June 3, 2022

AVLGMC rehearsal a tribulation, D, the operatic bass, vibrating and thumping behind me in a kind of aural rictus. In a teenager it would be called enthusiasm. Now it’s a mania, a pathology. He’s so loud and confident that when he’s off, there’s no getting back. 

Summer the way I like it, sweeping thunderstorms in the afternoon, flower-delighting sunlight before and after. 

Went to the riverfront office and pawed through old poems and journals. The evidence of the journals suggests that the era of my greatest and most fluid expressiveness concerning my own life was 1977. I could go on page after page-- still interesting to read, even by me who should already know what it says. The handwriting is perfectly, even elegantly, legible. When did I have time to write all that? How did I have the patience to form the letters so they could be read?  Leafed through poems as old at 1968, trying to find something salvageable. Did find the salvageable, but not very much of it. But, dear God, I was productive– hundreds of poems, thousands maybe, a poem every few days, epics and lyrics and verse-essays, if handwritten and stacked, taking up three full file cabinet drawers, three carefully arranged stacks to a drawer. With a few exceptions, no one on earth would know what I was talking about. They’re not complicated or intellectual so much as private. Poetry was an event or emotion striking a bell inside me, and the poem described the quality of the sound rather than the event that caused it– allusive, allegorical, musical, private to the point of dissipation. My poems created a world parallel to the world of the events that inspired them, leaving no necessary connection between. They were all signs and markers to a separate creation, and only I had the key. I was the piper of Blake’s “Song of Innocence,” piping from the heart and not worried if there were no intelligible connections to the mundus. I wondered why people praised them (or tolerated them) and I suppose it was because they give off an aura of lyrical authority even when demonstrably about nothing at all. They’re smart and musical. They’re also evasive, a shield rather than a revelation. I don’t understand the mind that made them any more. Maybe I didn’t then, and they were an effort at discovery. That quality of work lingered, I think, because I had no mentors. Tennyson and Millay were my models; I got Tennyson’s music and Millay’s attitude right, but somehow never their solidity. Chatfield was a little afraid of me, and praised what was not yet quite praiseworthy. I think I have to credit a rejection slip I got while I lived on Beaumont Ave in Baltimore, where the editor (identity long forgotten) took the time to tell me in what ways my poems were antique and elusive. Of course I rejected what he said. Of course my writing was changed the very next time I picked up a pen. What was going on in my life didn’t seem to enter the poetry at all. The whole catastrophic move to Baltimore became revealed only when I began to use Baltimore place-names to adorn the same kind of poems I had written before. The passionate revelation of the journals became glossy artifacts in the poems. 

What made the difference between the many poems from that time that failed and the few that succeeded? I don’t know. I’m sure I couldn’t tell them apart then. I did in a split second this afternoon. I probably had an unusually long development period as a poet, disguised by the fact that I was always so private about it all and nobody knew. I was the swan in the adage, so serene on the surface of the lake, paddling like mad underneath.

But I am writing the poems I ought to write now. In the face of that, I’m hard put to make complaint about any failure of the past.