Relentless Whoosh: Poetry of Ongoingness

Life keeps going, so we keep going; our hearts keep beating for some reason—is there a reason ?—therefore, we have to keep being alive; this entails not only all kinds of hassles, but also a bafflement that we mostly can't afford to pause and notice or to express. We try to project competence and confidence to others. But secretly, we are fundamentally puzzled in three or seven ways, and one way is the strangeness of the sheer ongoingness of life, its involuntary momentum, day, night, day, night, day…

Am I more puzzled by this than other people? Maybe not, but some people don't seem to need to keep fretting about this incredibly obvious thing: life keeps going and going. So I say I want a poem to express this, to catch, to seize and crystallize and bring into focus and "freeze"—as if!—the ongoingness of living. Immediately, one thinks of any number of poems on the theme of mutability, but I'm trying to keep my topic more specific than that.

I've tried to write the poem of ongoingness. Around 1980, I wrote a poem called "Shambler" that, at the time, I thought had done the job. And later, "New York Breeze," and "Polack Reverie," and "Pasco, Barbara," and "About Time." Each poem seemed to have done the job, and this felt good—for a while—but then, life kept happening.

Meanwhile, I also want to find and read the poem by someone else. I want that feeling (one of the crucial benefits of reading poems) of not being peculiarly alone in my quirky obsession. The poetry of life's mysterious ongoingness: I've gathered some favorite examples, yet the wish to discover anew the suddenly, freshly right poem of ongoingness is a wish that will keep recurring. There's a reverie in which I seem to see the poem from a distance; it's too far away to read, but it's there—it exists in an atmosphere that is blue and gray, dark blue streaked with gray, and it probably has long lines.

(I say I want to read that poem. But maybe, dear reader, "at the end of the day" I want this less than I thought I did when I first conceived of this essay. See misgivings below, where I tumble into Ashbery and Graham.)

You've read so many terrific poems about mutability and mortality—why do you keep looking for more? Ongoingly, you keep looking for more. Meanwhile, your life is ongoing in minutes, hours, days, nights, weeks, months—you never can step back and sit on a balcony and observe your life from a cool calm distance. (Unless in occasional spiritually different moments…) You are paddling in the river while you try to see the river as a whole. If it's a drama, it is a drama without satisfying climax because 10 minutes or five hours after a big event in your life, you're there still paddling, breathing, thinking, wishing, living. The strangeness of this; the helplessness; the comedy; the stoicism.

One week or three weeks after "finishing" this essay, I will remember or come across a poem that obviously should have been featured in it. Someone will point out to me a passage in Proust. The sensation of having failed to sum it all up will be ongoing.

________

Poetry that evokes the ceaseless unstoppable onward flowing of life… We think of Whitman, with his insatiable overflowing lines and his extravagant effort to acknowledge everyone, everywhere. The sensation of infinite ongoingness does pervade the many long poems in Leaves of Grass, yet when I look for the quintessential passages expressing this sensation I don't quite seem to find them. There are these lines in section 45 of "Song of Myself":

There is no stoppage and never can be stoppage,If I, you, and the worlds, and all beneath or upon their surfaces, were this moment reduced back to a pallid float, it would not avail in the long run, We should surely bring up again where we now stand,And...