And Collins
is right, too, about the poetry being a verbal bear hug. Consider this,
randomly drawn from the Calamus section of Leaves of Grass:
I do not know whether many, passing by, will dis-
cover you,
or inhale your faint odor—but I
believe a
few will;
O slender leaves! O blossoms of my blood! I permit
you to
tell, in your own way, of the heart that is
under you,
O burning and throbbing—surely all will one day be
accomplished;
O I do not know what you mean, there underneath
yourselves—you
are not happiness,
You are often more bitter than I can bear—you burn
and sting
me,
“Enough,”
you want to cry. Or maybe—here’s a thought—join in? Right, here goes:
O
ever stretching, ever-churning Atlantic, your waters seething with the salt and
the foam and the violence of wave;
O
ever-stirring prairie, your gold poured out on the ribbon of the earth, the
wheat, the oats, the soybeans waving gently in the humid night air;
O
Poet’s Passage, the quiet Stephan murmuring to his charge, Lucia stroking the
coffee that has been freed from the bean, the hapless writer deep in his toil;
All
you do I love, all you do I seek, generations of teachers, and writers, and
baristas to come, to all you who come,
From
Maine to Missouri, from Wisconsin to Wyoming, from the plains of Kansas to the
fruited slopes of California, you, all you,
Do
I love!
OK—that’s
mean. That’s unfair. But why is it that so much poetry—wrote peotry, but it got
corrected (and is now red-squiggled), dammit—just leaves me cold? Why do I
distrust it so much? And especially stuff that everyone else gets—why am I so
immune?
Let’s
take a favorite of my mother’s—Walter de la Mare, or
not. Since it’s an unknown world to me, why not fall flat on my face and write
one?
To A Poem
You’re in there, I know,
Dammit, clutching a wire in the
Hard drive,
Lurking under the keyboard
Flitting fleetfoottedly from the number
Pad to the keyboard to
The screen.
You glare out,
Sticking your tongue on
Which letters glisten
Out at me.
Letters that circle and spin,
Drop up and rise down
And will not form
A simple sort of word.
You tease me, you poem that
Drank coffee with me in the morning
Made my bed, dusted the
Fireplace…
And then…
Took the suitcase from the closet shelf,
Brushed off the cat hair,
Packed a dictionary and thesaurus
And walked out of my life, forever…..
