August 22, 2009

When DJ commandeered my old desk, he found a drawer full of poems, which he put into a box. While attempting to reduce the garage to order, I found that box. It is shocking, grievous, amusing, stupefying to look at the poems now. There are hundreds of them Perhaps thousands. And I know there were five times that many at one point, which I winnowed and discarded, or hurled into dustbins or onto the sides of streets in the grip of one fury or another. The ones I’ve uncovered so far date from the 70's and early 80's, a few from the 60's. I’m going to preserve them somehow. . . slip them in plastic sleeves. . . bind them in binders. Something. It’s not that they’re good, very many of them, but that they are fragments of me. . . pieces of me that had some influence on me, even if, like Sauron’s ring or Voldemort’s horcruxes, I was not in contact with them, had forgotten that they existed. They make me laugh. They make me sad. The last thing I had planned to do this weekend was to deal with them. I did, in any case, write and write back then. Three, four poems are dated sometimes on the same day. Some are paths that led to the spot I inhabit now. Many seemed to be dead ends, or derived from energy not really my own. In my hand I hold “Tellus,” typed at Koinonia in 1973, which was to be the culminating statement on my experience in Baltimore. It mentions almost nothing real, but it is very lyrical, a bird of paradise beating its wings over a jeweled forest. It was written with blood. There may not be a single line in it I can use today. It is grievous, amazing.

I remember now I stopped, walking home at night, on the corner of Beaumont Avenue and York Road, to sing the verses as they came to a great oak, who I assumed was the only being who would listen to me. I thought, “When I vanish as blown smoke, the oak will remember.” I touched its bark with my outstretched hand and whispered “Tellus.” I was pretty safe, as nobody but fools would be walking that stretch of street by night. I suppose I really was invisible as smoke. Perhaps that’s what saved me.

Before midnight. Though it was far from what I planned, I spent most of the day with the crate of old poems, sorting them, sleeving them, putting them in order, binding, recalling the circumstances of their composition. Different emotions flooded over me at different times, but the one which remains as the day ends–the one which came upon me finally, and with some surprise– is an emotion of completeness. What I was is restored to me. These are the depths which uphold the breaking wave of the present. It is the sea I sail on, vanished now, hidden away, but massy and deep. It is very well. Most of the poems are quite awful. Or, if not awful, unreachable–in a language very like English, but somehow failing to commit to communication. Reading them as a stranger, I would know that the author was well informed, interested in many things, fond of words, but I wouldn’t know one thing about him personally. I was a miracle of abstraction. Any personal interest was deflected by allusion or verbal complexity. Everything was intellectual, universal, rhetorical, a series of propositions an alert mind was weighing within itself. I looked at poems from when I was in agonies of love over G and H and K, and not one sign of that appears in the work. When I was suicidally miserable in Baltimore, what I wrote betrayed nothing except that I had been reading Pound. Only when I began The Glacier’s Daughters did immediate emotion begin to inform the technique I had been building all those years. Maybe it’s well it went that way. My students embarrass by pouring their real emotions into bad verse. I mildly engaged the intellect by pouring intellectualism and verbal gymnastics into able verse. If I had never grown out of it, my fault would be by far the worse. But I grew out of it. The poems which are very good I look at and murmur, “Where the hell did you come from?” Bad and good, I am glad to have them back with me.