I have been writing poetry for five years and have achieved mediocrity — if that — a knowledge I can think of wryly, having come to an age when it is more and more inconvenient to tell myself lies. As if I were in a sinking raft in treacherous waters, I start looking around to see what I can salvage, what will help me swim and ward off sharks. Pretending that I have a shot to win the Pulitzer is a piece of baggage I can let go. I know that even though I write poetry, I am not a poet.
It’s not that I do not want to be good. I work at my poems relentlessly, but most lack the right metaphor in the right spot or unforced eloquence or the image that startles and immediately feels right. Overall, I guess I eventually settle for the banal because I cannot recognize that quality until it is too late and by then I’ve put it out there for others to see. I’ve made my lack of talent public. I ultimately choose the torturous banal over silence. I must jabber on.
I began writing poetry because it gave me a form to investigate those sudden sharp understandings that are almost wordless in their detonations. A memory comes like the crack of a branch on a cheek, a glimpse of a house or field at 50 mph, a ½ a sentence in a book, the way a stranger tilts his head to watch a cashier at a market — and there it is, something so shadowy I cannot give it a word until I write a sentence, a clause, a phrase, a word, and then and only then does it begin to unfold itself. Essays don’t quite do the trick. They don’t have the apparatus necessary for the indeterminate, for drawing out the value of that drift of air that barely grazes your cheek, that drift of mind that is already evading your notice.
Of the many regrets I carry from my years as a teacher, I wish I could go back and completely reconfigure the way I taught poetry. After having written over 200 poems, I now understand that they come together in mystery. They are not machines whose parts can be disassembled and put back together and therefore reveal their mechanisms and why they move us. They emerge from the writer’s deepest currents and come together from many disparate threads of inspiration and hours of revision. They acquire meanings but those meanings have so many echoes and variations of pitch and tone and notes so refined as to challenge our ability to hear them at all. Great poems are more the exhalation of consciousness itself than anything else.
The act of writing is more important to me than its finished product which I always feel dissatisfied with but never with the work that takes me to the dissatisfaction. Ambition is a strange engine. I write poems because I love the act of composing them — the act of working to figure out what they are trying to say, what about them is true yet clear enough to make at least some part of that experience and truth apparent to a reader. I write them knowing that every one is a failure but a failure I’ve worked at until I must decide to either abandon it and become quiet or choose those that fail the least. I hesitate to use Beckett’s famous description here because he was a great writer. I scribble. He wrote Godot. But it does say what I have been trying to say: “Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try Again. Fail again. Fail better.” It’s the not giving up that keeps me jotting down notes after I pull the car over, or until I can get to a pen, repeating a line that has taken form while I’m making a latte. It’s the mystery that whispers to me, “You don’t have it yet but you might find it. Keep scrawling. Keep scratching the itch.” It’s one way I know I’m alive.
