IT'S TIME FOR BED. And here's what I'm going to do. I'm going to get in bed, and I don't have anyone to sleep with now, so what I do is I sleep with my books. And I know that's kind of weird and solitary and pathetic. But if you think about it, it's very cozy. Over a period of four, five, six, seven, nine, twenty nights of sleeping, you've taken all these books to bed with you, and you fall asleep, and the books are there.
Of course it was better when I had Roz in the bed with me. But I don't have her now. Her warm soft self was extremely comforting, and it's not there. I could cup her upward hip or one of her dozing boobies with my hand. Good times. That cupping is rhyme-the felt matching of two congruent shapes. And now where she would sleep are these books, and they're lying there in leaning piles, and sometimes they slip off and nudge me in the eyebrow with one of their corners.
Some of the books are thick, and some are thin, some of the books are in hardcover and some in paperback. Sometimes they get roiled up with the pillows and the blankets. And I never make the bed. So it's like a stew of books. The bed is the liquid medium. It's a Campbell's Chunky Soup of books. The bed you eat with a fork.
I'm hoping that someday I'll have to clean them out and that somebody will return. But for now, this is what I've got.
I ALWAYS SECRETLY want it to rhyme. Don't you, some of you? Admit it. You open the latest issue of a magazine. Could be Harper's, could be The Atlantic, or The New York Review of Books, or The New Yorker, or the TLS. Or some swanky literary magazine. You locate the poem, because you're naturally curious to see what this week's or month's trawl is-what it is that was, in the busy mind of that poetry editor, most pressingly deserving of publication. And you look at the poem. There it is. You take in the title-"Way Too Much." Way Too Much: Okay! And then you check the name of the writer-hmm, Squeef Corntoasty, never heard of him. Or: I sure have seen Squeef Corntoasty's name popping up in a lot of places lately. Or if it says "translated from the Czech by Bigelow Jones," forget it, you instantly move on, because translations are never good.
Well, wait-that's not fair. That's ridiculously unfair. I've read some wonderful translations. Translations of Transtromer, for instance. But my heart does droop when I see that it's a translation.
But let's say this poem is one hundred percent original work. How are you going to approach it? How about we just sort of touch the first line. Just a glance. Take it in, guardedly, without really reading it. Maybe just the first phrase: "I try to sit up straight." And then you break away to go down the words on the right-hand side. Right down the outer edge. "Pain," "truffle," "start," "shelter," "an," and "bell." Ah. Now you know: it doesn't rhyme. Once again they've done it. They've stabbed me right in the god-damned lung. Once again they've rejected the whole five-six centuries of our glorious tradition.
But all right-that's fine. It's a plum, not a poem. That's what I call a poem that doesn't rhyme-it's a plum. We who write and publish our nonrhyming plums aren't poets, we're plummets. Or plummers. And some plums can be very good-better than anything else you might happen to read ever, anywhere. James Wright's poem about lying on his hammock on Duffy's farm is a plum, and it's genius. So is Elizabeth Bishop's poem "The Fish," of course. "I caught a tremendous fish"-genius. So you think maybe this plum-poem is good in its own uniquely free kind of way. Is it? You read a line or two. No, it isn't. In fact, it's oozing with badness. It's so bad. How can it be this bad? How can this bad plum be sitting here, in type, in front of me? I don't get it.
Or maybe it's one of the very few that do rhyme. These are even worse, sometimes, because the rhyming is so painfully inept-like unclever Ogden Nash gone squiffy.
And yet if you go back and look at old editions of The Nation or The New Republic, which published a lot of poetry back in the day-or if you go farther back, to Reedy's Mirror or The Century magazine-and if you hunt around for a while in some of those periodicals, you'll find that most of the poetry in them is just there as decoration. It's a form of ornament, like a printer's dingbat. A little acorn with a curlicue. Or the scrollwork on a beaux-arts capital. It's just a way of creating a different look on the page, and creating the sense on the part of the reader that he's holding something that is a real Kellogg's variety pack.
The magazine is going to have some kind of big thoughtful political piece about Teddy Roosevelt, say, and then it's going to have a bit of serialized fiction, and it's going to have some "cuts"-that is, some art-and a few color pages tipped in, maybe, if it's The Century magazine, maybe by Maxfield Parrish, and it's going to have some poems. The long nonfiction piece comes to an end, and it's about being a stevedore in Baltimore, something like that. And then at the bottom of the page is this poem in two columns, with six stanzas, and each stanza has indentations, and the conventionality and vapidity of it will stun you. "The shades of summer's bosky hue, o'erlie thy modest floobie doo." The editors of The Century didn't expect you to read that poem with your full mind. They knew it was just some rhymes thrown pell-mell together with some cornstarch. They knew full well, because this is America, land of bad poetry. Yes, sir! Bad poetry, sir! Loads of it in the back, sir! Just keeps coming. Tipped in. The shovel eases the soft tonnage of poetry over the rim, and it just pours into the pit, pluth. The pit of what has been said. And the lost gulls are flapping and calling-peer! peer!
And yet we still want more. There's still that craving. Give us more, give us new. The hope. The hope that really does: it springs eternal. "Hope springs eternal in the human breast." That's clean crisp iambic pentameter. And I have some tips to pass on to you about iambic pentameter, how it's all a misnomer, as I said. But that's for later.
"Dear Paul Muldoon, Here's some new work, I hope you like it, all the best, Paul." Boy, I wish he didn't have my own name.
I USED TO SIT there in class, breathing, wondering, What's the teacher going to think of next? What's she going to teach us? Anything? I don't know. I'm just sitting here. I have no idea what's coming next.
And one time, she said, Today we're going to learn something new, and this thing is called "haiku." She wrote it on the board. And I thought, Interesting word, "haiku." Nice K.
Somebody discovered haiku way back about a hundred years ago. Obviously it existed for a very long time in Japan, but he discovered it in English. What was his name, that poet? Not Edwin Arlington Robinson. One of those guys who is known now for discovering haiku. And he called it: HOKKU. Hokku. He decided that hokku was a powerful force for order in English.
And he was wrong.
But I didn't know that. We're all sitting in the class, at these new desks. This was the sixties, and there were new desks that had recently come in, which had nice metal casters. They moved very smoothly over the linoleum of the floor. They didn't make the elephant trumpeting sounds that the wooden chairs made. They slid. And we were sitting at these smooth-sliding desks. Sun was pouring in. And they did have a groove to put your pencil in. Although I never put the pencil there.