I’ve been reading poetry again. Reading poetry always sets my mind abuzz about words and purpose and human connection and stories. I’m not sure if it was intentional, but the last few books that I’ve leaned into (My Private Property by Mary Ruefle, Death Prefers the Minor Keys by Sean Thomas Dougherty, and Winter’s Journey by Stephen Dobyns) are all prose poems or prose-ish poems. Prose poems don’t fiddle with line breaks. In this way, they’re a lot like vignettes or stories or fiction or non-fiction. Who can tell. The prose-ish poems I’ve been reading (the book by Dobyns) seem to have line breaks, but they didn’t have stanza breaks. With all of the lines being roughly the same length on the page, I struggled to discern exactly how the author determined where to break his lines. I tried scanning for meter, but I’m afraid my ear isn’t very good at that any more. I counted syllables, but didn’t see a pattern.
When reading the poets and poetry I enjoy (and I’m enjoying all three of these books), I can get lost in the “how did they do that” aspect of reading – which is why I was trying to understand the line breaks. I can get lost in this bigger sense of writing and art as a form of human connection. What I’ve liked about the poems in these three volumes, is that they’ve expanded my sense of what a poem is, or can be, or does. All of them have a meandering meditative quality to them – especially the Dobyns book. His poems in this particular book have a stream of consciousness quality to them. After each poem I’ve felt like saying that was a fun little trip. There’s also a tightness to his words that convinces you he didn’t just dump his brain on the page. From the poem “Spring,” he begins with an observation of a man in a yellow slicker and his son in a red jacket walking along the rocks at a lighthouse. Picking up in the middle of the poem:
You can never tell these days. Everyone is looking
at everyone else, wondering what they’ll do next,
like pull a knife, and if that doesn’t worry them,
maybe it should. The water is gunmetal blue and
as flat as a blanket; some fog on the horizon keeps
the foghorn busy. And today is a friend’s birthday,
maybe a former friend. I last saw her and her husband
in Rome, meeting in front of the Pantheon. The day
was hot; the square, crowded. We had coffee and
discussed old friends: who was well, who was not.
My wife and I had just spent a month in Florence,
a daily round of paintings and cappuccinos. Now
we’re bickering about money. That’s how it goes,
a pendulum giving what’s called character to a face,
or carving a road map to a place not worth the trip.
From my truck I can see the tip of Long Island.
I’ve a friend over there I haven’t seen for a while,
maybe a former friend. I’m afraid I’ve got too many
of those. The ones who remain, the ones who are gone,
those in between–I miss them all. Once my feelings
fix on a person, they stay bright pictures in my mind,
they always stay fresh even if I never see them again.
Often that feels like a weight.
As I read this, I was struck by a few different things. I like the simplicity of descriptions like how the water is “gunmetal blue and flat” and “the day was hot; the square, crowded.” I like that he brings life to the inanimate – the “fog on the horizons keeps the foghorn busy” as though the foghorn might otherwise be bored. I like the subtle echoing of rhymes: “day was hot” with “who was well, who was not.” I also like the repetition of doubt as the narrator remembers old friends (never sure if they’ve slipped into becoming former friends). I’ve been to Florence and Rome so that caught my attention and resonated. I love the juxtaposition of a pleasure (a month of paintings and cappuccinos) against a present moment of bickering over money. He’s both matter-of-fact about this dichotomy (“That’s how it goes”), and humorously skeptical about life’s pendulum “giving what’s called character to a face” and “road map to a place not worth the trip.” And again, he uses juxtaposition to capture this sense of fondness for his bright memories: “I miss them all” “they stay bright pictures in my mind” “often that feels like a weight.” As I read, I swung back and forth with the narrator, happily following along. The poem continues on this way for another four or five pages weaving in stories about the poet Anna Akhmatova and the friar Girolamo Savonarola as he contemplates the compromises we make with how we wish to live our lives – compromises that carve our individual stories on our faces.
As I finished the Dobyns poem, my thoughts turned away from the language, the mechanical, and my relation to the poem and turned towards questions about purpose and connection. I began to wonder how many other people have read this poem. Did they enjoy it? Why? How many copies of this book have been sold? I can’t imagine that the universe of people who have read this poem or this book is larger than the tens of thousands and yet even that seemed amazing – that there have been a few thousand people who interacted with this text. There have been a few thousand people who read it and had their own connections, had their own thoughts, feelings, and memories jostled and stirred. And this is one poem in a book of fourteen meditative poems which was, at the time of publication, the author’s fourteenth book of poetry. So many readers, so many words, all drifting out there in this crazy and big world.
I also began to think about how I read, what I like, and the type of writing I might yet do. Not everything in the book, or even in the poem, spoke to me. There were, I’m sure, entire lines and passages that were read but not processed. There were moments when my eyes were scanning the words, but my thoughts were on something else. As an occasional attempter of poetry and these longer forms of meandering thinking/writing, this acknowledgment was somewhat comforting. I don’t doubt that Dobyns and the other writers I’m reading agonize(d) over their words and choices… but knowing, as a reader, that not everything hits, that not everything resonates, gave me a sense of freedom. This is a lesson I have to learn over and over and over again: write it down, fix it later, who cares if it’s good or if it matters – don’t kill it off before you’ve even started. I’m constantly trying to break through this barrier that is my own thinking. I’d call it the ego, but I’m not sure what it is. It (this mind thing) is far more quarrelsome when I attempt other forms of art like painting. It’s as though I don’t know how to cede control and just let go. It’s as though I’m constantly trying to learn how to enjoy something for the creative process and not the end result. In thinking about having a purpose to everything I do, I get tripped up. On the one hand, I don’t care if I ever get published, but on the other hand I’d love to be able to do for others what these writers do for me… The back of the book quotes Dobyns as saying, “I write poems to find out why I write them” and “I’m looking for a miracle, I’ll tell him. Not that I think / it will happen, I’m just keeping the possibility open.”
I’ve been reading poetry again. I probably should have left it at that.