Sunday Afternoon Random Thoughts–Totally Self-Indulgent Edition

I’ve been writing poems for around twenty years now. Or I should say, I’ve been seriously writing poems for around twenty years. I started writing poems at age sixteen in my best friend’s basement when he and I devised a plan to become the greatest poetry writing duo in history. It was a terrific plan, to be sure. We’d decide on a really cool or important subject and then we’d work on a poem on that subject until it was completed. Some of the harder ones took all of about ten minutes. Fortunately, we didn’t believe in revision back then, so our level of efficiency in writing these poems was pretty high. One of the odd things about those poems, my juvenilia if you will, is that I still remember some of them by heart. Here are a couple examples:

Here I am left to die.
A lonely soldier am I.
The battle done,
The war lost or won,
But still the question why.

*

Bring to me tomorrow’s dreams
With each day of summer.
With the soft cool breeze
And the bright green leaves
Fill my heart with desire.
As the sun’s bright rays touch the earth
May I be filled with hope’s rebirth,
And may the fires burn within me
Throughout all the days of summer.
But eternal life does summer lack
As do tomorrow’s dreams.
Until, with a saddened cry,
As summers die,
My dreams blow in the breeze.
As do the fallen autumn leaves.

*

Foolish men are always waiting
For their ship that’s coming in.
And as the sun is slowly setting,
They know they’ll have to wait again.

Wise men are always sailing
Their ships so strong and straight,
Never going near the harbor
Where the foolish men all wait.

And there’s more that I still remember, but I won’t burden you (or me) with them. A few thoughts on these poems, though, both on what works—albeit barely—and what doesn’t work: All of my subjects were always large or grand or in some way didactic. I was always tackling the big topics: war, love, hopes and dreams. And I was always addressing them in the most distant, non-specific ways possible. There isn’t a single specific, concrete detail in any of the pieces above. That is truly one of the hallmarks of bad poetry—the generic, vague approach. What does strike me, though, about those pieces is that although simple and poorly executed there is a sense of rhythm and wordplay. In a few cases I intentionally avoided the exact rhyme and went with what is called a slant rhyme: waiting/setting, breeze/leaves (barely). The final piece of the three employed what is called a “feminine ending” on the first and third line of each stanza. I didn’t know what it was called at the time, I just knew that I liked the sound of the descending rhythm those end words created. So yeah, there may have been an inkling in my mind about the neat things language can do.

A brief sidebar here on the subject of revision. I hated it in the early days, didn’t believe in it at all. I believed that however a poem came out in its first form was how it should remain, as if there was something mystical or “pure” about that initial outpouring from the brain onto the page. I see how foolish and immature that idea was when I recall a moment when I was going over one of my poems and realized that a different word would have been far better than the original one but I refused to change it purely on principle. I’m amazed to find that many young would-be poets come to writing poems with the same belief.

OK, back to the regular post, already in progress. My juvenilia period came to an abrupt end when in my early twenties I showed a couple of new pieces to a friend whose opinion I respected, and he mistook them for something I had written in my early teens. I was embarrassed and hurt, but determined to figure out why my sing-song verses to the grandest topics of the universe weren’t being taken seriously as the high art I expected they should be. I started by doing something I hadn’t even considered before—I began reading a lot of poetry. I had always read the old masters in some limited quantity—Shakespeare, Coleridge, Poe, but I had never read anything written after the turn of the twentieth century. Which means, yes, I had planned to blaze a new trail and become famous in a genre I literally knew nothing about.

And so my education began. And it’s still going on. My poems have matured in the last twenty years. I have an idea (what real artists might call their “vision”) of what I want to accomplish in my poems. I like to focus on specific objects and contemplate the event that led to them being in that exact location at that exact moment. For instance, I once stumbled upon an old pick-up truck in a field that had been overtaken by trees and underbrush. The driver’s side door was hanging open, as if the driver had stepped out of the truck thirty years prior and just walked away. From that came this:

Bankrupt

I have seen how, in the slow burn of summer,
a life of work and faith can rust away
in the high weeds and overhanging limbs
of an abandoned apple grove, how a name
can fade in the daily ascent of the sun, how one
enthusiastic blackberry vine can climb
across the cracked and rotting vinyl seat of a truck,
weave its way along the steering wheel,
and spill onto the dash, pressing itself against
the smoky glass for whatever light it can find.

I have seen the remains of a door dangling
from its failing hinges, left open by the last son
who stepped down from the cab and walked
in whichever direction was away, who walked
until the field, truck, and trees were no longer visible
and his boots had slapped awhile on the hot blacktop
of a country road, who finally stuck his thumb
into the face of a passing line of cars and caught
the first ride out of here.

The details are specific and the subject is narrow and focused. If this piece speaks to a broader topic, it is up to the reader to decide. The sounds and cadences throughout are less obvious than in my older stuff. (As that friend of mine said way back when, “Put them in your poem, not on it.”) But they are all intentional. The long “A” sound in name/fade/daily, the repetition in vine/vinyl, the alliteration of weave/way/wheel are all meant to be there. I don’t make step-by-step conscious decisions while writing, but I do now go back and replace words with better words. By the time I consider a poem to be complete every word has been contemplated and is justified in my mind. Revision has become my friend.

In closing, here are a few of the pieces I’ve written over the course of twenty years.

Void

There is a void the shape of you
I lie down to every night.
There is no other form that fills
that space. Some nights I turn
and wrap my arm around the emptiness,
and wake to the clutch of air
I’ve drawn against my chest.
I have borne this loss against my chest
Too many nights to count. A ghosted you
I’ve formed from hollow air
and placed it in its turn
against the tide of nights.
There, a shape against the emptiness,
it serves as empty form and fills
whatever space I cannot fill
with other forms. My chest,
which bears this weight of emptiness
too well, will learn that absence in its turn
is a weight too strong to bear. You,
the void that shapes and fills each night,
will remain in me more vital than the air.

*
Cleansing

Strike a match and set these fields ablaze.
Let them all burn, turn to ash, let the smoke
fill the sky until the sun fails for the first time
in months to touch the earth. Run black-footed,
soot-faced, to the choked throat of the dry river –
to where the rotting flesh of catfish and carp
is soaked in the thick buzz of fat black flies.
Uproot the dead that line the bank, break off
low the ones that won’t let go, and throw
them over the brink. Set these, too, on fire.
Then head north, or west, past the expanding band
of scorched air, until you reach a place
where no one Goddamns the sky or ground
for what it has done, or what it has failed to do.

*

Perspective

A hundred miles north of here, a woman
filled with forty weeks of expectation
will rupture on her bathroom floor.

Two boys will jump for the open door
of a westbound train. One will fall
short and under. And you will stand

beneath the imposing dome
of an early summer thunderstorm,
flick a lit cigarette into the rain

where it will hiss in the wet grass,
and then die.