The Anthologist (14 page)

And then in time it became retroactive. So the publicists would say that such-and-such poetry consultant--Louise Bogan, maybe, or Elizabeth Bishop--were the poet laureates of their time. "A position now known," the press kit would say, "as Poet Laureate of the United States." Even a guy like William Stafford was the poetry consultant. It was very different from the English model, because there were term limits. You were only poet laureate for a few years, not for your lifetime. Very different indeed from the English way, in which you were appointed like a Supreme Court Justice and served till you went gaga, or died.

Now, John Dryden was an early poet laureate of England. Dryden is one of those poets who wrote many thousands of lines of poetry and left very little of himself behind. His biographers have a hard time figuring out what he was up to in any given year. He lived through revolution, restoration, plague, and fire, and all we have is his published writing and a few letters to go on. But it's enough. It's all you need. Dryden defended rhyme against Milton, who said it was barbarous. He was funny, he was easy, he was a great prose writer and a great rhymer. This is unusual, in that most good poets can't write good prose. The better the prose they write, the worse the poetry. The better the poetry, the worse the prose. Except for letters. Poets are good letter writers. Elizabeth Bishop wrote absolute killer letters. Louise Bogan wrote killer letters, too, and funny, jabbing reviews. Those two sit way over here in the twentieth century. Whereas Dryden is over here in the seventeenth century. He was a short man. Elizabeth Bishop was a short woman.

Louise Bogan was a tall woman. She read in a very formal manner, with an exaggeratedly correct upper-class accent. She says, "This, is Louise Bogan, and I'm going to read a poem called--" whatever. And then she reads it slowly, with great pauses. And it's very very compressed, and that's what I like about it, it's packed, it's like a shoe in a shoe tree. A Ted Roethke poem is like an empty shoe you find at the side of the road that some manic person has cast aside on a walk, but Louise Bogan's poems are like cared-for shoes in a closet, tight and heavy around their clacking wooden trees.

T
ODAY THE CLOUDS
have been sprayed on the sky with a number 63 narrow-gauge titanium sprayer tip. I don't want to sit in the barn just now, so I'm sitting out near the "thorny brambles," as I call them. I know very little about them except that they grow and grow and that they cover the hillside now, and when I pass by them with my lawnmower buzzing they catch at my shirt and my arm with their remarkably hooklike sharp thorns. Roz says they're a species of rose.

I've done nothing all week. Had a call from Victor and talked more about the reading series. Measured Nan's room. Drove to Portland listening to a CD of Elizabeth Bishop reading "The Fish." Cried, beating the steering wheel, because she was so good and she sounded so young. Booped the horn by mistake. Apologized with hand gestures to people around me on Route 95. Toured the Longfellow house in Portland while a group of kids from poetry camp chanted, in unison, "I shot an arrow into the air." Thought I saw John Green-leaf Whittier lurking in the shadows of the dark Longfellow kitchen, studying the gnarled blue tree in a large china tureen. Nodded at him. Opened a very unpleasant bill on my return. Ate a sandwich at a cafe with a nice short woman I met at the video store. Threw out my jaw because the bread was so crusty. Agreed to review two books to raise money: one a book of the art of Boris Artzybasheff, a surrealist illustrator who painted a lot of covers for
Time,
and one an interesting book about steam trains and poetry in the nineteenth century. Am I becoming a critic? Fine, I don't mind.

Then yesterday, another minor adventure in self-mutilation. I'd bought a big round loaf of bread from the bakery, and I cut off the nub end of it, and I did not put butter on it. I have something quite remarkable to tell you about butter, but maybe that's for another time. Oh, might as well tell you now. Unsalted butter is flavored. For instance, I buy unsalted Land O' Lakes butter--but this observation applies to all major brands of butter--and I didn't realize this until Roz pointed it out a few years ago. Roz has very keen tastebuds. All unsalted butter has so called "natural" flavoring. Real butter is flavored with butter flavor. Just think about that. I didn't believe it till I read the ingredients. Butter-flavored butter. When you know that fact, you'll taste it and it'll drive you nuts. How long has this outrage been going on?

So I had a slice of bread, and a few calamata olives, and I started singing "Saved by a woman," by Ray LaMontagne, at the top of my lungs, while cutting a second slice, and I got a little jiggy with the bread knife, which is new and sharp with squared-off serrations, and I cut off a small dome of my fingermeat. It was very similar to cutting off the end of the loaf of bread, except that it hurt. I said some bad words and bled on the bread, and then I went upstairs to the bathroom and did my best to reposition the sliced-off part where it was supposed to go, and although the blood continued I was able to encircle the fingertip--my left hand's index fingertip-- with two Band-Aids. It was the same finger that had crashed into the doorjamb, if you can believe it. I didn't call Roz because two cuts on the same finger is an embarrassment, and I've gotten quite good at self-Band-Aiding. I hope the skin is going to graft itself back on. I lay on my bed and stared at the ceiling, worrying about my credit-card debt and eating calamata olives. And now it's Thursday.

T
HURSDAY IS THE DAY
of fear. On Monday you're in great shape because you've got the whole week. Then Tuesday, still pretty good, still at the beginning more or less. Then Wednesday, and you're poised, and you can accomplish much if you just apply yourself vigorously and catch up. And then suddenly, you're driving under that huge tattered banner, with that T and that H and that U and that frightening R and the appalling S--THURSDAY--and you slide down the steep slope toward the clacking shredder blades that wait on Sunday afternoon. Another whole week of your one life. Your one "precious life," as Mary Oliver says. You don't have too many Thursdays left. There are after all only fifty-two of them in the year. Fifty-two may sound like a lot, but when Thursdays come around, fifty-two doesn't seem like a lot at all. I just wish I had more money.

Karl Shapiro taught. Ted Roethke taught. Money is a problem. I think I'm going to have to start teaching again.

No, no, no, no, no. I can't. I can't teach. It killed me. Those nice kids stunned my brain. I'll never recover from that year. I can't do it again. Any fate is preferable. It was death on toast.

The first week I told them to memorize a couple of poems, and I said, Here's what a poem is. See this glass of water? This glass of water is an essay. Perfectly fine thing for it to be. A literary essay--a piece of "creative nonfiction." But dip a spoon in that glass of water and scoop some of it out and hold it over a hot fry pan so that a few drops fall and sizzle and quickly disappear. That's a poem. And they nodded. They got it. And while they nodded I remembered when my mother would lick her finger and then touch the iron and I'd smell the tiny innocent smell of her fried spit. I remembered how I really liked that smell. But I didn't tell them that. Because there are limits to what you can tell students. I just made a little drumroll on the table with my fists, and I said, So guys, I want you to get some poems by heart and I want you to rhyme me up some nice little sizzlers.

And they tried. They were eager kids. They worked at it. But they weren't rhymers. And this is what everyone who teaches poetry discovers. If you ask grade-school kids to rhyme, it may sound jingly, but it's an appealingly artless jingle. If you ask college kids to rhyme, however, they're going to sound awful. Because the percentage of genuine rhymers is tiny. If you ask them to write a poem that doesn't rhyme, on the other hand, it's not so clear that they lack the basal gift. They may come up with something that has a rawness and a quick quiet stab of honesty and even wit sometimes--if you don't ask them to rhyme. And so there you are, a person who has loved rhyme all your life, and what are you saying to the impressionable people you are teaching? You're saying,
And remember--it doesn't have to rhyme.

So I learned that lesson first, and it was a painful one. But there was a larger unhappiness, too--a darker kind of knowledge that sprouted and blossomed and uncoiled its thorns in me over the semester. Which was that I was being paid to lie. My job was to lie very gently to these trusting, sleepy, easily wounded students, over and over again, by saying in all sorts of different ways that their poems were interesting and powerful and sharply etched and nicely turned and worth giving collective thought to. Which they were unfortunately not. One student wrote some good poems. And maybe she would go on to something, who knows? But most of them--no way. I remember one of her poems used the phrase "his goldfish hair."

So I was a professional teller of lies. And if I kept teaching, I would be telling more and more lies to more and more of these students, year after year. Soon they and their poems would merge. I pictured one of those pale inhuman computer-generated faces that you get if you superimpose a thousand real faces. All the individual voices in all of their individual poems would blend into one ghostly student megapoem--and it would float there, hovering, staring at me, waiting for me to tell it that it was good work. And I knew what the very first word of the megapoem would be. The first word would be: "I."

I. Now "I" is a really good word. It's a useful word. For instance, Elizabeth Bishop starts off "The Fish" with "I." "I caught a tremendous fish." And I've begun many a poem with "I." Because you've got to. And what I understood was that my own dear students were destroying "I" for me. Which is another way of saying that they were destroying me.

S
O
I
QUIT
. I did it in the second month of the spring semester, on a Thursday. There was a new batch of students around the table. Same overbright classroom, same malevolent chairs. The one good poet had gone off to Taiwan, and I missed her faint perfume of promise. They all handed their week's work in, and I lifted the pile of fresh poems in the air to feel its weight. It was unusually heavy, because one of the poems was twenty pages long. I knew who it was by. It was called "Pythagoras Unbound," and it was by an overeager boy who talked a lot about Czeslaw Milosz. I skimmed the first page and I saw the word "endoplasm" and I went cold, like I'd eaten a huge plate of calamari. As the hour was ending, I said, "Folks, just a heads-up. I want you to know that I won't be able to read some of the poetry that you've just given me. I will be writing a 'U.R.' on some of your poems. What does U.R. mean? It means 'Un Read.' I will want very much to read every word of all your poems, because my duty as your instructor is to read them, but in some cases I will not be able to, because, I'm sorry, I can't. And so for some of you the grade that I give you will be based from here on entirely on class participation. Or if you're silent and shy and thoughtful and don't talk at all in class, that's all right, I fully respect that, I'll just grade you on those sudden gleams of thoughtful insight that I detect in your eyes. An alert look in your eyes is probably more predictive of your future success than any poetry you will write any time soon."

The students listened with hurt puzzlement. They didn't like the U.R. idea. They wanted me to read their poems. Who else would read them? And when else in their lives would they be so alive and so full of the wish to do something new and good? I realized I'd gone too far. "I'm just joshing," I said. "I'm looking forward to this new work. Thanks for it. Have a great weekend."

After that class I went to the dean and told her I wasn't coming back in September. And that was the end of my teaching career.

E
LIZABETH BISHOP
was a short woman. She wanted to be taller. She had amazing up-floofing hair with a streak of white. And she didn't like the idea of teaching creative writing. She wrote May Swenson: "I think one of the worst things I know about modern education is this 'Creative Writing' business." But she did it anyway. She didn't want to be a drunk, but she was. Sometimes, she said, she drank like a fish. Lota, her Brazilian lover, wanted her to take antabuse and she didn't want to, and she left Brazil. Then Lota went into a gloom and killed herself.

Today I was punching down the garbage with my fist in the tall kitchen can, to make more room before I had to take it out to the barn--going, Yah, yah, punch it down!--and my right thumb caught on the wavy edge of the lid of a tunafish can and I sliced it. Not too badly. Not off. I rinsed the cut in the sink, and I thought, What's with all these minor finger injuries? What's happening to me? I'm wearing three Band-Aids now. I'm a three Band-Aid man.

Everyone always wanted Elizabeth Bishop to read aloud "The Fish," because it's good, and she grew to hate it and to dread reading it. She wrote to Robert Lowell that she was thinking of rewriting it as a sonnet. Its prosiness made her unhappy. She'd moved on and forgotten why the poem is so good.

The poem is in this book here. Look at this paperback. Just white and yellow and blue, simple as can be. Elizabeth Bishop's
The Complete Poems.
Don't look at my Band-Aids, just look at the book. It's a Farrar, Straus and Giroux book and they always, in this era, had the most beautiful cover designs. Six dollars and ninety-five cents is what it cost me. Bob Giroux was her editor.

And here is the original bookmark, from the bookstore where I bought the book. The Grolier book shop in Cambridge. Little poetry shop on a side street off Harvard Square. It's had some tough times recently.

"The Fish" takes up three pages. It's long. It starts here, and it goes over here, and then it goes over to here. And every word on these three pages is worth reading. In her letter to I think it's Marianne Moore, she says that she feels very adventurous because she's not capitalizing the first letter of each line.