The Poet Resigns: Essays on Poetry in a Difficult Time

Nothing in this Life

295 Nothing in this Life apair of young poets once approached me and asked if I’d like to contribute to an anthology they were editing. I write prose quickly, but I’m a slow poet, and don’t keep much ready-topublish material on hand, so I was a bit wary. “What’s the theme?” I asked, as a series of possibilities for an anthology in which I might belong flickered through my head. Rapidly graying poets? White guys who could lose some pounds? The last generation of poets to get on the tenure track before the general derailment of academe? It turned out to be none of the above: the young poets wanted to put together an anthology of poetry inspired by Nick Cave. When I mentioned the project to the Scottish poet Roddy Lumsden, he didn’t miss a beat. Nick Cave? Lumsden had written a poem for Nick Cave and, through a series of events too complex and unlikely to present here, he’d heard from an octogenarian friend who’d lunched with Cave that the great man himself had pored over the little chapbook in which the poem appeared—pored repeatedly, apparently fascinated, but inscrutable . There seems to be some special connection between Cave and the poets, and I think I know what it is. * It was in December of 1983—right around the time Cave’s early band The Birthday Party was breaking up—that I first put my hands on a 296 The Poet Resigns scuffed-up bootleg cassette of “Prayers on Fire,” an album the band had cut in Melbourne a couple of years earlier. I remember clamping the headphones of my Walkman on—that’s the verb that seems most right for the kind of willful, teenaged, cutting oneself off from the world that those headphones represented—hitting play, and hearing the familiar tape-hiss (oh sound of my generation!). But how to describe what happened after that? I think Emily Dickinson’s words may be the only way to get at it: “If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off,” said Dickinson, “I know that is poetry. These are the only way I know it. Is there any other way?” (474). Somehow, during that cold night on the Canadian prairies, the top of my head was indeed taken right the fuck off. We can actually calculate how long it hovered there: between the 2:38 of “Zoo Music Girl” and the 2:03 of “Just You and Me,” my scalp, with its lamentable gel-tipped spikes of hair, took some 29 and a half minutes to reattach to the rest of my thunderstruck self. I’ve been able to count on a similar effect from Cave’s music—at least from a track or two from every album—ever since. I think at least part of the connection I felt, and still feel, to Cave’s music, comes from the one—and, really, only one—fundamental similarity between us. We’re both the progeny of provincial culturati—which puts us into the same metaphorical shoes, even though his literal shoes are savagely cool black cowboy boots and mine are, more often than not, dopey looking sandals or grubby sneakers. Cave was born in Warracknabeal, Australia—a boondock town of some 2,000 souls midway between the glittering metropolises of Wycheproof and Dimboola, a place known mainly for its statistically improbable abundance of highly freckled redheads. His parents, though, were great lovers of literature—his father was an English teacher, and his mother a librarian. Later, the family moved to Wangaratta, another small town, one best known for being near the site of the outlaw Ned Kelly’s last stand. As the son of an art professor in western Canada, I like to think I know a little bit about what this means. It means a certain division of loyalties, even a kind of dislocation. On the one hand, you love the place you’re from with the kind of intensity that only the provinces can inspire. The love of a great metropolis like New York is dif- 297 Poetry in a Difficult World ferent, more sophisticated and perverse, and tends to take the form of a kind of hatred—would any real Manhattanite be caught dead in an un-ironic “I heart New York” tee shirt? The love of the provinces is...