anti-rhyme go, this is the third time around, or maybe the fourth. Thomas Campion, in 1602 or so, came out with an attack on the uncouthness of rhyme, which was very strange for him to do because he was one of the great lute-song writers of the day. He'd published two, maybe three books of airs. But no, suddenly rhyme and the normal meters were no good. They were vulgar, he said, they were unclassical, they forced a poet to go in directions he shouldn't go.
Everyone at court was buzzing about this strange tract of Campion's. And when Samuel Daniel read it it was as if his whole world was under siege, and he was deeply distressed. He said he felt that he must either "stand out to defend, or else be forced to forsake myself, and give over all." So he stood out to defend. Now remember this is more than four hundred years ago. All those years ago Samuel Daniel, writing in English, in words that you can easily read now-although some of them are spelled differently, and the sentences flow on in a way that our sentences don't-but Daniel says that for a poet who knows what he's up to, rhyme is no impediment. In fact, it helps him soar higher, he says. It "carries him, not out of his course, but as it were beyond his power to a farre happier flight." That's what rhyme does, if you're properly fitted for it.
Samuel Daniel was a court poet. He published a book of poems with a lovely, modest title. I think it's my favorite title of a book of poetry ever. The title is Certaine Small Poems Lately Printed. He was a man of some humility and grace. And he won his duel with Campion. Campion changed his mind and went back to rhyming. His neoclassical hexameters were pretty in a way, but people wanted to hear him sing.
And that's the single point I want to make today. People have been struggling over this idea that rhyme is artificial and unnatural for hundreds and hundreds of years. And meanwhile poem after poem gets written that people really want to listen to. And a lot of these poems rhyme. Imagine what would have happened if Campion had succeeded in his effort to fuss and scold rhyme out of existence and banish it from English poetry. Four hundred years of pretend Greek and Latin meters is what we would have had, instead of Marvell, and Dryden, and Cole Porter, and Christina Rossetti, and Gilbert and Sullivan, and Rogers and Hart, and Wendy Cope, and Auden, and John Lennon, and John Hiatt, and Irving Berlin, and Dr. Seuss, and Shel Silverstein, and Charles Causley, and Keats, and Paul Simon, and et cetera, and so on. Whole floors of libraries could be filled with the poems that we would not have had. Marilyn Monroe wouldn't have been able to sing
I've locked my heart
I'll keep my feelings there
I've stocked my heart
With icy frigid air
And think of it: you can put on the coolest, most spaced-out house trance music today-and it rhymes. "Got nervous when you looked my way, / But you knew all the words to say." That's a couplet from a trance tune by a group called iiO, in a remix by Armin Van Buuren, and nobody thinks tiptoe through the tulips when they're dancing to this, they just think, Yeah, the words work, they fit, they have that forward push of power. And they have that push because they rhyme. So it just continues. And nobody really stops to examine the need, the powerful endlessness and hunger of the need. Why? Why do we need things to rhyme so much?
WHY DO I, who can't make a couplet worth a roasted peanut these days, want poetry to do what I can't make it do? Mary Oliver is my favorite poet at the moment, and she almost never rhymes. W. S. Merwin's The Vixen is one of my favorite books of poems, and it doesn't rhyme. Not only does The Vixen not rhyme, not only does it not scan, it doesn't even capitalize or punctuate. And it's good. But I want these books to be in the minority. Why?
Well, of course, rhyme helps memory. But you can't allow yourself to get excited by that argument. Samuel Daniel used it, and Dryden used it, but it's not convincing. When I listen to something that rhymes well, I just like it. My memory for song lyrics isn't that strong, so the fact that the rhyme might help me remember the words is neither here nor there. First in importance is that the lines sound good. The sounding good comes before the utilitarian help of memorizability.
"Sugar, you make my soul complete. Rapture tastes so sweet." That's from the same trance tune I mentioned. It's sung by Nadia Ali, from Pakistan.
I CALLED ROZ and left a message asking if she'd like to come by and help me shampoo the dog. The flea shampoo is turquoise with sparkles and very thick. It's really a two-person job to put it on-one person to work in the suds and one person to hold Smacko's back and aim the shower sprayer. He keeps wanting to shake, spraying turquoise froth everywhere, and he will shake, unless one person keeps a steady, firm hand on the middle of his back.
Roz called and said she'd be by at about six-thirty. I knew she would-she misses the dog like crazy, and who can blame her? I got out some chips and salsa and was sitting in the white plastic chair by the barn door when she drove up. I watched her walk up the driveway, looking very calm and elegant in her dog-washing outfit of jeans and a loose blue shirt with a paint splash on the sleeve. She stopped and said hello to Smacko and picked up something in the sand. I heard her bracelets jingle, a sound I hadn't heard in a while. "Here's a present from the driveway," she said, and she handed it to me. It was a fragment of old china with very fine rule-lines in blue against white. Bits of old china sometimes appear in the driveway as rains wash more of its sand away. I took off my glasses to look at it and thanked her. Then I offered her a chip.
We washed the dog and didn't get too wet, and then she said she had to go. I asked her if maybe she'd like to stay and watch Bull Durham with me. She likes Bull Durham.
"Is it done?" she asked, meaning the introduction.
"It is not done. Nor will it ever be done, for I am not the one to do it."
"Oh, poof," she said. "You just need to apply yourself."
She didn't leave right away, at least. She smiled at the tablecloth. On it was my paperback of Mary Oliver's New and Selected Poems, Volume 1-I seem to be carrying it around the house with me. "So that's what she looks like," Roz said, tilting her head to see the picture on the cover better. It's the blue-tinted photograph in which Mary is wearing some kind of wonderful ulster with a zippered hood, and she's looking off, and she looks heartstoppingly French. "She's beautiful," Roz said. "Is that a recent picture?"
She's about seventy now, I said, and living in Province-town.
"Is she lesbian?"
I said I believed she was, yes.
"It's odd that the woman I most want to look like is a lesbian," she said. Then she said a long goodbye to Smacko and we hugged ceremonially and she drove away.
I didn't want to watch Bull Durham, so I watched three episodes of The Dick Van Dyke Show. Three's about my limit for one night.
GENE'S NEW EMAIL says that they're becoming "really concerned." I feel horrible about it. I don't want to disappoint him. Gene, I'm sorry. I apologize for this inexcusable slowness.
If I could just die and rot in the ground it would be okay. I wouldn't have to write anything more. Die and rot and be completely dead. No worries. Everything's good. "Paul Chowder was at work on an anthology of rhyming poetry when he died." "Ah, too bad."
The best use of the word "rot" that I can think of is from a poem by Coventry Patmore. He's sitting in a bay. He's just had some reversal, we're not sure what. The ocean and its waves are out there. He looks at them. What kind of ocean is it? It's a "purposeless, glad ocean." That's what first caught me, those two words, "purposeless" and "glad," placed together. But then comes the next stanza, which is a killer. Suddenly he raises his voice and he says, "The lie shall rot."
When all its work is done, the lie shall rot;
The truth is great, and shall prevail,
When none cares whether it prevail or not.
I know I'll never write anything anywhere near as good as that eight-line poem by Coventry Patmore. Which is in many, many anthologies. I've sailed past fifty and I've had my chances and it hasn't happened.
But there's still the hope that leaps. There's still the tiny possibility. You think: One more poem. You think: There will be some as yet ungathered anthology of American poetry. It will be the anthology that people will tote around with them on subways thirty-five, forty years from now. There will be many new names in its table of contents-poets who are only children now, or aren't known. And you think: Maybe this very poem I write today will somehow pry open a space in that future anthology and maybe it will drop into position and root itself there.
I guess that probably explains why I used to collect anthologies. I was hoping to find a crack in the pavement where my ailanthus of a poem could take root.
IT WAS ABOUT MIDNIGHT and misty after another brief rain. I wanted to sit in the white plastic chair by the driveway and admire the overboiled potato of the moon, but I knew that the basin of the chair would be filled with water. So I tipped the chair forward, in the dark, with the crickets going, and I could hear a splash as the water poured into the grass. I hesitated for an instant, wondering whether it was worth my while to sit myself down in the wet chair and get my pants wet. And my answer was immediately yes. Of course I wanted to sit in the wet chair. No sacrifice is too great. And meanwhile the mist came up the hill and a wild turkey was peeling out a great crazy screeching cry down by the creek. He's lost, or he's lost someone, or he's having an argument or an orgasm. I'm breathing the same mist that the turkey screeched into-the same mist that has boiled away the moon.
Out of the corner of my eye I saw a firefly inscribe part of a curve, and I remembered W. S. Merwin's poem "To The Corner of the Eye." I thought: It is so, so good to know that W. S. Merwin exists. I even love his initials. W. and S.-ideal initials. Merwin writes poems that, fortunately, I can't remember. They would be exceedingly difficult to memorize. But imagine being the poetry editor, maybe at The New Yorker, getting "To the Corner of the Eye" in the mail and reading it. Imagine how thrilledly shaken up you would feel at reading it and knowing that you had the power to publish it. Although come to think of it, "To the Corner of the Eye" wasn't published in The New Yorker.
Then, in the mist, I saw a big man walking up the street. He was wearing one shoe. He had a familiar look, so I got out of my chair and went partway down the driveway, and I waved at him. It's not usual, really, for people to walk up and down my street without two shoes on at midnight. He stopped. He put his hand on the telephone pole that's there. He looked down. And then he looked over at me. He was a big guy. Big strong bald head. Wide nose. Kind of a defiant, wild, defeated look. I said, "Ted? Ted Roethke? Is that you?" And he nodded slightly. I said, "Wow, Ted, how's it going? You look like you just got hit with a couple hundred million volts of electricity."
"No, it's hydrotherapy," he said. " 'I do not laugh, I do not cry; / I'm sweating out the will to die.'"
"Whoa, Ted," I said. "Sounds a little like Dr. Seuss, except dark. You want to come in and maybe make a phone call to a loved one?"
He shook his head no. I went back to my chair and sat down. The mist came and went. In ten minutes, a car pulled up behind him, and a man got out and led him into the car, and they drove away.
I went inside, and I got in bed next to some anthologies and W. S. Merwin's The Vixen and slept quite well.
W. S. MERWIN SAID his mother read poetry to him. Well, mine did, too. Several times my mother read me Shelley's poem "Ozymandias." Percy Shelley, played by William Shatner, is riding in some caravan across a mental desert, and he comes to two enormous carved ankles and calves that tower above him. "Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair," say the words carved into the pedestal, in some lost language. Carl Orff's Carmina Burana is playing its great hollow choral chords in the background, as it always does.
My mother came to the last line. She read, "The lone and level sands stretch far away." Present tense. An instance, there, of the necessary compression and deformation of speech: "lone" doesn't quite make sense. Shelley had in mind the isolated, the forlorn, the lonely, ruined, sandy scene-but the meter called for one syllable, and so he wrote "lone," which is perfect. Lone and level.
I have to warn you, though: There is a most painful enjambment in "Ozymandias." Because of this one enjambment, I can almost not bear to read the poem as printed on its page. Which is another good argument for memorizing- if you memorize, you can loop through just the parts of a poem you like, without having the flawed lines flaunt themselves for your eye.
What is enjambment? Enjambment is the key to the whole conundrum. The word originally comes from an old French word, "jambon." "Jambon" means ham. Anytime Ronsard or one of those French troubador poets used enjambment, they flung a slice of ham at him. Ronsard learned his lesson and wrote some really nice love songs.
No, very briefly, enjambment is a word that means that you're wending your way along a line of poetry, and you're walking right out to the very end of the line, way out, and it's all going fine, and you're expecting the syntax to give you a polite tap on the shoulder to wait for a moment. Just a second, sir, or madam, while we rhyme, or come to the end of our phrasal unit, or whatever. While we rest. But instead the syntax pokes at you and says hustle it, pumpkin, keep walking, don't rest. So naturally, because you're stepping out onto nothingness, you fall. You tumble forward, gaaaah, and you end up all discombobulated at the beginning of the next line, with a banana peel on your head and some coffee grounds in your shirt pocket. In other words, you're "jammed" into the next line-that's what enjambment is. So in the case of "Ozymandias," second line, you've got "Two vast and trunkless legs of stone"-end of line, we need to pause, but no, keep moving, woopsie doodle, next line-"Stand in the desert." Ouch.
THERE ARE TWO KINDS of enjambment. There's regular enjambment, which is part of traditional poetry and is almost always a bad idea, but especially in sonnets-and then there's what's known as ultra-extreme enjambment. Ultra-extreme enjambment comes standard in free verse because free verse is, as we know, merely a heartfelt arrangement of plummy words requesting to be read slowly. So you can break the line anywhere you want. In fact you want to
break against any
moments of natural
pause, not with
them, to keep
everyone on their toes and off balance. So at the end of a line, you might find a word like "the" that requires another word to go along with it. That's how you know that you're in the middle of an ultra-extreme enjambment situation. And you know you're in trouble if that's not what you're looking for. But if that is what you're looking for, then it's fine and you're happy. And there are many poems that enjamb all over themselves, that I love.
SOMEDAY, when I feel you're ready, I will show you The Vixen, by W. S. Merwin. Here it is, in fact. Got it right here in a pile, surprise surprise. That's a photo of a vixen in the snow on the cover-in other words, a fox. The title poem isn't the best poem in the book. So often true.
W. S. Merwin was one of these guys who-well, he wanted to be a poet, and he thought that Ezra Pound was the modernist man, the founder of it all. Which he was. So in the forties Merwin went and visited Ezra Pound in the insane asylum, where Pound was hanging out, doing rather well. Many aspiring poets would go to St. Elizabeths, outside D.C., and visit Pound and listen to him ramble on. They'd bring him gifts of tea and cookies and tins of jellied ox tongue and whatnot. He was a celebrity, an oracle-and if you wanted to be a certain kind of poet you went to visit him in the booby hatch to say hello to the maestro. Dorothy, his wife, would be there, making sure everything went all right, steering him away from his fixed idees. Pound, who was by nature a blustering bigot-a humorless jokester-a talentless pasticheur-a confidence man-was now supported by the American state. He had a sinecure. He'd spent the war being paid by Mussolini's press bureau to say things on shortwave radio like "the kikes have sucked out your vitals." And bad things about Roosevelt. Pound admired Mussolini and Hitler-he'd admired them both long before the war. So when the Americans took control of Italy he was arrested and held in solitary confinement. Archibald MacLeish, who'd read the transcripts of the broadcasts, wrote letters to the attorney general to get him sprung. Eventually Pound ended up back in the United States, and MacLeish got him a good lawyer and a good shrink and saved him from being tried for treason, on the grounds that he was mentally "unsound."
Why? Because the modern movement was too precious to suffer that kind of public discrediting. If Pound were tried for treason, the damning transcripts of his broadcasts would be all over the papers. MacLeish himself might have to testify. Modernism would have a big black eye. The ugliness of its Futurist-fascist patrimony would be exposed. T. S. Eliot would look bad. In fact, Pound might be sentenced to death, as Lord Haw-Haw was, though not by hanging. Lord Haw-Haw was hung. No, Pound had to be packed safely away in the excelsior of St. Elizabeths, where his legend could accrete. In fact, MacLeish and Eliot and Allen Tate engineered a special new poetry prize for him, the Bollingen Prize, to clean up his image.
So now Pound was safe, and he became the cracker-barrel philosopher of free verse. People made pilgrimages. And he loved telling them what to do. That had always been his great talent. He'd told Yeats what to do-he'd presided over Yeats's Monday night get-togethers in London, handing out the cigarettes and the cheese doodles and telling Yeats that his late writing was "putrid." And he'd told T. S. Eliot what all to cut from "The Waste Land," and he'd told Hilda Doolittle how to fix her poems, and he'd told Harriet Monroe, the editor of Poetry magazine in Chicago, whom she should publish in her magazine-he was Poetry's official foreign correspondent for a while, and he scolded Harriet and her colleague Alice when they went soft and published the occasional piece of Sara Teasdalian verse. He'd even told Amy Lowell what to do, until she finally got tired of his high-horsing and took herself and her cigar box elsewhere. Then Pound and Wyndham Lewis started a new movement, Vorticism, which was Futurism by a different name. It was hard, cruel, pitiless, strong. It was pre-fascist, in fact. The first poem in the first issue of BLAST, the Vorticist periodical, had a line in it, later altered. The line was: "Let us be done with Jews." Written by: Ezra Pound. By then London hated Pound, for good reason, and he moved to Paris to tell James Joyce how to fix Ulysses. Yeats's father said, "Hatred is the harvest he wants to gather."
And even decades later, after the Second World War was done, people went to Pound for advice-crazy people like Charles Olson and nice people like Bill Merwin, who in 1948 had no notion of the fierceness of Pound's lifelong disorientations and his hatreds. Pound gave them all advice. And some of it was good advice.
POUND'S ADVICE to Bill Merwin was: You've got to do translations. Sharpen your mind with translations. So Merwin did a lot of translations. He translated from the Spanish and the French and from the Russian, and rare bits from the Welsh and the Eskimo. Really worked at it, for years. And I don't know if it was good for him or not to translate so much, but the upshot of it all was that he wrote a beautiful book of poems late in life called The Vixen. And another beautiful book called Present Company.
Merwin is a fairly old man now. He lives in Hawaii, where he, I think, cultivates rare forms of palm tree. Or is it pineapple tree? Anyway he does something rare with botany. In Hawaii. Still sharp as anything.
I miss my mom and dad.
So many poets are disappointments when you hear them talk on the radio. But Merwin isn't like that. I heard him talk once while I was on the Portsmouth rotary, and I missed my turnoff onto Route 16 and went all the way around again, and now every time I go around that rotary I think of Merwin's voice on the radio. He's got a wise sensibleness and a gentleness of inflection that makes you want to listen. And all the poems in his book The Vixen have the same form, which is that one line goes along for about ten words, and then it enjambs into the next line, which is indented, and that line goes along, and it enjambs into the next line, which begins at the left margin. And then indented. And then left margin, and then indented. So each of the poems has this very consistent square-toothed edge. And there's no punctuation, none, so you have to figure out where the long sentences begin or end. That's part of the joy of it, in fact, that you don't know sometimes whether a word is part of the end of one idea or the beginning of the next idea. Everything enjambs visually until you read it aloud to yourself and hear where the breaks should come.
There's a nice one about a lizard, and one about a door with a worn threshold, and one about a woman who has a plum tree that grows a certain kind of plum called a "mirabelle." All Merwin's poems in this book are good, practically every one.