Here's to Poets

I am ignorant of poetry. Not by my choice, exactly, but by that of my elders and betters, specifically, the school board in Torrington, Connecticut (circa late 1930's.) I can't fault them. It was the depression. There wasn't any money to spare on useless frills, such as replacing textbooks. What had been good enough for our parents was deemed to be good enough for us. There were also known to be a lot of radicals advocating dangerous ideas. The safer course was to make sure that all ideas were boring, which the curriculum was brilliantly designed to accomplish.

We were especially well protected from poetical tendencies by a prophylactic injection of the New England poets. As a ten year old I memorized some of their jingles (not REAL poetry, as I knew even then) and still remember them:

"Over the rude bridge that arched the flood
to grandmother's house went Hiawatha,
(a fearful trip on a burning deck,
his wang by April's breeze uncooled.)
Oh Captain, My Captain
is the pudding done?"


Let's face it, being required to learn such stuff at a recalcitrant age, was a near certain guarantee that none of us would ever look at another poem.

Happily, it was not a completely successful strategy. I have read a few poems in the ensuing 67 years, and have even met a few poets. One of my favorite memories is hearing my friend Verlena Orr recite her poem on learning how to swear. I can still see her father, (a large, raw-boned man, I imagine, wearing overalls borrowed from a Dorothea Lange photo) hammering on a piece of farm machinery. His vivid curses light up the sky around his Idaho farm. An awe-stricken little girl takes it all in.

 Sadly, I was not aware of the poet, Donald Hall, formerly 'poet laureate' of the United States, until a few days ago. A friend gave me a copy of his book 'Essays After Eighty' an amusing retrospective of his life in the poetry game. (He claims that in his mid-eighties he no longer has enough testosterone to write poetry.)

In an essay entitled 'Thank You, Thank You' he comments on poetic fame. He had been engaged to read his poems to an audience of students for an hour. As he approached the podium he was told to cut his reading to half an hour because the second half of the hour was required for the election of the Homecoming Queen.

He read for half an hour--and was vigorously applauded. ("An audience applauds longest when it knows it has not been paying attention.") As he left the stage, the podium was taken over by the previous year's Homecoming Queen, who would preside over the election.

"Now." said the retiring Queen, "now comes the moment you have been waiting for!"

The story reminded me of a poignant paragraph in Yeats' Autobiography, remembered from 1960 (I was in graduate school in Chicago, and should have been reading something else) about a poem Yeats had read (or perhaps, written) about a woman who was a queen, and the daughter of a queen, and the grand-daughter of a queen, a charming, mystical image.

I still have the autobiography, an Anchor paperback published in 1958. I'm looking for that passage--so far without any luck. I used to have a nearly eidetic memory for page placement--once I had read something I could infallibly turn to the same page again. Maybe 55 years is too much of a stretch.

Or maybe I'm remembering something that never existed. Yeats confessed in a Preface dated 'Christmas Day 1914' that, "I have changed nothing to my knowledge; and yet it must be that I have changed many things without my knowledge; for I am writing after many years and have consulted neither friend, nor letter, nor old newspaper, and describe what comes oftenest to memory."

In other words--he might have been improving reality, spinning gold from straw--as poets do.

This is the part where I meant to say something clever about the relative importance of Queens and Poets.

I forget what I had in mind.

The Cynosure of All eyes

As a youth I expected to be famous. Or rather, I thought it was expected of me. Much the same thing, really.

Being a sports hero was not in the cards. I couldn’t hit a curve ball, or even tell the difference between a curve ball and a wild pitch (no laughing matter in a town where farm boys threw a lot harder than they aimed.)

I drifted through a hapless adolescence, looking for alternatives. Eventually I decided to be a famous intellectual. The pay was lousy, but the perks were intriguing (Arthur Miller had just married Marilyn Monroe) and the work (making fun of Ayn Rand, for example) looked easy.

A lousy decision, as it turned out, for which I blamed my parents.. Not that I had mentioned it to them. In retrospect I can see that I was doomed from the start. Nobody in our family had ever been famous, much less intellectual. Of course, we all read a lot. Whatever came to hand. Dad subscribed to both TIME and LIFE, and Mom belonged to The Book of the Month Club, although she rarely had time to read the current selection. On Sunday mornings we read The Herald-Tribune (very inferior comics--no wonder that rag failed.)

Lamentably, both my parents were Republicans, although in those days Republicans were often quite sensible. Still, it was better not to mention my ambition. Intellectuals were known to be Democrats. Better to surprise them.

If I had been European, or even British, I might have understood how hopeless it was. In that case I might have written something 'edgy' to chop out a little niche in the second tier of fame, like the young Kingsley Amis:

"Another thing you'll find is that the years of illusion are not those of adolescence, as grown-ups try to tell us; they're the ones immediately after it, say the middle twenties, the false maturity if you like, when you first get thoroughly embroiled in things and lose your head. ... That's when you first realize that sex is important to other people besides yourself. A discovery that can't help knocking you off balance for a time." (from 'Lucky Jim' 1954)

By now I'd be a famous author, although no longer read by anyone but PhD candidates. As it is, my development was arrested just about the time you see me leaving Connecticut (more or less forever) age 17. That’s me with the ‘I’m not with these people’ look. We're at the train station. My father is the photographer, which accounts for the lack of focus and the obscured daughter. My mother is contemplating the greatness of all her children, as usual, and some of my younger siblings have come along to wish me well. 

Or, more likely, they wanted to see the steam locomotive--the last one on the Naugatuck line.

Bye bye, Mom.

Thanks, Dad. 

See you when I'm famous.