So you can force it, and you should force it. All the time. Force it open. Push. Pull. When you think you can't, think again. On the other hand, sometimes the wood of the door is a little rotten around the handle and you tear out the screws. My father was right. Sometimes the door is really just stuck.
THE EMPTINESS of this floor of the barn is its greatest quality. This barn is, I guess you could say, my family barn. My parents bought this house in 1961, when I was still a kid. There's a house, an ell, which is the connecting structure, and the barn. They put a new roof on the barn, which is really all you need to do. You need to keep the rain out. As soon as a roof starts to leak, the decay, the collapse, the inner fungosity take charge. You've got to have a roof on your barn. I see it over and over again, the slumping to the side. "Two more payments and it's ours"-that postcard.
The first floor is a chaos, and I've been filling it with even more boxes. It's a madhouse of stored boxes. But the second floor is still quite empty. Well, right now it has the folding table with sections of my anthology on it. But it's almost empty. It will be empty again. Broom clean, as they say in real estate.
My broom is rotten. Over the winter, it became a blackened side-swerving dense stump. It was almost unrecognizable. It had literally decayed. You simply cannot leave a corn broom outside over the winter. I don't know what I was thinking. I was distracted, I guess-by the anthology and by money and by things going wrong with Roz. Once I wiped snow off the windshield and then I just carelessly leaned it against the house and then a fallen roof drift covered it. What a mistake. It's downright painful to try to sweep with this moist stump of a broom.
I called Tim and I said, "I'm just very worried that they may have stopped making brooms like this, because people all seem to own little plastic brooms now."
Tim said that he was pretty sure that he'd seen similar classic corn brooms for sale at Target recently. So I went to Target, to the broom aisle, and Tim was absolutely right. I'd just assumed that the old style wouldn't be there anymore, but it was. It's made by the Libman Company, and it's still made in the United States. I came home, and I tore off the plastic, and there was the same smocking, the same tight spiral of shiny wire. I slid aside the doormat and whistled at all the sand that had collected under there, and I swept it clean away.
Then I drove to Roz's place to tell her that I'd gotten a new broom. I saw her getting out of a car with a man. She was dressed up. Cripe. And yet of course she should. If you break up with someone then you go out with someone else.
While I was gone the mouse in the kitchen found half an old cookie and tried to pull it up into the stove's control panel, which is where he lives. But the cookie wouldn't fit. So he just ate it where it was. Ate and shat discreetly and had quite a little party.
I MADE AN EGG SALAD SANDWICH and took a bite of it over the open silverware drawer. A piece of egg salad fell in among the forks. I swore softly with my mouth full. Another piece of egg salad fell in. At first I was going to leave the bits there and then I thought, No, you have to keep on top of things, and I dabbed them up. Then I wiped some of the night's kinked mouse droppings from the stovetop. Then I thought of a poet named Ed Ochester. Good poet. And then I thought of another good poet, Mary Kinzie. And then I thought of another one, Matthew Rohrer. And another, Stanley Plumly. There are hundreds of poets like Ed O. And like me. And we all love the busy ferment, and we all know it's nonsense. Getting together for conferences of international poetry. Hah! A joke. Reading our poems. Our little moment. Physical presence. In the same room with. A community. Forget it. It's a joke.
But then one day you open up a book to a certain page, and you read, "Up from the bronze, I saw / Water without a flaw"-Louise Bogan's "Roman Fountain." And you see why it's all necessary, the whole enterprise. Water without a flaw. My life is necessary because I sustain the idea of poetry through thick and thin. That's my job.
What does it mean to be a great poet? It means that you wrote one or two great poems. Or great parts of poems. That's all it means. Don't try to picture the waste or it will alarm you. Even in a big life like Louise Bogan's or Theodore Roethke's. The two of them had an affair, as I said. They had a busy weekend with many cries of pleasure, and it helped their writing a lot. Or Howard Moss's life, or Swinburne's life, or Tennyson's life-any poet's life. Out of hundreds of poems two or three are really good. Maybe four or five. Six tops. All the middling poems they write are necessary to form a raised mulch bed or nest for the great poems and to prove to the world that they labored diligently and in good faith for some years at their calling. In other words, they can't just dash off one or two great poems and then stop. That won't work. Nobody will give them the "great poet" label if they write just two great poems and nothing else. Even if they're the greatest poems ever. But it's perfectly okay, in fact it's typical, if ninety-five percent of the poems they write aren't great. Because they never are.
A lifetime of fretting over pieces of paper and this is what you've got. And yet it's worth it, isn't it? That's what you have to think. All the chewing of salad, the eating of pickled beets and the little marinated ears of corn, those flexible baby corn ears, and the waitress coming by saying, "Folks, how is everything?" You nod and smile gratefully, chewing. "Can I get you another Smuttynose?" Sure, I'll take another.
TENNYSON'S AT THE SALAD BAR, making his way around, holding the chilled plastic plate, fumbling in his beard. Poet laureate of the British empire. Staring for a long time at the tub of bean salad. Corn salad or bean salad, which will it be today? "Into the valley of death, rode the six hundred!" Plop-beans. Pope's there. Alexander Pope, the magpie trick-ster rockpolisher. Malevolently ladling the blue cheese at eye level. Taking care not to spill. Hey, Alex! You don't want to talk to me? That's fine.
And what each of them comes up with is a couple of pages' worth of poems in an anthology. All of that rhythmic chewing and swallowing and digesting, all the conversational nodding-"Yes, yes, true, true, mm-hm"-results in something called Collected Poems, and out of those collected poems grow a few sprouts, a couple of pages in a paperback.
That's the way it works. Long ago there was an article in Commentary. The article was called "Why We Need More Waste, Fraud, and Mismanagement in the Pentagon." The idea was that in order to build a magnificent weapon of deterrence, you need to tolerate twenty-dollar screws and five-hundred-dollar screwdrivers. Well, it's not really true of the Pentagon. But it's true of poetry.
We honestly don't need more fraud and waste in the Pentagon. We need to retrain some of the weapons engineers, so that they can teach high school. Some of them might write light verse. We might have a sudden upwelling of light verse. I mean, God, what has happened that we have no good light verse? Practically none. It's shocking. It's tragic. The New Yorker used to publish light verse in every issue. Newman Levy's verse. Newman Levy, the lawyer poet. And of course Ogden Nash. Roethke published some light verse. So did Up-dike. Now nothing. Hip-hop is our light verse, I guess. Some of it's quick and clever, and some of it isn't.
An American man wrote up his memories of Tennyson a hundred years ago in The Century magazine. Tennyson told him that one of the best lines he wrote was about the French Revolution: "Freedom free to slay herself, and dying while they shout her name." Which is a good line.