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I didn't begin to seriously read the poetry we call poetry until I was in my
mid-twenties. In school I had read it as literary artifact, or as
code-breaking, a code that the teacher knew and I had to figure out. As a
result I didn't know that poetry impinged on my life, or that there might
even be other reasons to love it. I remember being excited early on (after
college) by E. A. Robinson, Kenneth Patchen, Cummings, the brilliant
nonsense of Lewis Carroll, Dickinson's distilled mysteries, William Carlos
Williams's experiments in a language I could recognize. I liked Frost, but
wasn't yet ready to appreciate his depths and his slyness. I liked
Prufrock, but was lost in The Wasteland. in 1967 I took
Wallace Stevens's Collected Poems with me to Spain where I went to
write a novel, and was happy to read them pre-cognitively for their music
and idiosyncratic verve. It was around that time that I started to write
poetry with an amateur's seriousness.
But it wasn't until I read James Dickey's poem "The Sheep Child" in a
late-sixties issue of The Atlantic Monthly that I felt I'd been given
permission to be a poet. It seemed that if you could write about farm boys
fucking sheep, and imagine the product of such a union, even give it voice,
well, you could write about anything. Sure, I had read "Howl," but that was
a different kind of permission, and the incantatory quality of its language
was some distance from my ear and my temperament. I recognized its
considerable power without thinking I could come close to emulating it.
Dickey's poem was also bold, and written with a measured lyricism and
inventiveness that was more kindred to me. I thought it was gorgeous, and
still do.
If I found myself as a reader coming to poetry for the elusive news of the
world, for the unspoken finally spoken, then as a would-be poet I
simultaneously became a different kind of reader, someone who found himself
trying to be alert to a poem's moved and formalities, I increasingly read
with an eye toward learning to perceive the various ways meaning could be
orchestrated. Or if not meaning per se, how a poem might be a series of
"sudden rightnesses" that might disabuse us of ideas and feelings calcified
by complacency and convention. A poem, I discovered, might move us into a
new mode of regard for what we thought we knew. It might even be a verbal
romp, what Paul Valery called "a holiday of the mind." Sometimes it was
just strangely beautiful.
Early on, I probably half-knew that a successful poem was some amalgam of
content and handling of content, that to be a good reader you had to train
yourself to be alert to how one serves the other. I may have vaguely known
that the power of "The Sheep Child" resided in Dicket's management of
effects as much as it did the exotica of his subject. But I wouldn't have
been able to articulate that then. When reading Stevens, Berryman, Creely,
I found myself thinking of syntax and diction, of framing and phrasing. I
read Frank O'Hara as a model for playfulness and for his handling of
tonalities. But I think it was Roethke (whose work I had known casually for
years) in whom I started to see an ideal. His blend of music and sensuality,
his mixture of play, existential edginess and gravitas, his formal dexterity,
all were thrilling to me. Over and over I would read "I Knew a Woman," "The
Waking," and "Elegy for Jane." I lived with the mysteries in "Mediation at
Oyster River" and "In a Dark Time." Mysteries that had clear surfaces. Here
was a poet who had everything that I wanted for myself.
Roethke led me to Yeats and Hopkins, Eliot and LaForgue and Appolinnaire,
Williams to Whitman. I read backward into the tradition. First, someone or
something modern, then their luminous predecessors. I wonder if that's a
typical arc in others' reading lives. In graduate school at Syracuse, eight
years after I graduated from Hofstra College, I received a heavy dose of New
Criticism, which in retrospect I value as one way among many to read. But
more important was the catholic teaching of Philip Booth, Donald Justice,
and W. D. Snodgrass, practical in nature and buttressed by the examples of
their poems. And George P. Elliott, too. Though he was more novelist and
story writer than poet, he might have been the most valuable of them all. To
have a curmudgeon approve of you is an exciting thing indeed, and approve
he did. But he would also regularly share his reading enthusiasms. Read
Anthony Hecht's The Hard Hours, he'd say. Read Nadezhda Mandelstam's
Hope Against Hope. Read Mandelstam himself. Read King Lear
again. And of course I would read everything he'd recommend.
Meanwhile, my fellow graduate students had put me on to the poems of James
Wright, which seemed like soul-notes in a new American idiom. Robert Bly
was translating Neruda and Vallejo. Merwin and Kinnell were in their
compelling ascendancy. The journal Kayak was delighting us with
strangeness that seemed utterly kindred. It was 1969. An exciting time to
be an apprentice. I read everything whispered, alluded to, championed,
everything that came my way.
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