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“I Love So Many Things I Have Never Touched”

poetry books reading poetry

In her collection Obit, Victoria Chang takes the journalistic standard we call an obituary and puts it through some poetic paces. For most of the book, each poem looks like a column in a newspaper, forgoing stanzas for one tall rectangular block. And while the starting point may be the stroke and death of her father followed by the death of her mother, her poems take matters a step further.

How? The Table of Contents foreshadows how: Title-less poems commemorate her father’s frontal lobe, voice mail, language, future, civility, privacy, and her mother’s lungs, teeth, friendships, gait, optimism, ambition, memory, tears, etc. Some of the poems are repeat-obits, including ones for Victoria Chang, the author herself, who feels beleaguered and fundamentally transformed by grief and its effects.

To give the reader occasional breathers, Chang includes a series of tankas throughout. Then there is Section II: “I Am a Miner. The Light Burns Blue,” where she forsakes the middle tower spaces of the page used for obits and writes poems that expand to the entire page, using white spaces between single words or small clumps of words, forcing the reader to slow down and carefully pick through the wreckage death scatters like so much flotsam and jetsam.

For this to work (and it does), the poet has to be both confident (check) and accomplished (check) with personification. Let’s look, for instance, at Chang’s obituary for Approval:

 

Approval – died on August 3, 2015
at the age of 44. It died at 7:07 a.m.
How much money will you get was my
mother’s response to everything. She
used to wrap muffins in a napkin at
the buffet and put them in her purse.
I never saw the muffins again. What I
would do to see those muffins again,
the thin moist thread as she pulled the
muffin apart. A photo shows my mother
holding my hand. I was nine. I never
touched her hand again. Until the day
before she died. I love so many things I
have never touched: the moon, a shiver,
my mother’s heart. Her fingers felt like
rough branches covered with plastic. I
trimmed her nails one by one while the
morphine kept her asleep. Her nails
weren’t small moons or golden doors
to somewhere, but ten last words I was
cutting off.

 

As Chang writes obituaries for abstract things like approval, it gives her time to explore all the feelings that overwhelm her, first while her parents are ill and then while they die, not to mention her grief in the days and months after they die. In that sense, this collection is one long obituary for both her parents and the familiar way of life she had grown accustomed to.

The form suits Chang’s talents well. It also challenges the reader to consider all the little “deaths” we experience each day, how they change us in big and small ways, and what we notice about them if we take a moment to think. People change, that’s well understood. But seen through this lens, we come to realize that change in life is nothing but a series of little deaths, some planned or expected, many more spontaneous and surprising. Like this book!

Mean Poems

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mean

Poetry, often something we uphold for its beauty and its dalliances with love and nature, sometimes has a reputation to downhold as well. In poetry, Tony Hoagland tells us, meanness can work. That’s right, vinegar instead of honey for your readers. As any misbehaving child will tell you, negative attention can be as good as positive.

Hoagland serves up some examples in the final chapter of his book of essays, Real Sofistikashun: Essays on Poetry and Craft (but not Ken Craft). It shouldn’t surprise us. Have we not learned that the pen is mightier than the sword? Have we not realized the power of words as weapons?

Certainly as kids we quickly learn the lie in the little ditty, “Sticks and stones will break my bones, but words will never hurt me.” What bull. Words will always hurt us! If they didn’t, we wouldn’t feel the need to protect ourselves with silly little chants in hopes of magically feeling better.

For starters, Hoagland gives us the plain simple plain of William Carlos Williams–a poem that will red wheelbarrow right over your heart, if you love grandmas.

 

The Last Words of My English Grandmother

There were some dirty plates
and a glass of milk
beside her on a small table
near the rank, disheveled bed—

Wrinkled and nearly blind
she lay and snored
rousing with anger in her tones
to cry for food,

Gimme something to eat—
They’re starving me—
I’m all right I won’t go
to the hospital. No, no, no

Give me something to eat
Let me take you
to the hospital, I said
and after you are well

you can do as you please.
She smiled, Yes
you do what you please first
then I can do what I please—

Oh, oh, oh! she cried
as the ambulance men lifted
her to the stretcher—
Is this what you call

making me comfortable?
By now her mind was clear—
Oh you think you’re smart
you young people,

she said, but I’ll tell you
you don’t know anything.
Then we started.
On the way

we passed a long row
of elms. She looked at them
awhile out of
the ambulance window and said,

What are all those
fuzzy-looking things out there?
Trees? Well, I’m tired
of them and rolled her head away.

 

Ouch. But it hits you in the not-so-sweet spot. Grandparents aren’t always paid to behave like the sweet old grandparents of yore. Sometimes they grow gruffer with time. Sometimes our final memories of them are best overlooked and forgotten. And sometimes that becomes an impossibility. Instead, it becomes a poem.

Or what about Louise Gluck’s “Circe’s Power,” wherein she pulls a Jonathan Swift and looks at the whole damn human race as pig-like. Thus does Circe’s act become more metaphor than magic:

 

Circe’s Power

I never turned anyone into a pig.
Some people are pigs; I make them
Look like pigs.

I’m sick of your world
That lets the outside disguise the inside. Your men weren’t bad men;
Undisciplined life
Did that to them. As pigs,

Under the care of
Me and my ladies, they
Sweetened right up.

Then I reversed the spell, showing you my goodness
As well as my power. I saw

We could be happy here,
As men and women are
When their needs are simple. In the same breath,

I foresaw your departure,
Your men with my help braving
The crying and pounding sea. You think

A few tears upset me? My friend,
Every sorceress is
A pragmatist at heart; nobody sees essence who can’t
Face limitation. If I wanted only to hold you

I could hold you prisoner.

 

And one more from Tony H., this one to the tune of “Mommy Dearest.” It’s Stephanie Brown’s poem, “Mommy Is a Scary Narcissist,” which includes the scary word, blepharoplasty (plastic surgery of the eyelids, thank you).

 

Mommy Is a Scary Narcissist

C’mon, I shouldn’t need to mention blepharoplasty.
Her mauled face is a part of the shared horizon.
I don’t need to mention the lift, the tuck, the lipo.
(A Trinity.)

The smile-ever-smiling is a part of the position.
This is Mommy’s supposition:
Sexy. Sexy. Sexy. Everlasting and in high-tonus stance
Decisions
Belong to dads, men, boyfriends, bartenders, chance.

Mommy looks good when she prays in the chapel.
(ferns, lush foliage, candles, rose petals, and flattering paints)
Harder than the other mommies. No one stays.
(She looks into the baptismal font deeply, passionately, and
long.)

Mommy tries to love, Mommy tries to get a job.
Not very hard, the outside world knows that, but Mommy
doesn’t.

 

Enough already? Ready to cry, “Uncle?” If the world is driving you nuts, you have two creative choices: one, you can write escapist poems for people who want to escape to Pollyanna poesy, or two, you can write with vim and vitriol. Let it all out. Get even. Poetically, of course.

Some readers out there just might appreciate it and thank you from the hidden dark and sinister of their hearts.

We Hold These Truths To Be Self-Evident…Once You Read Them

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One of the most famous lines in Thomas Jefferson’s start-the-presses Declaration of Independence is “We hold these truths to be self-evident.”

OK, let’s not get political and note any ironies about what follows (“…that all men are created equal”) because you know and I know that inequality is as big in this Age of American Oligarchs as it was in the Age of TJ (a slaveowner himself).

Instead, let’s consider the role of truth in poetry. Truths are as important to good poets as they are to enlightened philosophers. If a reader reads your poem and has an aha moment that goes something like this: “Yes! I recognize that truth, and I loved the new way you uncovered it!” then you are onto something. Something we call the essence of good poetry (like gold cobbled from mongrel minerals, a rarity that will delight more than alchemists).

Ellen Bass’s collection, Like a Beggar, includes a batch of Pablo Neruda-like odes, which are a lot more fun than Ancient Greek-like odes. Here’s an example of a “little truth” that Bass uncovers in her own creative way. It’s called “Ode to Invisibility,” and it touches on the way older people become more and more “invisible” in a youth-worshiping world because… because what do wrinkles and oversized sunglasses matter, anyway?

If you’re older, you can read it and say, “Aha, I recognize this feeling!” and if you’re younger, you can read it and say, “Oh, yeah. Old people? I think I noticed one last year….”

 

Ode to Invisibility
by Ellen Bass

O loveliness. O lucky beauty.
I wanted it and I couldn’t bear it.
When I was a girl, before self-serve gas,
as the attendant leaned over my windshield,
I didn’t know where to look.
I could feel his damp rag rubbing the glass
between us. Or walking from the subway,
even in my work boots and woolen babushka,
all those slouched men plastered to the brick walls
around the South End of Boston—
I could feel them quicken, their mouths
opening like baby birds. I was too beautiful.
and never beautiful enough.
Ironing my frizzy hair on the kitchen table.
All the dark and bright creams to sculpt my cheekbones,
musk dotted on my hot pulses,
and that pink angora bikini that itched like desire
as I laid myself down under the gold of a key we didn’t yet fear.
Hello, my pretty. Your ankles were elegant,
your breasts such splendor
men were blinded by their solar flare.
These days, I’m more like my dog,
who doesn’t peruse himself in the mirror,
doesn’t notice the gray at his temples, though I think
it makes him look a little like Cary Grant in Charade.
I can trot along the shallow surf of Delray Beach
in my mother-in-law’s oversize swimsuit,
metallic bronze and stretched-out so it bulges like ginger root.
On one side, that raucous ocean surging and plunging,
on the other, the bathers gleaming with lotions and oils.
I can be a friend to them all, even the magnificent young,
their bodies fluid as the curl of a wave.
I can wander up to any gilded boy, touch
his gaudy biceps, lean in confidentially. I’m invisible
as a star at noon, a grain of clear sand.
It’s a grand time of life: not so close to the end
that I can’t walk for miles along the pulpy shore,
and not so far away that I can’t bear
the splendid ugliness of this disguise.

 

 

The poem turns nicely on the line “These days, I’m more like my dog” and really gets down to the self-evident (but hard to express) truth with the line “I’m invisible / as a star at noon, a grain of clear sand.”

The good news? For women who once had to endure wolf whistles from men on city streets, invisibility is a blessing. But also a harbinger.

Just thank god that you can still walk miles along the pulpy shore, Ellen tells us. It’s a consolation, and consolation, they say, was the penultimate thing out of Pandora’s box.

April Is the Cruller Month

poetry

No, wait. That can’t be right. “April is the cruellest month,” according to T.S. Eliot (with “cruelest” misspelled).

Or maybe it’s a case of Brit-spell, which we fought a war over. I still remember the peace treaty at Yorktown, where George Washington proclaimed that, heretofore, “colour” would be spelled “color.” Huzzah (and all that)! Strike up “Yankee Doodle” and let’s get some lunch.

But back to Eliot. It’s a great line about April (which debuts today). A humdinger of a line. One everyone remembers, even people who consider poetry as foreign as Neptune. To stretch it out a bit, the first four lines of “The Waste Land” go like so:

 

April is the cruellest month, breeding
Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing
Memory and desire, stirring
Dull roots with spring rain.

 

The line works especially well in New England, where new life can be coaxed out of the earth only to be slammed with a late-season frost or a “whoops” snowstorm. Cruel.

The bigger point here, though, is great lines. All of us write them (by “us” I mean poets not quite as well-known as old Thomas Stearns Eliot), it’s just the company they keep. That is, when we create an awesome line that makes us proud, we have trouble drumming up players to go out on the field or court with it.

Poetry, you see, is a team sport outfitted with players called words and lines and stanzas. Given that, a great line cannot stand alone. It is not an orchestra unto itself. It requires other lines to help it resonate, make sense, fill the room with music. You can put a star on a basketball team, for instance, but if the other four players are mediocre at best, good luck.

Some poetry “how-to” books advise a collection of your best lines, shoehorning them into one poem. To me, that’s a cheat sure to fail.

What? My best lines from five poems forced to play together, even if they treat on different subjects? Just imagine the egos of five superstars on that basketball court with no practice as a cohesive unit. Ball hogs. Hot doggers. Ma, look-at-me’s.

No, no, no. That will not do. That would be cruelly unkind and one mess of a poem.

Think of that next time you try to devise ways to make one of your favorite lines famous. I recommend starting from scratch. Build a team around your great line. It’s not easy, but whoever said poetry was? Not this guy. So pass the crullers, poor a coffee, and get to work.

Writing Prompts: They Hide in the Wide Open

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Traci K. Smith divides her anthology, American Journal: Fifty Poems for Our Time, into five sections: “The Small Town of My Youth,” “Something Shines Out From Every Darkness,” “Words Tangled in Debris,” “Here, the Sentence Will Be Respected,” and “One Singing Thing.”

Think about it. Each of those section titles would make a great prompt. Five stirrers for your daily writing cocktail. The first opens up memoir-like possibilities from your past and the town you grew up in.

The second offers a study in contrasts where you can use the rhetorical device of antithesis to explore one small phoenix that poked out from the ashes.

The third? Play with words and see how even tangled debris can take on significance.

Looking at the fourth title, I think of how the word “sentence” can be taken two ways, one if my diction and two if by the judge’s gavel.

And finally, the wonder, the shout, the ode of “one singing thing.”

So much for “I have no ideas.”

As an example of a poem Smith chose for the first section, “The Small Town of My Youth,” here is a poem by Oliver de la Paz:

 

In Defense of Small Towns
by Oliver de la Paz

When I look at it, it’s simple, really. I hated life there. September,
once filled with animal deaths and toughened hay. And the smells

 

of fall were boiled-down beets and potatoes
or the farmhands’ breeches smeared with oil and diesel

 

as they rode into town, dusty and pissed. The radio station
split time between metal and Tejano, and the only action

 

happened on Friday nights where the high school football team
gave everyone a chance at forgiveness. The town left no room

 

for novelty or change. The sheriff knew everyone’s son and despite that,
we’d cruise up and down the avenues, switching between

 

brake and gearshift. We’d fight and spit chew into Big Gulp cups
and have our hearts broken nightly. In that town I learned

 

to fire a shotgun at nine and wring a chicken’s neck
with one hand by twirling the bird and whipping it straight like a towel.

 

But I loved the place once. Everything was blonde and cracked
and the irrigation ditches stretched to the end of the earth. You could

 

ride on a bicycle and see clearly the outline of every leaf
or catch on the streets each word of a neighbor’s argument.

 

Nothing could happen there and if I willed it, the place would have me
slipping over its rocks into the river with the sugar plant’s steam

 

or signing papers at a storefront army desk, buttoned up
with medallions and a crew cut, eyeing the next recruits.

 

If I’ve learned anything, it’s that I could be anywhere,
staring at a hunk of asphalt or listening to the clap of billiard balls

 

against each other in a bar and hear my name. Indifference now?
Some. I shook loose, but that isn’t the whole story. The fact is

 

I’m still in love. And when I wake up, I watch my son yawn,
and my mind turns his upswept hair into cornstalks

 

at the edge of a field. Stillness is an acre, and his body
idles, deep like heavy machinery. I want to take him back there,

 

to the small town of my youth and hold the book of wildflowers
open for him, and look. I want him to know the colors of horses,

 

to run with a cattail in his hand and watch as its seeds
fly weightless as though nothing mattered, as though

 

the little things we tell ourselves about our pasts stay there,
rising slightly and just out of reach.

Writing (vs. Fighting) Like Cats and Dogs

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I have oft written of dog poems because I am a dog guy. That’s why I disapprove of such crazy commandments as the 11th, “Thou shalt not write a poem about dogs.”

But what about cats? As I have little patience for their kind, I feel more sympathetic toward “no cat” rules. After all, cat pics clutter Internet feeds like cholesterol clogged King Henry VIII’s arteries. Said pics can be found in the dictionary under “clichés” as opposed to “cute.”

Still, I’d be foolish and inconsistent to rule in dogs’ favor while wishing cats their tenth lives. And so it is that I advise writers who love one or the other or both to go forth and multiply in your creative efforts (the 12th Commandment).

No less a poet than Marge Piercy leads the way (see below and meet me at the bend):

 

A Republic of Cats
Marge Piercy

Nobody rules. They all
take turns. I can never
tell who will chase who
playing war over the couch

and chairs, round and
round again until suddenly
they stop as if a whistle
blew in their heads.

Five of them, aged fifteen
to two. Who will curl
together making one cushion
of patchwork fur? Who

will painstakingly lick
a friend, washing and
cuddling. Who will growl
at their friend of last hour?

The one rule is where each
sleeps at night, their spot
in the bed and with whom.
It is written in bone.

 

Writing about pets starts with scientific observation. With that data, the writer turns to more creatively figurative ideas and goes for it. The writer must! Dogs and cats are too well known not to.

For me, all credit in this poem goes to the start (“Nobody rules.”) and the end (“It is written in bone.”). Hook the reader from the start, lest you lose that impatient-as-all-get-out customer (and think of it—no two words better capture “cat-dom” than those).

Then comes the end. Your poem depends on a final flourish. Something memorable. Something with panache. If sleeping spots are as important to cats as lunchroom table spots are to middle schoolers, then say it in style: The rule “is written in bone.”

Now go watch your cats and dogs with a notebook, why don’t you. Take notes. Then make like clumsy Moses and break some commandments.

Adult Brain + Kid Wondering = Poetry

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Sometimes you just have to be kid-curious to write poetry by saying, “What if?” and “Imagine that….” Rest assured if you are a poet walking on crowded city sidewalks, you are not thinking the same things as the folks looking down at their Palm Gods (read: cellphones). No. Your mind is moving faster than you are, turning at every bend, allowing no law of physics to get in your creative way.

By way of example, here’s a Wislawa Szymborska poem which, whether she intended it or not, has a distinct samsara flavor.

 

Thoughts That Visit Me on Busy Streets
Wislawa Szymborska

Faces.
Billions of faces on the earth’s surface.
Each different, so we’re told,
from those that have been and will be.
But Nature—since who really understands her?—
may grow tired of her ceaseless labors
and so repeats earlier ideas
by supplying us
with preworn faces.

Those passersby might be Archimedes in jeans,
Catherine the Great draped in resale,
some pharaoh with briefcase and glasses.

An unshod shoemaker’s widow
from a still pint-sized Warsaw,
the master from the cave at Altamira
taking his grandkids to the zoo,
a shaggy Vandal en route to the museum
to gasp at past masters.

The fallen from two hundred centuries ago,
five centuries ago,
half a century ago.

One brought here in a golden carriage,
another conveyed by extermination transport,
Montezuma, Confucius, Nebuchadnezzar,
their nannies, their laundresses, and Semiramida
who speaks only English.

Billions of faces on the earth’s surface.
My face, yours, whose—
you’ll never know.
Maybe nature has to shortchange us,
and to keep up, meet demand,
she fishes up what’s been sunk
in the mirror of oblivion.

 

I like all the cameos here by people both famous and infamous—people kind enough to share their faces in Szymborska’s Warsaw one week. I had to look up Altamira to see that it is an ancient cave filled with caveman (and woman) canvases (rock on!) that might hang in the Prado if cave walls could move. As for Semirada, an opera, it appears, starring a queen of the same name. Maybe Szymborska was a fan of the opera. Me, I give it a wide berth, being the modern Vandal that I am.

Face it, you could do worse than let your mind wander to such strange wonders today. Whimsy is on the same shelf as poetry, after all. Just ask Dewey Decimal.

A Carnival of Losses, A Big Top of Gains

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In poet Donald Hall’s second (and final, given his death in 2018) collection of essays, A Carnival of Losses: Notes Nearing Ninety, his prose style is concise and entertaining, proving compression (i.e. “the art of poetry”) has pay-offs for the essay writer, too.

For fans of poetry, two of the book’s four sections merit mention: “The Selected Poets of Donald Hall” (a series of reminisces about poets Hall met and interacted with over the years) and “Necropoetics” (an extended study of poems about death… something Hall was quite familiar with, having experienced the long and fateful death of his poet wife, Jane Kenyon).

Poets discussed in the “Selected Poets” section of the book include Theodore Roethke, Robert Creeley, Louis MacNeice, William Carlos Williams, John Holmes, Stephen Spender, Geoffrey Hill, James Dickey, Allen Tate, Edwin and Willa Muir, Kenneth Rexroth, Seamus Heaney, Joseph Brodsky, Richard Wilbur, E.E. Cummings, Tom Clark, and James Wright. Most of these “essays” are but a page or two long.

For a shorter one and a taste of Hall’s style, I give you his take on Kenneth Rexroth:

 

“New Directions published Kenneth Rexroth’s poems, and I read Rexroth with pleasure and excitement beginning in my twenties and thirties. Long poems and short, I admired him and learned from him, his diction and his three beats a line. His radio talks on California NPR made his opinions public. A dedicated anti-academic, he bragged, ‘I write like I talk.’ Whatever his taste or careful grammar, I kept on admiring his poems as he kept on being nasty about me and my eastern gang. I thought of a happy revenge. Frequently I wrote essays for the New York Times Book Review, so I asked its editor if he’d like an appreciation of Rexroth. Sincerely and passionately and with a devious motive, I wrote an essay to celebrate the poetry of Kenneth Rexroth. I imagined the consternation in California after my piece came out in the New York Times—the shock, the shame, possibly the reluctant pleasure. Mind you, he would not thank me. His publisher James Laughlin, mumbling out of the corner of his mouth, brought me a meager but appreciative word.”

 

Kill ’em with kindness, I always say. Especially when they’re playing tribal politics, something we watch with horror as it plays out in Swampington D.C. and thus, as poets, something we should know better than to repeat in our own little microcosm of intrigues and jealousies.

The reminisce about Allen Tate is quick but quick-witted, showing Hall’s signature sense of humor:

 

“My recollections of some poets are brief. Allen Tate always looked grumpy.”

 

The Tate page is so white, it is reminiscent of Basho and jumping frogs. A haiku, then, to the fifth of Snow White’s dwarfs, Grumpy:

Sp
las
h!

The Complication in Simple Truths

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Simple truths. They abound out there. Put them to paper, though, and they may play like clichés, fast and loose. You need an angle, then. You need your own way.

Pretty much, that’s the simple complication to writing. Everyone holds any given truth to be self-evident, but only one can put it in a certain way—one that makes readers nod and say, “Yes, this illustrates that truth perfectly.”

For example, let’s see how Marjorie Saiser angles in on a simple truth with the following poem:

 

Weekends, Sleeping In
Marjorie Saiser

No jump-starting the day,
no bare feet slapping the floor
to bath and breakfast.

Dozing instead
in the nest
like, I suppose,
a pair of gophers

underground
in fuzz and wood shavings.
One jostles the other
in closed-eye luxury.

We are at last
perhaps
what we are:

uncombed,
unclothed,
mortal.

Pulse
and breath
and dream.

 

Visually, the poem keeps whittling itself down to basic truths, and those basics are delivered in two final stanzas that amount to one- and two-word lines. That’s all. People like gophers in wood shavings “uncombed, / unclothed, / mortal.”

Better yet, the final word of the final stanza, so different than the physiological ones that precede it: “Pulse / and breath / and dream.” This time the short waves come without punctuation or hesitation, but we are more than just autonomous pulse and breath. We are the stuff of dreams.

A basic truth about a lazy day with a loved one. Terribly uncomplicated, really, until you tackle the complication of saying it your own way.

 

“The General, Big-Bearded Arrogance of Certainty.” And Then There’s Poetry.

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As a subscriber to Poetry, I admit to enjoying the essays in the back section as much as or, some months, more than the poetry up front. I’m still safe at the plate, however, as the essays are about poetry.

Jumping into the archives as I sometimes do, for instance, I find the May, 2018, issue, which features Poetry‘s well-advised fourth installment of exchanges with England’s estimable Poetry Review. I enjoyed one essay in particular—Jack Underwood’s “On Poetry and Uncertain Subjects.”

Though an essay, Underwood’s is an ode to poetry’s protean knack for escaping. Escaping what, you ask? Lots of things. Predictions. Definitions. Sometimes even meaning.

In poetry, Underwood writes, “You not only have to acknowledge the innate inaccuracy of language as a system that cannot catch or hold onto anything securely, but also that it’s precisely this characteristic of inaccuracy that a poetic, empathetic transactions rests on.”

When it comes to writing and publishing poems, Underwood warns, “you deliberately build your poem as an open habitation; you have to learn to leave holes in the walls, because you won’t and can’t be around later on to clear up any ambiguities when the lakes of your readers’ lives come flooding up through the floor.”

(Editor’s Note: Underwood assumes that your poems will, in fact, have readers.)

What resonated with me most in this essay is its admission that our poems can slip away even from us, the supposedly confidant author / poets:

“If a poem works it’s because you’ve made it such that other people might participate in making it meaningful, and this participation will always rest on another person’s understanding of the poem and its relationship to a world that is not your own. Your own understanding of the poem will evolve over time too, as you reread it in light of your changing world, just as you will find the world altered in light of the poem you wrote to understand a small uncertain corner of it.  With poems, you never get to settle on a final meaning for your work, just as you never get to feel settled, finally, as yourself. So it seems entirely natural to me that poets, exploring and nudging such unstable material, foregrounding connotation and metaphor, and constantly dredging up the gunk of unconscious activity over which they have no control, might start to doubt the confidence, finality, and the general big-bearded Victorian arrogance of certainty as it seems to appear in other forms of language: mathematical, religious, political, legal, or financial.”

Doubtful? You need only dig up some of your own published work, whether they be poems in poetry journals or poems in your own books. Trust me when I say, some of your poems will wink at you, stick their tongues out at you, and even turn their backs on you.

Willful children, I think they used to be called. You did your best, and now they go out unto the world to be interpreted as they will by the many, many people they will cross paths with.

Vaya con Dios, I tell them. Godspeed and may you reflect kindly on your creator.