Every since I wrote this weekend with the news that I’m stepping down, after 11 years, as a columnist on poetry for my local paper, I’ve received some very nice farewells. I mean, very nice. One woman wrote me to say she had read and kept each and every one of the pieces in binders marked On Poetry. One for each year. Binders full of poetry, eh?
This morning, turning my mind to the task at hand as I was thinking about James Merrill’s digital archive of his Ouija board project (the book known as The Book of Ephraim) as being, in some fashion I’d not yet worked out in my head, akin to Alan Lomax’s now complete, or so, archive of folk music. Admittedly, I was not really certain where to begin. Therefore I determined to begin by procrastinating by opening the day’s mail delivery.
And, lo! An unsigned and as it turns out un-love letter!
In the aforementioned piece, I wrote, “So it’s time I move onto other pursuits.” Now, in my hand, a clip of the newsprint with my piece and those words very highlighted in yellow. With a note that reads:
“move onto.”?
…onto a table?
…onto a bridge?
…onto a scaffolding?
I am quite sure you
meant you are
“moving on.”
Does this qualify as a
“very sharp complaint”?
Sigh. Just move away.
This is the best found poem I’ve read in a very long time. Take that, Dave, you A-asterisk-asterisk! It’s a Dada masterpiece that not only epitomizes contempt, hauteur, and superbity, but calls for direction action too. It’s Marcel Duchamp’s Mona Lisa meets Phil Rizzuto of The Money Store meets a KKK threat.
In George Sherman’s 1971 film, “Big Jake,” the Jake in question is a wealthy loner and rancher, Jacob McCandles, who is estranged from his family in Texas, and who reappears in their lives at the bidding of his wife after their grandson is kidnapped for ransom. McCandles is played by John Wayne. Throughout the movie, from violent thieves to hotel clerks, everyone believes that the famous McCandles has long been dead, usually saying, “Jacob McCandles? I thought you were dead.” “Not hardly,” he replies each time. (If you watch the film clip — and it’s worth watching the whole four minutes — the part I’m referring to comes about 2:45 in.)
Ingenious though the full reasoning of that little hate poem may be, it is also dull and cynical. Move away? Not hardly. Yet, as it is unsigned, I admit that the note is not at all opportunist. Suppose I just quit now, you know? Quit writing poems. Quit writing about poetry. Truly, is this what my hater would call victory? Yeah. Well, not hardly.
I suspect that no serious person would be at all impressed if my quitting were the outcome. I don’t mean to inflate my importance. Or to suggest, as I say in that last piece, that I feel it is presumptuous and foolish for me to imagine that writing a column about poetry is intended to shape the literary landscape.
But a civil, engaged, thoughtful, clarifying and, yes, sometimes heated discussion of ideas about poets, poems, and poetry is essential to the vigor of the art. Afterward, let’s all go out and have a drink together.
Maybe that’s what I would have said about the Merrill/Lomax connection if I hadn’t gotten distracted here. Out of their found materials both Merrill and Lomax reinvigorate their imaginative grounding and their means to present that to an audience. That journey is at the root of poetic experience.
For Merrill, working from the freethinking occult to the freeing limitations of blank verse allows him to write a poem equal to Yeats’ “A Vision.” He finds a form to shape his unshaped experience.
Lomax, on the other hand, was an archivist. He was able to uncover what it means to work from a physical place and in a physical place. He brought the, if I may borrow a word from our found poem, home to the “away.” He provided American culture with its best sense of itself.
That’s what criticism, or column-ifying, is meant to do. It’s meant to pursue the thread through the labyrinth. It’s meant to come upon or, dare I say, onto discoveries and to bring them to others to weigh and respond. “You have enemies?” Winston Churchill once asked, “Good. That means you’ve stood up for something, sometime in your life.”
