Saturday's Child (31 page)

More than these poets' style of living, I coveted their style of writing. Their subject matter was personal, analytic unto the Freudian, packed with images as violent as the emotion was intense. Juxtaposed with a strict elegance of form, this could produce a powerful effect. In the jargon of “schools,” I suppose they were “academic” poets—not because they were based in academia (though Kenneth was teaching undergraduate English at NYU's uptown campus), but because they mostly chose to write sonnets, sestinas, ballades, and other traditional forms (Kenneth was in fact inventing new forms, including one he named his “mystic stanza”).

Now, four decades later, in this era of rap and poetry slams, some readers might find it pitiable that I was so surrounded by a “white male Western tradition” of poets and poetic techniques. God knows I profoundly wish there had been more than the few token women poets, poets of color, and cross-cultural poets who were then visible as inspiration and enrichment. But it can be valuable to learn a discipline for the discipline itself; afterward, one can keep or jettison different skills as one chooses, or vary them as I have and still do. I sometimes write “formal poetry,” but when I write blank or free verse, I do so more concisely and precisely because I do so from choice, not inability to do otherwise; when the technique is there so the challenge of form
can
be met, it
needn't
always be met. It's taken these forty years for me to understand how much each poem demands its own unique shape—perhaps a traditional Western form, perhaps
one borrowed from a non-Western culture, such as a Turkish ghazal or a Japanese haiku or tonka, perhaps free verse, perhaps a form invented afresh for that individual poem—and it's taken forty years for me to learn
how
to uncover
which
form will fit a specific poem's function.

Nor does poetry exist in some rarefied atmosphere beyond politics. It never has, which is why Dante got sent into exile. Thanks to the cultural explosion called feminism, an entire new poetic vocabulary would open up in the late 1960s. Until then, it was acceptable—even laudable—for a poem to contain images from an androcentric universe (
rods, members, wands
, and
staffs
from the traditionalists;
cocks, pricks
and
dicks
galore from the Beats), but it was unthinkable for a poem to contain such words as
clitoris
or
vagina
—or even
dishtowel, tampon, mop, diaper
. Except for clues glinting in Millay's irony, Parker's sarcasm, and Rukeyser's lonely feminist intimations, the experienced reality of half the human species was invisible; female imagery—unless as the object of male perception—was considered not the stuff of poetry. (Since we also were told to “write what you know,” this sent a double message that silenced or deranged more than one poet who happened to be female, and helped drive some, like Plath and Sexton, to early graves.) Consequently, any serious woman poet in the 1950s and 1960s bent over backwards—often literally, spread-eagled—to prove she could keep up with the boys in choice of subject matter, fearing to be classified alongside “nineteenth-century lady poet-
esses
with three names who languished neurasthenically on their sofas, twitching their smelling salts,” as Kenneth put it.

Nevertheless, when I was only twenty (still nineteen, officially), any strict discipline of craft, albeit patriarchal in origin as well as in style of delivery, was useful training. As a young poet, I might otherwise lazily have been tempted to believe that poetry was about “having something to say” or “experiencing deep feelings,” or might have let myself believe that prose could be called a poem if it had “high-sounding language” and was typed with jagged right-hand margins. Robert Frost famously said that free verse struck him as senseless, “like playing tennis with the net down,” and Kenneth sternly lectured me, “After you manage to write your first thousand sonnets, then
maybe
you
might
begin to write poetry.” I took both comments seriously, though later I realized that Frost was exercising, well, Frostbite, and Kenneth hyperbole. Still, we wouldn't let just anybody wander
into an OR to perform brain surgery, and the craft of poetry is at least that difficult. So although I often sat in the bus riding uptown after a workshop evening sniffling tears of humiliation as I chewed my Dentyne cud, I don't regret those workshops or the lessons drilled into me:

Concrete
images, not abstract ones: never write “tree” when you can write “aspen,” “birch,” “willow,” “ash.” Read Cleanth Brooks's
The Well Wrought Urn: Studies in the Structure of Poetry
. Study the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century English poets, especially Donne, Marvell, Herbert, and Crashaw, for wordplay, meter, wit. (It was quite a day when I came across Mary Sidney Herbert and Katherine Fowler Philips, same place, same periods.) Read Whitman for excess, Dickinson for economy, Yeats for music. Read Wallace Stevens for imagery, T. S. Eliot for philosophy, Robinson Jeffers for audacity. Read Randall Jarrell for astringency, Robert Lowell for psychology. Read William Carlos Williams for his eye, Roethke for his ear, the strength of his individual line. (I discovered Phillis Wheatley, Amy Lowell, H.D., and Zora Neale Hurston by myself, but it was Kenneth who recommended Christina Rossetti, Charlotte Mew, Kathleen Raine, and Ruth Pitter.)
Read, read, read
. Don't think you can find refuge from low-level cliches in high-level cliches. Read Strunk and White's
The Elements of Style
. Dissect Marlowe's mighty line; analyze what Shakespeare does with vowels and consonants. Get yourself a good rhyming dictionary. English is rhyme-poor (unlike Italian, for instance, with all those supple vowel endings), so work through slant rhyme and subtle internal echo rhymes and save strict rhyme for rare dramatic resolution, if at all. Tread lightly on alliteration. Read Fowler's
Modern English Usage
. A refrain should up the ante on itself each time it returns, or else it's mere repetition. Never settle for simile if you can manage metaphor. Never settle for approximate metaphor: only exact will do. Tighten, then tighten again. Poetry is about essence. Poetry is distillation. Read Empson's
Seven Types of Ambiguity
. Watch those jog-trot rhythms, or your work will sound like “The Song of Hiawatha.” (Naturally, there are exceptions to every rule: did you ever notice that most Emily Dickinson poems can be sung to the tune of “The Wabash Cannonball”? The format of hymns must've got stuck in her head.) Respect etymology. Don't over-rely on onomatopoeia. Get yourself a good thesaurus. Trust no translations of poetry until you learn how approximate they are. Use adjectives sparingly; if you have the
right noun, you may not need an adjective at all (tell it to Faulkner). The verb is all-holy; it moves the line forward. Read
poetry
, read
about
poetry,
read
.

I drank it all in, in long draughts that intoxicated me. I watched a poem I decided I'd
finally
finished get ripped apart line by line, dactyl by iamb by trochee—then reassembled with suggestions from the group into something rich and strange. In time, Kenneth would tell me it was my stamina that had won their respect, that he'd been impressed by my endurance: no matter how much “homework” he gave me—books he urged me to read, exercises he suggested I do, classic poems he told me to analyze so as to learn how they'd been structured—I did it all, and came back for more. “You may have been a pink ex-child star from a Sutton Place pink apartment with all but pink turds floating in the pink toilet,” he once said, with characteristic off-putting charm, “but you loved poetry and dearly wanted to write it well. And you just refused to be stopped.”

Refusing to be stopped seems to be a character flaw (and/or strength) of mine, one that aging already moderates and death will assuredly cure. While a blessing in certain circumstances, this tendency has been a curse in others. For example, during the fourteen laborious years, from 1970 to 1984, of compiling the anthology
Sisterhood Is Global
, the motto I hung above my desk was “Only she who attempts the absurd can achieve the impossible.” Such doggedness qualifies as a form of obsession, and in a sense, one definition of talent could be the gift of a capacity for obsession. Still, this stubbornness, this fanatic belief that sheer
will
can see you through, can also be a form of hubris. It's beguiled me into staying too long in certain relationships better exited earlier. It's blinded me regarding people who lack (or are free of) the same capacity, so that I assume intolerantly they just aren't trying hard enough. On one occasion, it inspired me to keep driving nail after nail into a concrete wall (positive that if I could only do it
right
the shafts wouldn't buckle). “There is nothing you cannot be,” Faith had said, “if you want it enough.” The imprint had taken.

In the workshop period, something certainly was driving me on, despite secretarial workdays at Curtis Brown, nights and weekends spent rewriting drafts of poems and fighting with my mother, and periodic forays to an audition here or there because it was easier to just go and louse it up than wage another fight about not going. Meanwhile, I completed a verse play,
Their Own Country
, a youthful but somewhat subversive work about what the three Magi really might have seen in the stable. To my ecstasy it actually ran for a week of performances at the Episcopal Church of the Ascension on lower Fifth Avenue, in a Christmas-season production directed by Warren Bayless, who was one of my Curtis Brown secretary buddies and a member of the church congregation.

During those months, I drew closer to Kenneth as a friend and confidante. In return for all I felt he was giving me, I was happy to be of use to him, too. He was writing plays during this period (probably why I monkey-saw, monkey-did too), and I organized several readings with actor acquaintances and myself participating, sent scripts to the few theater people I still knew, persuaded Cindy Degener at the office to take him on as a client. Faith didn't (as yet) mind my being in his company. He and his lover, Robert Phillips, the pianist and composer, would have me over for long, hospitable dinners, let me play with their cats Castor and Pollux, and sympathetically share their own horror stories at having fought and fled parental strictures. They solicited and enjoyed anecdotes of my working childhood, but seemed genuinely more interested in who I was becoming than in who I'd been. I was actually more at ease with Bob than with Kenneth; I sought Kenneth's approval too thirstily to be able to relax fully around him.

Bob was tall and dark, campy, temperamental but talented, and unashamedly omnivorous where men were concerned. This was back in the age of freewheeling pickups—the docks, parks, “meat-racks,” and bathhouses—well before HIV/AIDS rudely woke the gay male community out of its denial into a brutal realization that casual sex could get you dead. Committed relationships had always existed among gay men, of course, but weren't all that respected or enduring (especially in metropolitan centers) until the epidemic's tragedies inspired a maturity affirming relationships more than passing fancies.

From the first, Kenneth gave off a sexuality different from Bob's. He talked openly about women of whom he'd been enamored, of having had several heterosexual affairs, and of wanting someday to father a child. I knew from his poetry that he was not a man to use words lightly, so I listened closely to what he said, listened at many levels of hearing. Given all the gay and bisexual men I'd known in show business, none of this seemed
particularly strange to me. I'd already developed a Galatea/Trilby attraction for and ambivalence toward him, casting him as my Pygmalion/Svengali. I already loved his poetry, his intellect, his intensity. I loved everything he stood for: rebellion against convention, refusal of simplistic definitions, insistence on the centrality of art to human consciousness, and the courage to be ironic yet lyrical. To me, Kenneth
was
poetry. It was a simple step from there to loving the man himself.

I've always confused my lovers with Art, God, or Revolution. Such unfairly inflicted expectation has ensured their foreordained shortcoming and my inevitable disappointment. But it's taken a while for me to comprehend this pattern. Back then, what I felt drawing me to Kenneth—unlike what had drawn me to previous attractions—was at least rooted in a healthy self-interest: he possessed knowledge I lusted to get near. (Perhaps had Faith let me go to college … but even so, it was the contents of
his
brain I yearned for, which no courses in poetry could possibly have equaled.) That my lust was perhaps more for his knowledge than for its imperfect, simply human host seemed as irrelevant as the motivation for
his
desire, which he candidly admitted was perhaps more concerned with affirming his D. H. Lawrence-model bisexuality than for me as a specific love object. Ours was a dance of denial as much as of courtship. We flirted, awkwardly in person but skillfully in poems. We even discussed having sex, but he was taken aback by my virginity and refused to be my First. This was frustrating, since to my mind he was an ideal First, being both a friend and a poet. I knew myself well enough to grasp that I wanted to feel
some
surge of authentic love for the first person with whom I had actual intercourse. During a brief trip to Puerto Rico the previous year, when I'd managed to extricate myself from Faith's company, I'd maneuvered myself into bed with a sexy young man I'd just met—only to gaze into his stranger's face, freak out, leap to the door, and, when he refused to leave, yell that I had
both
syphilis and gonorrhea and he
must
go
now
. Whether thinking me honest and infectious or lying and insane, the poor guy fled, and I learned that my First needed to be at least a friend.

Kenneth was a good friend. That autumn, with his support, I finally created the moment to tell my mother that I'd met Mates Morgenstern, that I'd found him sadly not so very different from the man she'd described to me back when I was thirteen, and that I still loved her
deeply—for having survived him and raised me. To my surprise, she handled it well. Perhaps she'd intuited it was inevitable. Or perhaps I'd found the right way of telling her—as proof of choosing her over him; as reassurance, not accusation. We talked late into the night, a good talk, about how his power felt lessened now that he was no longer a phantom. When I hazarded the subject of the lost year, there was a nervous moment. But Faith must have been weary of carrying her secret for so long. She told me the story quietly, as if it were not at all unusual, as if she were innocent of the hair-raising implications in what she was saying.