Author's Note:
I don't imagine that a few poems can begin to represent my 60+ years as a poet, so I have tried to select ones that are somehow special to me. The first, "Morning: Spring Rain," is the first poem I kept. There were at least two hundred before that which got thrown away and that led to the advice I give young poets: "Write 200 poems, throw them away, and then bring me the next one." I am including a second early poem, one I am extremely fond of, "Lecturing My Daughter in Her First Fall Rain." This poem has been incorporated into the design of the Milwaukee Convention Center (second floor, east hallway), which might be the greatest honor I've received as a poet. I could have stopped writing in 1971, I guess. The third poem, from "Letters Home," is one out of a book of poems chiseled from the letters that my wife's great-great-grandfather George H. Cadman sent to his wife Esther during the Civil War. Cadman died in an Army hospital from "dropsy" before he was able to return home. Relatives preserved his letters and someone typed up a copy which I had access to. I like to call this selection Cadman's "Robert Creeley poem." Cadman was the first of the "masks" I have put on over the years, masks which include the voice of an Iowa farmer (who is not my father, and not not-my-father) in a series called "When the Sun Goes Down, the Sky Turns Dark;" a woman on the tall-grass prairie of the 1880s who lost her husband (the series "Married to Prairie);" the irreverent Ben Zen; an imagined conversation with Wisconsin's foremost poet, Lorine Niedecker entitled "That Woman;" the old poet of the series "Imagination's Place;" the tragic, young exotic dancer of "Dancing for a Living;" the woman of "The Woman in an Imaginary Painting;" and, of course, my current obsession, "The Old Monk Poems," of which there are thousands. When I can't think of what to write out of my life, I guess I become someone else. The fourth poem is "Summer, Appalachia 1968." I heard Robert Creeley tell a story a few months before he died about a poet who gave a reading at a middlewestern college; afterwards one of the students asked: "Was that a real poem, or did you just make it up?" When I read "Summer, Appalachia 1968," I introduce it with that story and say: "This is a real poem." I've noticed over the years that I like to give voice to those who aren't always heard, people like that mountain kid. The final poem I've selected, from my collection Seventy at Seventy, is "Were I a Painter." Tom Weiss recently said of some my "translations" of the old Chinese masters that the poems have a "distilled, spare language that leaves room for infinities." "Were I a Painter" has that, I think—room for infinities and maybe a little wisdom, which is about all a poet can hope for in the end. |
Morning: Spring Rain
morning: spring birds start
to crack the lake with
song. the sun moves up
the ancient sky as
slow as an old man
mounting stairs, to clear
off thick grey fog. day
is not revealed so
easily. clouds come
in low, hide the sun,
huddle birds in fresh
green trees. on the lake,
rain begins & sings:
it relieves those birds
the whole cold day.
~
Lecturing My Daughter
in Her First Fall Rain
6 October 71
this then is fall rain.
i spoke of it
in july, telling you
rain has textures,
telling you july
rain drives deep for
dry roots, to fill them,
drives in at warm
angles, softly. i
told you then fall
rain is cold, rough as
wrought-iron, sometimes,
bent as rusted nails.
you were content,
though, to wait, to learn
this rain by touch,
to measure your blue
fingers against
the still-warm places
between rain-drops
on your surprised face.
~
from Letters Home
I find
the more
a man
has here,
the worse
it is:
the more
he has
to pack:
it is
useless
for us
to make
ourselves
the mules.
~
Appalachia, Summer 1968
He's thin as a rail. He's wearing denim
overalls, no shirt. I say, How come you're
so skinny? He says, Ain't no fat people
in the mountains. He's chewing a plug of
tobacco. Our smart aleck from New York
asks, How old are you? The mountain kid says,
Fourteen. New York says, Then give me a chaw
of that and he stuffs a wad in his mouth.
Later he's puking his guts out around
the corner of the house. Mountain kid
just smiles. He looks off into the distance, speaks
his wisdom: You s'posed to spit the juice out.
~
Were I a Painter
I'd know
what to paint --
in the morning,
the light
drilling into
the bark of trees;
in the evening,
the light
coming out.
~