Eccentric Flower:199903/who gave you permission

twenty-two march

who gave you permission?

This is sort of a continuation of the previous postcard.

I got down the Natalie Goldberg book Wild Mind from the high shelf where it has been gathering dust, so I could mail it to its promised recipient.

I made fun of this book on a mailing list recently, so it may surprise people who read those posts that I am actually speaking of it nicely here. Well, I never said it was a bad book; I said that I found it useless. Your mileage may vary.

I also said that I took one useful bit from it: the part about your "writer hand" and your "editor hand," and why you should never edit while you write. You may add to that something I found while leafing through it tonight.

Goldberg is speaking of her friend Jim White, saying that when she met him, "I had finally found someone who wanted to talk about [poetry] as much as I did":

Sometimes we would recite our poems to each other. I remember the first time. I was driving Jim home and he said, "Oh, I'll recite one of my poems." And he did. A beautiful one about a deaf boy catching a Frisbee. Then I recited one of mine. I can't remember which one. He said, "Hey, that's good." And we both let out a sigh of relief. It almost didn't matter how much we liked the rest of each other's work. It was the first poem that counted the most. We could continue with our relationship.

One day after we knew each other a while - Jim was ten years older than I, a veteran poet - he turned to me. "Who gave you permission to be a poet? Was it Allen Ginsburg?" I had studied with Ginsburg the summer before. "Someone along the way has to give you permission."

"No." I shook my head. I was too shy to say, "No, Jim, it was you."

[...]

Naturally, anyone can be a writer. "It's a free country," I used to scream as a kid [...] But there's someone further along on the path, who gives you the nod, who says yes, who adores literature as much as you do and so gives you permission to love this odd thing all the way and to continue with it in the face of everything.

- - -

I remember the person who gave me permission to write poetry. Her name is Ava Haymon, and I assume she's alive and well, although I haven't seen her for four years or so. I have known her for years and years - she's the mother of someone I occasionally went to school with. She was my Muse for a while, although she's the worst kind of Muse, the one who makes everything look easy.

With poetry as with most other things in my life, the projects I want to work on the most are the ones that no one else is interested in. Poetry is a hard sell anyway - there are always those who won't look at it just because it's poetry.

Oddly enough, I seldom write a poem I'm dissatisfied with. (I write fiction I'm dissatisfied with all the time.) But I write a lot of poems I know will look like bad poems to someone else. Since I believe that poetry is an indivisible, un-analyzable, one-time statement on the part of the poet - I did and still do refuse to critique poetry beyond "I liked it" or "It didn't do anything for me" - I don't show those poems to other people because I don't want to have to defend them.

And I never rewrite poetry. When Nonelvis read "Helen and Menelaus" for the first time, she didn't say anything. I said, "You didn't like it, eh?" She doesn't seem to care for my style of poetry much. "No, it was good," she said, "a little rough - some of the lines could use tightening." Nope. That's the way they were written. If you "tightened" them, you'd have a different poem.

Okay, okay, I do tinker with poems occasionally. But very rarely. I broke the long lines in each quatrain of "Helen and Menelaus" here because of the medium - I knew they would wrap, and I wanted to choose where. I regret that I had to do that, but I also can't decide if it works better. Altering poems makes me nervous. If I change one word in an existing poem I feel like I've irrevocably altered the whole thing.

The shorter a poem is, the less likely I am to alter it. With short poems, one changed syllable really is a new poem. You may not think this poem is perfect; I do. If I throw out all the other Trojan poems, I will keep this one. As is.

IPHIGENIA

Your worst nightmare come true
You are married to the executioner
And your voyage has been a deception
And your father has lied to you
And your blood will stain the prow

- - -

I've lost touch with Ava. I should write her and find out how she's doing, tell her how grateful I am that she gave me permission. Not that I look appreciative; I write less poetry now than I ever did before I had permission; I write tons of fiction and I have never gotten permission there.

I suppose that when enough people look one of my pieces in the eye and say "This is really good" and I know from their face and their tone that they mean it, it suddenly removes the pressure from me. I feel like I've achieved everything I set out to do. I have written a poem ("Sublimation") that everyone seems to unanimously adore. I have hit the pinnacle. What more is there for me to do?

I hate to think that if I write a book everyone loves, I'll stop writing. I don't think that'll happen. For one thing, I'll never finish a book. For another, then what would I have left to vent all this hot air with?

Hmm. I should have ended this with "Iphigenia." That poem has an air of finality to it; it's a good way to finish (assuming you don't mind a downbeat ending). I stepped on my punchline. Pity that this is the order my in which thoughts arrived.

I hesitate to quote one of Ava's poems - I feel like it's unfair to her. On the other hand, each of her collections so far has been published as a limited-run chapbook, each by a different small poetry press, and even if I gave you the addresses, they'd be hard to come by. So I hope she'll forgive me for disrupting her copyright in exchange for a handful of new readers.

MYOPIA

Horizons began to scare me
the first time we went to the delta
after I started wearing glasses.
My uncle called me Yankee
professor, so I went outside:

no trees, no hills, no buildings -
a plowed expanse of silt
alluvium, shuddering with heat and dust,
whipped out from me in every direction.
I saw how far away the edges were.

I was a sandbur, snagged at the navel
of the flat earth - cracked groat,
in a pancake about to be flipped - a fly's eye,
stuck on the face of a striking clock
that whizzed through chaos like a pie pan.

I managed to lose my brand new glasses
that afternoon, as children will do.
I'd have lost my head, too,
if it hadn't been
too late.

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