Done Done Done Done

Today is wet. Up at eight, put on white button-up shirt, rolled up sleeves, green pants, blue sneakers, and took an exam. The air was heavy, damp, oppressive, abrasive, and so on. Finished, got picked up by Thom, and we went downtown. We saw our friend Jason, known to us, however, as El Duce (Mussolini, not number two playing card) and walked with him to the tea house. I fell forward on the stairs. My shin now has a bump, and for a few minutes I felt how every muscle in my body had tightened (I can talk all I want about Buddhism, but my body freaked out at the first thing I didn't expect.) We got lunch and came home.

That was my last exam. I am now feeling end-of-semester awkwardness. It's always awkward. You wake up the next day, you read a book, you waste some time, and your reflex is: “Well, I guess I need to get to studying.” But there's nothing to study. Walked around for a little, restless, slept, showered, ate, had sex, slept again: still restless. I pulled a book of my shelf that I have not looked at in a long time: The Poetry of Our World. I see that it's still getting rave reviews on Amazon.com. Well, I'm glad. It's a good book. I'll call this book one of my “formative” books of poetry. Here are my “formative” books or poets:

At 13: Edgar Allen Poe, Emily Dickinson, Robert Frost.

At 14-15: Saul Williams, Slam, and Aloud (all of which I can no longer stand), The Poetry of Our World

At 16-17: T. S. Eliot, Anne Michaels, Dylan Thomas, Sylvia Plath

Although I have been influenced by others since, nothing that I look back on gives me that dreamy feeling of forming out of nothing, of being born out of a sack in a cosmos (that's bad but I'll leave it.) After reading through The Poetry of Our World today, I remember my first encounter with Elizabeth Bishop, Pablo Neruda, Zbigniew Herbert, Paul Celan, and Anna Akhmatova, among others. Out of all of the poems at the poets, it's sad to say that Bishop's “The Fish” stuck with me most out of a book of world poetry. She was the only one who stuck by name. The others stuck by poem. Flipping through the book now, I'm looking at the dog-ears (I used to dog-ear my books relentlessly) and I see that I have Paul Celan's section dog-eared. That's funny, because until Cassius and I stared going verse exercises with Celan's poetry a few months ago, I had only heard of him, but, really, I've read his poetry. I take that back. I took an immediate liking to Shuntaro Tanikawa as well. Out of all the prose in it, and there are many essays, the one thing that stuck with me the most was Helen Vendler's comment: “To turn over Dylan Thomas' thirty drafts of 'Fern Hill' made me feel that I had been admitted into the heart of creation,” which were the words that came directly to my mind when I found the facsimile edition of The Waste Land on the shelf in Barnes and Noble and opened it up.

At any rate, this book may be the most beat-up of all my paperbacks. There's a break in the spine that will cause the thing to split in two, sooner or later, and the pages are dirtied, the cover is creased and smudged, the corners are worn to a feathery soft consistency. Reading it, I know, I know what I must do this summer: read poetry. I will finish The Tin Drum, The Crying of Lot 49, and Titus Groan for Thom, but I must read poetry while I can. I don't mean to sound all drippy. I certainly don't want to be one of those public champions of poetry, those “Poetry can change your life!” people. I know how poetry has changed my life. It has changed the entire trajectory of my life. I really do not know what I would be doing right now if I had not found Emily Dickinson or The Waste Land. I probably would not have worked at Barnes and Noble, hence I wouldn't have met Thom, nor would I be going to the University right now.

I think I know why I'm not one of those “poetry can change your life”people. It's not that poetry can't change your life. I know first hand that it does. However, poetry is not for everyone. Some people just don't have the stomach for it, some people are too stupid for it, some people are too closed-minded for it, there are many reasons why people do not read poetry anymore. If someone wants to read poetry, I will encourage them all that I can. I've even bought several people books of poetry before. However, to assume that poetry can change anyone's life is foolish, and that's the mistake that most people make. In the grand scheme of things, poetry is just an attachment. The way I feel about poetry may be the way that some people feel about football, or poker, or gardening, or whatever they love to do. And anyone who truly, truly loves something knows this: it's far too sacred to talk about, unless it's with someone who loves it as much as you, or someone who's honestly willing to learn to love it. Period. The only person I've ever met in my whole life who was as serious about poetry as I am is Cassius. For all the crappy stuff in our “friendship,” there has never, ever been one other person who has been willing to sit there and make fun of bad poetry with me, or talk about good poetry, or weird things in the tradition of poetry and literature (like the fear that Dr. Johnson will come back from the grave and drop the atomic bon mot on you if you ever make fun of him. Wonder why no one writes bad stuff about Samuel Johnson? Now you know.) Thom, on the other hand, just has plain good taste. If I pick out a good poem and read it to him, he picks up on in immediately. The first day I met him he was telling me how he had just read Sylvia Plath's “Daddy,” and how he'd never read anything else by her, but that he thought it was so great. Ahh. A man who isn't on the “Sylvia Plath was just a bi-polar bitch who writes melodramatic poetry” trip. So refreshing.

All right, I'll wrap this up and go read some more.