Re-reading Poets: The Life of the Author

Epilogue

153 I realized while I was writing the final chapter—as my own “life of the author ” began to emerge through my poems as a subject for inquiry in much the same way as the other poets I am talking about—that my “defense of poetry” is not complete without some sampling of my creative work. The main difficulty is how to do it. I have written poems on and off for forty years and I have lots of them, with themes and styles that vary significantly from one “era” to the next. So I’ve been trying to find a more inventive angle into this part of the project. A few days ago I was out walking in the woods—it was mid-January, about fifteen degrees, a few inches of new snow, blue sky, just beautiful. I was alone that day, thinking, for some reason, about what it was like walking in the woods when I was a boy growing up in Forest City, Pennsylvania, animated by an inner energy that generated an excited self-delightedness, not unlike the one Wordsworth describes so often. And all of a sudden it struck me that I felt at that moment just like I did back then. This realization was exhilarating—because when you make it past sixty, I thought, without having had that inner spark extinguished by the rigors of all that life, well, what could be better than that? One of the nice things about nature is it makes no judgments, delivers no advice or criticism, pretty much no matter how oddly you act around it, which is why I like it so much. It puts me entirely at ease, and I can be myself, which in this case meant I could laugh unabashedly for a good part of the rest of my walk. That’s how happy I was. Along the way, I started doing what I often do when I feel at home with myself: remembering my own poems and reciting them in my 3 Epilogue kameen pages3.indd 153 9/1/10 3:32 PM 154 / Epilogue head. The one that came up first that day was a dark and turbulent one I wrote in the late 1970s or early 1980s. It’s called “Missing Americans:” Bearded, sweaty, he crouches in the shade leafing through the August Penthouse. I buy a dozen daisies from him, pretending the day is lovely, there is romance where I’m going, a woman in the flesh. As I turn the corner a wall of heat heaves up from the street. I stroll slowly through it, pretending I am Norman Vincent Peale afloat on an iceberg. It doesn’t work. I am too hot to think straight, might as well be Buffalo Bob layered in braided suede, or Howdy Doody, wooden headed and sweatless. They say the weather is going crazy. El Niño swirls slowly off the coast of Peru. Molten lava oozes down a swollen Hawaiian hillside. A year’s worth of rain falls in a weekend on Galveston. The Sudan turns Sahara. And I am only halfway home. Norman Vincent Peale is lost at sea. His ice cube clinks inside a glass. Clarabell steals a Jeep in El Salvador. Four women fall to their knees pleading, el niño, el niño, just a kid, shoots them to keep cool. I stroll slowly home alone, a dozen daisies wilting in my fist. The poem is based on an actual walk home from work, and all the references are to events in the news of that week. It’s an odd poem to step forward at a moment of such self-satisfaction, all that violence and heat. But what struck me most vividly, for the first time really, were the poem’s daisies . Why would someone with no one to go home to buy a dozen daisies as if he did? Well, I thought, why not? That’s a pretty good summary statement for why I write poems, too. I’ll leave it to you to work out the details, and implications, of that comparison. kameen pages3.indd 154 9/1/10 3:32 PM Epilogue / 155 That’s where I start this set of selections from my life as a poet, with flowers, which crop up over and over in my work, serving many different purposes, as they do for so many poets. Here’s one...