As If It Matters

“April is the cruelest month…” and it is National Poetry Month. I probably write more on this blog about poetry than about anything else. Poetry is art that sustains me; it is the quiet commentary on my day. Little things all around me call to mind lines from poems; my inner life lives in the company of poems. I am reminded of the George Bradley poem “Paideia” which begins:

My poems are my children, and I swear
on the graves of my ancestors
I never laid a hand on them,
not even when they exasperated me,
when caring for them left me exhausted
and their cries in the night disturbed my sleep.

I rarely write poetry; I read it and memorize it. Writing real poems seems to me like enormously hard work. But poetry is such an enormous part of my private life, such a part of my joy (and in fact all of my emotions), that when Michael Ansara invited me to help start the Massachusetts Poetry Festival, I knew there was only one answer. Last year we managed to pull of an incredible festival in Lowell, with readings by Marjorie Agosin, Lucie Brock-Broido, Martín Espada, Rhina Espaillat, Regie Gibson, Robert Pinsky, Nick Flynn, and Ed Sanders that left me wanting for more. I ended up buying many more volumes of poetry following the festival than I should have, but “Ink runs from the corners of my mouth. / There is no happiness like mine. / I have been eating poetry.” I was particularly thrilled to hear Robert Pinsky read one of my favorite poems, Samurai Song.

We had so much fun with last year’s festival, we are organizing it again – again in Lowell (Jack Keraouc’s hometown), this time October 16 & 17. I’m hosting a couple of planning meetings in April at EchoDitto’s Cambridge office – the first one is tonight! – so please ping me if you’d like to come. We need all the help we can get!

It’s National Poetry Month, and given my love of poetry I feel compelled to post something about poetry. I have always been a fan of Jim Harrison. I’ve often quoted his writing on this blog. But a few weeks ago I saw on Poetry Daily one of his poems that boldly spoke to me – titled simply “27“.

First I have to explain Poetry Daily. I confess I’m a little reluctant to admit its the start page on my browser, my “home” page. I guess I’ve always found bite-size morsels of poetry unsatisfying, not engaging enough, a little too stranded out there in the world without context. Poetry Daily seems like it should be too least-common-denominator to be satisfying. But in fact, I frequently find it satisfying. Whoever picks those poems has taste similar to mine at least part of the time.

So a few weeks ago Harrison’s “27” showed up. It was such a sharp, hard-edged poem, with a narrative force to it and more than a bit of mystery. I loved it, even with its bleak, dark commentary. I looked up the book, Letters to Yesenin. A new one for me. Hmmm. I ordered a copy.

I love reading an excellent book of poems, one that holds together and has a narrative force to it. It has been a while since I’ve read a book of poems that held together so tightly, with such a taut and compelling emotional thread driving it along. But Letters to Yesenin is exactly that sort of book of poems – one long poem, really. So good I couldn’t stop reading it and re-reading it. It’s dark, to be sure – Harrison wrote the book when he was a younger man, in the 1970s, when he was probably close to my age (30). He’s living as a hard-scrabble farmer, with his wife and small children, and is full of despair at the dead-end his life seems to have found, a dead-end without the excitement and engagement of the literary life he desires. Harrison writes the poems in a deep depression, as intimate letters to the Russian poet Yesenin (who wrote his last poem in his own blood and hung himself at 1925). Curiously, I had a hard time finding much Yesenin’s work online. But Harrison’s poems begin in the darkness of real despair, considering suicide like Yesenin, and ultimately through the letters to Yesenin, Harrision talks himself, ever so slowly, out of his depression and back into a love of life again.

It is a compelling and intense emotional journey. Hayden Carruth called it “one of the best [books of poems] in the past twenty-five years of American writing”. I’m forced to agree. It was fine. Thus my life draws fuel ineluctably from triumph.

As many friends know, I love poetry. It fuels me and gives me inspiration and energy. But I generally don’t write poetry; I read other people’s poems, and memorize my favorite ones. I don’t write poetry because it is a fine art, a serious craft, and to come to it requires diligence, patience, intensity. Who wants to write a bad poem? It’s worth the effort to write a good poem – but it’s a lot of work. So given my respect for the craft, and the effort involved, I don’t write poems.

That’s not to say I don’t want to write poems; I just don’t want to write bad poems. There’s enough bad poetry in the world – more than enough. But I’m also an insomniac, and I am sometimes prone to wake in the middle of the night and what else is there to do but write a poem? More often than not an intense dream has driven me to awake suddenly, with a stark awareness of the night, and that’s a place where many of the few poems I have written have been born.

My desire to write excellent poems constricts me; it prevents me from writing too many poems, and it prevents me from publishing (or seeking publication) of most of my poems. Something has changed for me today; I found this bit of a poem I had written some time ago and felt the impulse to publish it on nicco.org. I am also constricted by the intimacy of my poems; given that my dreams provide the raw wood for most of my poems, and my dreams tend toward the intense and intimate, I’m further reluctant to share them publicly. There is the dark stuff, taken from the depths of the subconscious, and although it may be hard to make sense of, it has power and it is intimate and revealing in oblique ways.

Despite all that, I’ve published this poem and maybe that’s the small opening required to publish more – and more importantly, to write better poems.

The first time I cried,
there were no tears.
You spoke to me from a dream,
and told me to shave my beard.

My beard? My strength?

I woke up and went swimming in the lake,
cold and dark in late September,
Michaelmas.

Inside, a painting on the wall,
provenance unknown, ugly
but from a distance decent.

My hair wet, I watched the leaves outside
and waited for the rain.

The cat on the wide windowsill
turned her head as if to speak,
as if she sensed my mouth about to open,
and the forest quiet kept my self to a minimum.