Denver 4

April 10, 2010

Denver Airport. They are paging Miss LaLa Zalou.

Two soft-voiced Iraqis drove me to the airport. They had been interpreters for the Army, and had been relocated here after a time.

My flights were changed in the night, making this ordeal four hours longer than I expected. Nothing to be done. The airline industry is anomalous and amazing: the question being how an enterprise so inefficient, so user-unfriendly, so capricious, wasteful, expensive, and arbitrary should not only be tolerated, but squirm itself into a position where criticism of the mess may be made to look like terrorist intent. Down at the ticketing gates a big blustery man was bellowing at a clerk for making him miss his flight. From what I heard, the big blustery man was right, and had a reason to bellow, but everyone looked on him as an ass and an obstruction and wished he would go away. Not fair, but part of the collusion we find ourselves involved in, in order that the experience might not be too unnecessarily terrible for ourselves.

Reading at a bookstore last night, way off in some college area of Denver, where skyscrapers gleamed in the distance, and from which we were nearly unable to return because all taxis were gobbled up by people leaving a baseball game. During the reading, during this whole week, it was clear that out of every thirty people who call themselves writers, one should be. It’s not a matter of skill or competence or education or hard work. All the readers last night read crafted and well-observed poems. They’d been published in the right journals, had saved time from their busy days to honor their craft. But greatness and permanence require something more, and I wonder if I dare to conclude it is, simply, unfairly, a gift. Nature wants some to be writers, and allows others to live under the roof, but if one listens, one hears the difference immediately. Some are visitors or honored servants. Others are heirs of the House. The same goes for actors on stage, and probably for other disciplines which I am not confident of judging. Some writers write the world, others about their impressions of the world. Some reveal; some investigate, often fetchingly and intricately, their relationship with the things around them. Some are creators and others annotators, and one tires of the annotators much quicker than the two hours plus of the readings last night. Everyone was serious. Everyone was called to a high enterprise. Two were chosen. Everyone knew it too, especially, grievously, those who were but called. They were the ones who talked about process, revision, the circumstance of each work. They were the ones exhausted at the end. Ours is an environment where such things cannot be said aloud, and I think that is, mostly, well. I do not believe one can rise from one category into the other by will or labor, but it is possible that one can, and none should be discouraged from trying. That some were “touched” or “chosen” or “talented” was a given at one time. We resent that version now, and hope fervently that qualitative judgments are merely matters of taste. But I have listened hard. You can hear the reverberation of genius, the airiness, the profound leisure that comes from doing what one was chosen to do. I do not know how this works. I only know that it is.

People who say they hate poetry, or Shakespeare, or art, or whatever it is they hate, may be stupid, or they may have been exposed only to the tiresome versions of it. All through the week I noted that bad poets spend at least twice the time explaining their poetry as good ones do, and that their poetry is twice as likely to invoke what they suppose to be the sweet, tragic, honed sensibility of the poetic mind. I squirm along with the philistines at readings where the poet sets up the poem so exhaustively that the work is dwarfed by the prelude, and the listener is invited to see the poet’s victory over the thing the poet ostensibly addressed. Regard me being a poet. Transcendent beauty cannot be created by an artist seeking to reveal himself. Many of us were taught that revealing ourselves is what we are meant to do, all we can expect to do. Those who learn that lesson will be lost in the great humming din of the Hyatt atrium, a voice among the many. One thinks of Keats. Of course he reveals himself, but as every blade of grass is cut in flame by the rising of the sun, and the effort has not been for the blade alone. One thinks of Shakespeare, or Homer, who, as far as I can tell, reveal nothing of themselves at all.

Of course some believe there is no transcendence, no differentiated and permanent reality, nothing to be revealed but echoes of our own sensibilities. We have nothing to say to one another.

The angry big man from the ticket counter is at my gate. He must be heading for Atlanta. He is working on his laptop, and not calmly at all.