Inspiration

(an excerpt from my selected newspaper columns as poet laureate, to be published in autumn 2020 as Seen from All Angles: Lyric Everyday Life)

I have tried—with what I consider good reason—not to talk much about my own poetry in these columns I make an exception this month only because I also try to consider the themes and issues raised by my library visits in Vermont in a serious way. I must give spontaneous answers in my spoken responses; the column format may allow me to be both more elaborate and more precise.

Audience members often ask how poems come into being, and often inquire about “inspiration.” I’m a little leery of the term, only because I don’t want to give the impression that some Higher Authority is using me as his or her mouthpiece. In almost all respects, I’m just another bozo on the bus. But if you’ll indulge me, I’ll replicate a recent poem of mine and then say a word about it, and to that extent about poetry as I understand it, without for a moment claiming that my understanding is or should be a universal one.

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Abattoir Time

The widower pushed the tailgate shut and fell.
The two sounds –click and thud– seemed synchrony,
As if one in fact were function of the other.
The red calf, bound for veal in the pickup’s bed,
Looked rearward over his shoulder. No one there.
A ginger-hackled rooster, framed by the door
Of the loft, screamed loudly, sun igniting him
To noontime flame. He sent six hens in a dash
For cover under bush and sill, as though
His love-assault might be a thing far worse
Than the farmer felt – or rather did not feel,

The death so quick and commotionless his livestock
Didn’t notice. Everything once had purpose
Here, and meaning, and might still have, if only
He’d stayed to read them. Now a skinny cloud
Rode unremarked on a breeze above the barn,
Unsafe and leaning. His horse, a spavined relic
From other ages, whickered behind the house,
All canted too, its paint mere scattered flakes.
Meaning and purpose had blurred in recent years
But the farmer kept right after them no matter.
Who’d free the weanling now, who lead him to slaughter?

So: how do poems get generated in my mind? Well, they certainly never begin with what, in my teaching days, students called “ideas.” They tend rather to begin with some sensory recall, more often than not auditory. This can be the sound, say, of a certain woodpecker on a very still spring morning; a snatch from an old Monk tune; or, as in this case, most typical for me, a small chunk of conversation that has lodged itself in mind, whether or not I know it.

After a reading last year, somehow an audience member mentioned a farmer of his acquaintance, one who like all small farmers in the era of agribusiness, had struggled to keep his place going, and one who’d just dropped dead while closing the gate of his pickup on a veal calf.

For whatever reason, I vividly heard the click of the tailgate and the thud of the man’s body when it fell.

And then my mind shot back more than fifty years to a farmer whom I had worked for in those old summers. He’d lost his wife and, age supervening, was finding the relentless labor of his calling more and more difficult. He said to me, a boy not yet eighteen, “This place used to have a meaning and a purpose.” The click and thud instantly married that remark, and I fused the two countrymen into one. I had only to fill in the physical details of the farmhouse and farmyard to finish the poem. Whatever its merit, then, “Abbatoir Time” was all but given to me. If that’s inspiration, so be it, inspiration in such a case really being a sort of selective and synthesizing memory.

Which leads me to a terse answer to another frequent question: are my poems always founded on my own factual experience? Well yes, of course, who else’s? Yet the facts per se may have transpired at different times, in different places. There is, for example, no actual single farmer who experienced the specific moments I render here; and yet I hope my imaginative construct, my blending of two figures, shows a “true” account of a human being in the situation I describe—I hope it is true in the sense of being more or less faithful to anyone’s sense of loss and diminishment.

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A Monk After Dark

One boot sags dumb like him in a corner.

He drops the other to the floor with a grimace.

He’s still devout. If his face contorts,

It’s from pain in both his shoulders. A nuisance,

 

Not metaphor. It’s the fruit of labor–

A day-long dig springtime in the garden:

Parsnips enough for the brothers, heaped pale

In the wheelbarrow, damnably old-fashioned.

 

He shouldn’t complain, but concedes he’s bored.

In a club a jazz man’s trombone rumbles,

A point guard throws a tricky pass

In a game, flesh flickers onscreen.  For example.

 

Owls outside. Does he envy night-birds?

How might they profit him? He’s no psalmist.

He took his vows far later than most.

There were too many gawkers today on visits:

 

As they dawdled, he thought of a schoolmate’s smile,

Her “peasant” skirt, the glint of her teeth.

He kissed her once as they walked across

A late-autumn field of winter wheat.

 

For instance. Their words? He can’t remember.

Where might that decent girl be now?

He dreams of her as a visitor here:

In unsuitable shoes, she’d wend through rows

 

Of beets and splendid heads of cabbage.

She’d study the bees with a less studied eye,

The way they bob in morning’s first sun,

Their perfect bodies reflecting its light.

 

How strange, their tiny white larvae in May.

But to him, all this is completely familiar,

And familiar feels sometimes like an affront.

Tonight, as they do each night, owls yammer,

 

Over and over and over and over.

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Balloons and Flowers

–for Goran Simic

I dropped into sleep while reading a book of poems

by the Bosnian friend I write for here. They’re brilliant,

full of red flowers and graves and wrenching accounts

of his homeland during the 90s. They lend some perspective

 

on our COVID-19 scourge, which I don’t mean to downplay,

much less to discount the unforgivable part

in worsening it of our leader, jackass and villain.

Goran’s a Serb, and his wife was a Muslim woman:

 

during the troubles, he really had nowhere to turn.

His poetry makes my guts knot; it’s not a sort

you’d think of as soporific, but being so anxious

for three generations of family has made me restless

 

almost each night, and so of course I was tired.

I’d been sitting in my wife’s dear grandfather’s rocker,

handsome but sternly wooden. I still nodded off,

and when I came to, I noticed I had drooled

 

on my shirtfront, like any old fool might do; and yet

the sun of afternoon through the kitchen window

turned even the spot of spittle to something lovely.

Unlikely enough, and the next things to snare my attention

 

were a once-vivid mum in a glass and a reddish balloon

left from my wondrous partner’s 64th birthday,

back before we knew what the world was in for–

though that contemptible leader had been forewarned.

 

Our grandchildren’s eyes turned bright as my wife blew out candles,

the smaller kids batting balloons like that one up

into air… All that before some weeks unraveled

and people got sick, many died, and that balloon

 

and that flower, sole survivors, puckered and shrank

to half their old sizes and somehow looked so sad

that I went back– it makes no sense, I know–

to those agonizing poems of plunder and murder.

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Old Leather Suitcase and Me: A Fable

I found this suitcase slumped in a dark attic corner

like a drunk awash in self- pity.  I was Me once.

There’s a burn mark beside one latch. I tell myself,

with a bit of wonder, Me used to smoke in those days.

Indeed– and drink. And booze and bright ash equaled char,

perhaps in some airport waiting space. I see

such moments, as when Me stumbled out of that bar,

 

precisely to catch a plane.  On the way, he kicked

a sack that a woman had stuffed with gift-wrapped somethings.

Her look mixed fury with fear. She wore a toque,

dark green, with a sort of oval metal badge.

So much is blacked out, but the hat is clear for some reason.

Me mumbled Sorry. The grip’s travel tags have frayed:

Hungary, Italy, Switzerland, even Egypt!

 

Me held fellowships, took exotic vacations

with his wife and three children. A raving child himself,

Me knew even then he didn’t deserve good family.

I bring to mind his foot-stomping rage in Siena

when a toy he’d bought wouldn’t work on his son’s fourth birthday.

Although Me reassured the child that his rage

was not at him, the boy’s face was more than just worried.

 

And when the shopkeeper claimed the toy had been dropped,

Me re-erupted, screaming until frail knickknacks

quaked on the small store’s shelves: Non sono bugiardo

neanche truffatore! I’m neither liar

nor crook!  Maybe not. But brute? No doubt. Or yes,

a child mid-tantrum. The, shopkeeper, quaking herself,

gave Me the refund: in fact, the refund-plus.

 

The cobbled Sienese square was generous with sun–

and looked to Me as dark as the hell to which

he must be bound. He was poet and scholar,

whose Italian stay had been funded by rich foundations,

and he hadn’t yet turned up his cards and found his hand

to be worse than a simple loser’s. All this came before

Me met a man he hasn’t seen since then.

 

Me, his hope grown faint, felt mostly puzzled

when the stranger, unbidden, recited this passage in English:

I will destroy the wisdom of the wise;

The intelligence of the intelligent I will frustrate.

Me inwardly cursed the stranger for his presumption,

for playing the saint. Yet the passage dug down inside.

The bag obliquely recalls that old quotation.

 

Back then a person’s luggage had no wheels.

Back then, full of books, this suitcase felt like an anvil

on walks to airplane counters. In Budapest,

it got lost for a week, and Me was blessed that he knew

no Magyar to speak of. What might he have screamed about this?

Now Me has grown old. He is I. These are not the sole reasons

these days I’m not very apt to raise my fists

 

as Me once did, nor to storm at innocent people.

Never in those bad years had Me been aware

he knew so little. What he used to consider acumen

had brought him to where he ended. If I’ve found a shred

of wisdom since, it has come of ascertaining

my own unwisdom. I study the scorch on the suitcase.

It has prompted a story, I see. May Me keep hiding.

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Why Poetry?

The following essay is from my forthcoming collection, The Music of What Happens, a compendium of newspaper articles I wrote as Vermont Poet Laureat (2011-2015):

People have often asked me, of course, why I chose poetry as my principal vocation. I like to joke that it’s all about money, women, and fame . . . which is, of course, just that: a joke. The best-selling poets in America would do well to attract more readers than a last-place major league baseball team might draw in late September of a hopeless season.

So there have to be other motives. I could go on at length about these, but I’ll try to distill my thoughts here.

I came to poetry late, not publishing my first collection until I was forty. Prior to that, I had striven to be a conventional academic, though from the start somehow, the whole effort felt a little misguided. I didn’t know why for some time.

In 1970, I was asked to teach a section of Dartmouth College’s first-ever creative writing course, not because of my credentials—I had none—but because the then chair of my department, a good man indeed, imagined the gig would give me time to finish up my Ph.D. dissertation, as I had not yet done. This would not after all be a “real course,” he assured me; it would demand neither class preparation nor any scrupulous commentary on the students’ work.

And yet in teaching that course (I use the verb loosely), I felt the return of an old itch to write, one I’d experienced in my undergraduate days, when I composed quite a number of short stories. None of these was created for a course, because in the early sixties there were no writing courses as we know them where I went to school either. In the interest of economy, I won’t go into my reasons for responding to that impulse by choosing poetry over fiction. Suffice it to say that I did so choose, and though I have written a novel and five collections of personal essays since, poetry has remained my chief métier.

A different and less kindly disposed department chair eventually came to me and indicated that, although my reputation as a teacher was pretty good, Dartmouth had now become a publish-or-perish institution. When I noted that my first poetry collection was under contract, this fellow, not quite concealing his smirk, suggested that, just as creative writing was not a “real” course, a book of poems did not constitute “real” publication.

I’d finished my dissertation by then. In it, I’d sought to ape the suddenly voguish posture of the theorist. For such a reason, it remained an obscure screed, even to its author, whose inclinations were and are, non-, even anti-theoretical. I decided nonetheless to mine the paper for a few scholarly articles (at that time, one didn’t have to offer whole books to meet the publishing requisite), but on reconsidering my own prose, I felt something very like nausea. I recall saying right out loud, “This is not what I want to do when I grow up.” I resolved to go on writing verse and to let the chips fall where they might.

I was denied tenure at Dartmouth, but was quickly hired at Middlebury, which had something of a history of writer-professors. This was a better fit. But all that aside, the real question is, why should scholarship have seemed a pursuit so ill-suited to me? I’ve thought the matter over many times. It was not because I felt contempt for scholarly enterprise; indeed, I still value the training I got in world literature, both as an undergraduate and as a graduate student. And I have published a book of essays that—although I hope it’s devoid of jargon and hyper-annotativeness—might legitimately be called a work of scholarship.

No, my choice of poetry had to do with the fact that it more nearly answered to my own mental tendencies. Whereas scholarship, even in its often impenetrable post-modernist avatars, still ultimately depends upon premise and conclusion, upon the dialectical approach, the realm of lyric poetry—at least for me—is roughly described by Carl Jung when he speaks of true psychology as the domain “always … of either-and-or.” That is, lyric can keep multiple perspectives alive within one frame without seeming merely to be a muddle. Perhaps this is what Keats meant when he famously spoke of Negative Capability, the capacity to live with “Mysteries, Uncertainties and Doubts, without any irritable reaching after Fact and Reason.”

Negative Capability, so understood, enables me to indulge what another great poet—T.S. Eliot—called the “necessary laziness” of the poet. To use a reductive buzz phrase, it is a right-brain enterprise. To relax the muscular, either/or approach to experience is to open oneself to unanticipated possibilities, and to let them come as they will.

And to let them come in all their fullness. It may be cliché to say that lyric captures the intensity of certain moments, but so it does for me. This is true, I think, even if the moment that catches my attention never eventuates in a written poem. I know I sound a bit fogeyish to say so (I am in my seventies, and have a right), but the fact that most of anyone’s moments are ephemeral and diffuse seems the more evident in the age of Twitter and (the very word speaks volumes) of the selfie. For me, the lyric impulse allows me to see certain “deeper” moments, to concentrate them in what I hope, however vainly or justly, may be memorable language. Among the very deepest of those moments in my own experience, for eloquent example, are the witnessing of the births of five children. The plethora of responses to such events could never be catalogued nor exhausted, but one can go farther toward rendering their impact—or so I believe—via the language of poetry than by any other mode of discourse.

Lightning scarcely strikes every day. If it did, I’d write 365 poems a year. But that it might strike at any moment makes me feel alive and attentive, makes me open to all manner of novelty, if I can adequately ignore mundane distractions (and of course I can’t; who does?). It feels that such newness is always available out there, no matter I have been recording my responses for more than four decades now. Until I take the long sleep, I’ll believe that something fresh may be right around the bend.

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The Singin’ Rage

Fats and Little Richard would come to our rescue,
but before they did I ached for Patti Page,
“The Singin’ Rage,” as the radio deejays dubbed her.
I remember loving “How Much Is that Doggie in the Window?”
And “Mockingbird Hill”– maybe corny, yet it robbed my breath.
In her much older age, that star somehow fell in New Hampshire,

just across the river from where we live.
I suspect that six out of ten of my local friends–
and all of them younger, say, than sixty–five–
would give me blank looks if I were to mention her name,
same looks that Audrey Wurdemann– Pulitzer poet
for her volume, Bright Ambush, 1935 –

would produce if anybody referred to her now.
Tatters and shards. “Nothing beside remains,”
as Shelley said of his fallen king’s condition.
Like a dear friend’s death, this all might seem depressing.
Well, go that way if you want to. As for me,
my age-old unconcern for reputation

frees me this morning to change a grandson’s diaper,
marked by the bright effluvium of his life,
and improbably to imagine a hymn to that life.
Meanwhile, I notice– with that age-old catch in my breath
and that rage to sing about it to all who will listen–
the beauty of long winter shadows on snow outside.

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Fantasies in’56

Hank Nicci worked as the gas pump man
at Greville’s Sunoco all that summer.
He had a heart like a Valentine,
but softball-sized, tattooed on a shoulder.
It said Mom. What else would it say in those times?
His bleach-blond girlfriend looked like a star
right out of the movies, at least in my eyes.
She drove a smoking-hot custom car:

’48 Merc with some big new V-8,
and lowered so far that sparks would spray
from her bumpers whenever she drove on the lot.
Just to watch her show up made my own sparks fly.
The girl. Her street rod. Of course I got smitten.
She stole my heart, which she never imagined.
Of course she didn’t. Her Mercury glistened
like a red candy apple. Complete perfection.

I knew if I mentioned her, Mom would inform me
my dream-love looked cheap. Her name? Roy-Anne.
How she and Hank fought! I once heard her storming,
“You can kiss my ass!” as she peeled out. Gone.
If this meant cheap, it was what I longed for.
Bad language. Cool car. My whole soul was yearning.
I swear I’d have kissed her for weeks, wherever.
But Hank wouldn’t lay off his non-stop flirting.

If she were my sweetheart, I’d be much more careful:
whatever she wanted, she’d have her way.
I needed my thumb to get down to Greville’s
after mucking out stalls or pitching hay
or herding turkeys at my uncle’s place.
I could work, but couldn’t yet drive. I got lectures
from my mom about wasting the ends of my days
at some dirty old gas station. I never told her

what I’m telling you here, though of course if you’ve read
my story so far, you know it all.
Mom kept on about bright years ahead.
At college, she claimed, I’d “discover new goals,”
but I’d never found any in school, so why would I?
The real goal for me was to turn into Hank:
big arms, a tattoo, and giggly housewives
who blushed and spluttered as I filled up their tanks.

Roy-Anne screamed and swore– but she stayed with Hank.
If I couldn’t find someone exactly like her,
I’d die, or that’s what I heard myself think.
It turns out I’ve lived a long time after
without a Roy-Anne, but when I was fifteen,
Man, I ached for her. I’d have treated her well,
and I bet she’d have let me– at least now and then–
switch spots on the seat and take the Merc’s wheel.

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The Rural Sublime

…the only sensible impression left is, “I am nothing!”
–Coleridge

Farmwives conjure elaborate quilts.
Woodworkers busy themselves at their stations.
No shortage at all of craftspeople here,
but however deft these artisans,
their work’s no balm for my sudden unease.
Today I’ve sampled maple balls
and poutine, and from a provisory bleacher,
heard the roars of the Tractor Pull,
and outside of airplanes I couldn’t see,
the gunmetal clouds dropping ever downward.

I’m at the Tunbridge World’s Fair,
set in a town from a picture postcard.
I’ve been awed by oxen with legs so long
and stout that if my eyes didn’t wander
to mammoth heads (we’re all so small)
I’d imagine black-and-white trunks of trees–
the Holsteins– and winey red– the Herefords.
There’s a scattering too of paler breeds
like Brahma or Charolais. All wonders.

Wonders everywhere indeed:
200-pound Hubbard squashes and pumpkins,
Brobdignagian potbelly hogs–
“Kevin Bacon,” “Spamela Anderson,”
“Tyrone the Terrible”– that plod through the final
Pig Race, intent on the cookie reward.
Though I feel the weather grow ever grimmer,
the announcer rattles his comic words
at the crowd, consisting mostly of parents
with enthusiastic sons and daughters.

Are they gripped like me by nameless fears?
This morning, I shuddered less when leaning
from a Ferris Wheel car or crazily spinning
in the Tilt-a-Whirl or the Whizzer Demon
than when standing right here. Pink cotton candy
cones look like torches, puny beacons
in evanescing afternoon.
The ozone scent of imminent lightning
fills the air like the whiff of corn dogs,
funnel cake, hush puppies frying.

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Assumptions and Cullings

I sometimes come on headstones in backwoods graveyards
girt by their own shallow graves the size of bathtubs
and by brush, through which each one juts valiantly upward.
Lately, whenever I take to my local river,

small cavities in either side’s high sand tiers
look empty to me as those graves must be by now.
Once there were hundreds on hundreds of bank swallows there,
darting jauntily out of those minuscule lairs

to harvest the mayflies that rose from the silty streambed
toward the sun, like bright diminutive angels.
Now I find it lucky– a word too poor for what’s sacred–
to behold one or two of the birds, athletic, winged

wonders under dawn- or twilit skies.
Myriad assumptions, myriad cullings.
One tradition tells us our spirits will rise,
before which, however, a winnowing’s required.

How odd to imagine that such ideas might comfort.
The men and women beneath those knife-thin stones,
the vanished wildfowl– to me, of course, pure strangers.
Yet I feel the haunts of aerial things. They hover

over my frail boat as I remember and mourn.

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