About Darius, and the power of reading and writing

Here's one of the most delightful things that's happened to me this year, and a testament to what reading and writing do in our lives. My gratitude to Darius for helping me remember that.
http://www.schoollibraryjournal.com/slj/home/894644-312/wv_fifth_grader_donates_10000.html.csp

Vita Nuova

I'm the sort of writer who is almost entirely dependent upon experience; my imagination goes into action when I try to look closely at what happens to me. Therefore I require the freedom to speak about whatever's going in in my life; if I declare some aspect off-limits, then the energy to create begins to wither  -- as if that one verboten zone becomes a toxic presence, and gradually I can't talk about anything.

The clearest illustration of this came recently, when I took on the project of reading a huge pile of my old poems.  David R Godine, the fine New England publisher who put out my first two books of poems, decided to reissue those collections in a new volume. (It's just out, by the way; it's called PARAGON PARK and it's a beautiful edition, with a vintage postcard from the old Nantasket Beach amusement park wrapped around the cover, a very inviting design.) In order to make the re-issue something new, we decided to include a selection of earlier, uncollected poems -- which turned out to be a bigger deal than I'd expected it to be.

I went out to the storeroom, sorted through boxes, pulled out some big piles of pages. Over the years, they've accumulated in a fairly random order, and there's a lot of stuff I wrote between the ages of sixteen or so and thirty-three, when my first full-length book came out. It didn't take long to realize that I wouldn't want anyone to read the vast majority of this stuff. One reason for that is that you simply can't tell what most of the poems are about; they act out emotion, usually longing or rage, without ever acknowledging the sources of these feelings. I didn't always know where these feelings came from, but in truth I certainly knew that I was avoiding talking about my own thwarted sexual life, the deep currents of desire which I had pushed down, as a young man, and attempted to pave over.

I did find a group of poems, written around 1980, that liked fairly well, and in which I thought I started to sound like myself. (What that means is a whole other discussion.) My life was opening, that year,
and I had begun to be more open with myself and with others. Freedom to speak in one area seems to lead to freedom in others -- like a gradually spreading thaw.

That was a long time ago, and my circumstances are completely different ones now. But I have noted how the big changes in my life over the last nine or ten months have made it very difficult to write here; I have been keeping a good portion of my experience cordoned off.  Blogs raise complicated issues about privacy and self-disclosure; how much do you want to say, and to whom, and when? Paul and I decided our marriage was at an end in July; it was overdue, I think, and our separation has been an amicable one. I love him and have great respect for him, and I also feel freed by this change and glad to be moving on. But who wants to talk about seismic changes like that, especially when they're brand new, in a blog post? Or on FaceBook?

I thought I was going to spend a goodly period of time being single, something I've not done for sixteen years. But the forces that move and shift around us (and move and shift us around) had something else in store for me. I've known Alex for nearly three years now, and this summer our relationship shifted swiftly and dramatically. It's clear to me that the door to the next years of my life was waiting to open. There will be much more to come here about the new life; what I wanted to do for now is break this silence, and grant myself permission to speak. (Is there never just one closet, one coming out? Aren't we required to find the nerve to reveal ourselves over and over again? To experience that struggle and consequent coming into the light one more time?)

That's Alex, up above, this spring in Munich. And here he is (in a photo by our friend Peter Lau) with our little fellow George, who's become inseperable from Ned. Here's the joy in my life.

NYC: Do I contradict myself? Very well then...

Tuesday was the first day of school, and a memorably trying one. I was running late after a morning appointment, missed the train I meant to take to New Brunswick, then hopped onto one scheduled to get me to the train station exactly fifteen minutes before the first meeting of my nonfiction workshop. After a bit of fiddling with the doors, and back-and-forth talk by the conductors over their intercom system -- which for some reason is designed to let everyone hear whatever they have to say to each other -- we pulled out of the station. Slowly. And we didn't get any faster. Then a halt in the tunnel. Start up, speed up, halt before the drawbridge outside of Newark. Start up, speed up, halt: the pattern will be familiar to all riders of New Jersey Transit, where such meltdowns happen at least weekly, to the point where it doesn't seem accurate to call them "meltdowns." They're the order of the day.

I was fifteen minutes late to class, no time to copy syllabus or hand-out, so we just winged it and talked, and the students were (not suprisingly) eager and smart, and happy to be there, so it was all fine.

Later in the day I showed up for my poetry workshop and began to teach a class while the students looked at me with rather bewildered expressions, a collective skepticism I didn't understand until their professor walked in. Pure humiliation. Much later, I sat on an A train -- the express -- while it was parked in Penn Station, watching local train after local train whizz by.

So I arrived home around ten in a thoroughly vile mood, having been out since ten that morning, and Ned and I headed out for a walk around the block. We were strolling on Sixth, under a new, Martian-looking arrangement of scaffolding and brilliant flourescent lights, when Ned decided there was something of paramount interest close to the curb, and ambled over to look. He didn't hurry, and there was no one near us, as far as I knew. But when we got to the curb, a middle-aged woman in tightish black sweats and a stocking cap walked by, and somehow I could feel hostility radiating from her, even though she walked right past and I could only see her back.

I thought, I'm just making this up. Then she turned around and said, with an anger that probably had very little to do with me as an individual, "You acting stupid."

My day had been rough enough to prevent me from thinking before I spoke. With no hesitation I spat back "Fuck you! Be polite."

She muttered something and kept going. It was only when I got around the corner that I started to laugh, realizing that I'd uttered, without thinking, a quintessentially New York statement, the paired contradiction just exactly the everyday sentiment of Metropolis:  Fuck you, be polite.  Couldn't be more New York, especially if it strikes you as funny thirty seconds after you say it.

An Exemplary Sentence (2)

This one comes from Robert Hass, from "Consciousness," concerned with the complicated, branching, elusive nature of awareness. It may help to know that the sentence before this one is "My mind went seven places at once." Then there's a space-break, followed by this, which is both a study of awareness and a demonstration of one way thinking moves:

One place was a line of ridge somewhere in a dry Western landscape just after sundown, I saw a pair of coyotes appear suddenly on the ridge edge and come to a loping stop and sniff the air and look down toward a valley in the moonlight, tongues out in a way that looks to us like happiness, though it isn't necessarily; I suppose they were an idea of mammal consciousness come over the event horizon in some pure form, hunter-attention, life-in-the-body attention.

An Exemplary Sentence

This from Joan Didion's new BLUE NIGHTS: You pass a window, you walk to Central Park, you find yourself swimming in the color blue: the actual light is blue, and over the course of an hour or so this blue deepens, becomes more intense even as it darkens and fades, approximates finally the blue of the glass on a clear day at Chartres, or that of the Cerenkov radiation thrown off by the fuel rods in the pools of nuclear reactors.

New Years Resolution/Messiah on the NewsHour

One of several resolutions for the new year: blow the dust from this six-month neglected blog, which, after a summer break, I began to miss. There's something appealing about the form, the public notebook/scrapbook/commonplace book. It's been crowded out during a crazy, overwhelming time.

Begin again with this: the people at PBS NewsHour have produced a beautiful bit of video for the holiday. I went down to DC and read my poem "Messiah (Christmas Portions)," with a terrific film crew in attendance, at an Episcopal Church in Tenleytown. I have a longstanding distrust of "illustrating" poems in practically any fashion; usually I'd prefer to let the words do the work they were made for. But what producer Anne Davenport and her fellow PBS staffers made here delights me; the poem seems opened out to a wider audience, and the editing's so intelligently done that I don't even notice the cuts in the text made for time's sake. Four minutes on the evening news? What more could a poet ask for -- at least when it comes to speaking in the social space.

from PBS NewsHour, 12/21/11

Watching this the first time, on television here in the Springs on Wednesday night, I was taken back to the Provincetown church where I heard the town Choral Society give the performance the poem describes. I went, in truth, because there was a guy in the chorus I liked who'd invited me, and I had the impression that he was asking me on a date; in fact, I think he was just beefing up the audience. But in truth my pleasure was not dented by the fact that he wasn't interested. All these years later, the poem has another life, removed from its occasion, which is exactly what ought to happen: the originating scene erodes, vanishes in time, and the poem becomes, if one's lucky, free to belong to anyone.

Summer, screech owls, spiders, and WHAT IS AMAZING

Summer feels like no time to blog, as the distance in time between the last post and this one will attest. i want to be out in the garden, or under the high loose canopy of leaves out back, where the shadows of branches vein the slope of grass. I love it there; it's a place where the mind wants to drift downward toward the moles in their tunnels, or up toward the new screech owl nesting box I've hung fifteen feet or so off the ground. Still empty, I think, though the other night I heard the underwater ripple of their call, after twilight, from the woods behind my neighbor's house, its piercing quality softened bit by distance. Maybe it'll be next year before they find the box. The little round opening and the pile of cedar shavings for nest-making await.

I've been reading a fine new book of poems by Heather Christle called WHAT IS AMAZING; it will be out from Wesleyan 'ere long. Heather's collection is making me think about poetry as a vessel of subjectivity. Maybe one of the art's functions is to record something of what it feels like to be alive in any particular moment; it's almost accidental, for the poet, that this inscription becomes historical, preserving an aspect of the spirit of the age. Think of Frank O'Hara, and the way those remarkable present-tense poems, dedicating to transcribing the motions of eye, mind and heart in the moment, seem timeless. They're happening right now, as you read them, but they also a moment of consciousness in New York in the 1950s in a crystalline form.

Christle's book feels very particular to the 21st century, but I haven't been able to articulate to myself just how this is so. Because they're notations of awareness, both private and public at once? Because they're tentative, like pages from a secret notebook, and also oddly bold, artfully earning the reader's allegiance and bringing us into alignment with the writer's way of seeing? Because the speaker feels like a kind of psychic seismograph, recording the major and minor tremors that ripple through her awareness?

Well, what you see above is me thinking my way towards a blurb, trying to find my way to some kind of reasonably intelligent formulation about challenging work that I love. Challenging to describe, I mean, which is what a good blurbs does. Praise is easy, but the work of actually articulating what a poet seems to be up to is a whole other task.

Anyway, here's a poem from the book, one I think is just extraordinary.

THE SPIDER

The spider he is confused
b/c I am not killing him
only moving him outdoors
When I die I do not want
to feel confused
Please I would rather feel clarity
like I am a pool
and death a chlorine tablet
I want it to feel
not like I am dying
but am being transferred
to the outside
And I hope I do not drown
as I have seen happen
to hundreds of spiders
b/c I love to swim
and to drown would
wreck swimming
for a long time
But death is like none of this
I know that death is a tower
standing in the middle of the town
And the tower receives
many visits
And there's no one
but spiders inside