FREE VERSE really got rolling about a hundred years ago. It wasn't just free in the sense of being very loose in the rhyme and meter department. Free verse was sexually free. That's what nobody understands. Free verse meant free, naked, un-clothed, un-Victorian people scampering about in an unfettered sort of way. That's why it was so exciting. I was trying to explain this to my next-door neighbor, Nanette. I ran into her when I was out walking my dog, Smacko. Nan was out again picking up trash with her plastic trash bag. I asked her what she'd found. She'd found some beer cans, a pair of panties, half of a meatball sandwich in a paper plate, an ice cream wrapper, and an old laceless shoe. We walked back to her house, and she asked me if I knew anything about Toro lawn-mowers. I said I knew a little, because I do. Her lawnmower was starting and then dying after about a second. I pulled off the air filter and banged the float cup with a wrench and suddenly, to my surprise, the mower worked. I went around her yard once with it.
Then she asked-out of politeness-"So why did poems stop rhyming? Were all the rhymes just used up?" I said no, no, the rhymes weren't used up, they can never be used up until the English language itself is used up, because rhyme-words are really just the ending sounds of whole phrases and whole lines. It doesn't matter whether "breath" and "death" have been rhymed before, only whether the two new lines that end with "breath" and "death" are interesting and beautiful lines. Although sometimes it's good to give certain rhymes a break for a century or two.
She said, "So then why?" I told her about Mina Loy, the beautiful free-verse poet whose poems were published in a magazine called Others. Mina Loy had romped with the famous Futurist Filippo Marinetti, and he treated her badly, because he was an unpleasant egotist who liked war and cars and didn't like women. He'd written a play about a man with a thirty-foot penis that he wrapped around himself when he wanted to take a nap.
"Golly," said Nan.
I told her that Mina Loy wrote a poem about sex with him, or with one of the other Futurists, in which she compared Cupid to a pig "rooting erotic garbage." And American newspapers picked up on this phrase, and it made her famous as a free-verser.
"Very interesting," said Nan. We said goodbye. She began mowing her lawn, and I went into my kitchen. I opened my freezer, looked at the motionless mists in there, and then closed it.
I STARTED A POEM that began "On Wayland Street / I talked to my neighbor Nan / She had picked up a beer can / and a pair of panties." I wrote seven more lines, and then I got to the word "shrubbery" and I stopped, disgusted. I've never liked the word "shrubbery." Then I changed the beginning to "In the fulth of Wayland Street / I talked to my neighbor Nan." "Fulth" is a word that Thomas Hardy used in his poem on the death of Swinburne.
Immediately I realized that this was not a change for the better, and I changed it back. And then here's what I did. I'll pass it on to you as a tip. I read what I'd written aloud to myself. Which is what you always do. But this time I used a foreign accent. The foreign accent is the twist that helps. I chose Charles Simic's Serbian twang. Other foreign accents that can help you hear your own poem better are Welsh, Punjabi, and Andrei Codrescu's Romanian. If those don't work, try using a juicy Dorchester accent, or a Beatles Liverpool accent, or a perfectly composed Isabella Rossellini accent. Or read it as if you were Wystan Auden and you'd smoked a million cigarettes and brought a bottle of bine to wed with you every night. See if that helps. It didn't help me much with the beginning of this poem, but it has helped me in the past and maybe it'll help you.
I MET MY FRIEND TIM for a drink at the Press Room, a bar, and I told him Roz was gone. He was somewhat sympathetic. "You drove her away," he said. "You didn't give her anything to believe in."
I asked him how his book was coming. Tim's book, which he's going to call Killer Queen, is a look at Queen Victoria's dark, imperialistic side. Tim split up with his wife several years ago, and he took up eating. He teaches at Haffner College.
Tim leaned forward. "I work away at this book, and I describe how the Queen oversaw this huge system of plunder and destruction that wrecked people's lives all over the globe, and I've raked together all this knowledge, and I enjoy doing it because I feel I'm getting at the truth-"
I nodded.
"But it means so much less to me," Tim went on, "than if I were sitting on a couch talking to a woman of grace and intelligence who was wearing an attractive sweater."
I made agreeing noises. "And beads over the sweater," I said. "Roz strings the most exceptional beads."
Tim announced that he was going to a pick-your-own blueberry field with a woman he'd met. She had a friend. Would I like to go? I said sure. Then I asked him a question. "Is there any chance Haffner would take me back?"
"I'll sound out the dean if you'd like," Tim said, but he looked doubtful. "You kind of alienated them when you quit so suddenly last time."
"I had a scare," I said.
"My advice is: get that anthology out," said Tim. "That's your ticket back to the classroom. Tell people why rhyme exists. Give them a big, fancy neurobiological explanation. People love fancy neurobiological explanations." Then he slapped his legs. "I'm off."
When I got home there was a tax bill, and a box from Amazon that held James Fenton's anthology, The New Faber Book of Love Poems. Fenton's introduction is only twelve pages long, and it feels like the perfect length. He includes six of his own poems, which I must say shocked me. When Sara Teasdale edited her book of love poems by women, The Answering Voice, she didn't include even one of her own, even though hers were better than almost all the others, except maybe Millay's and Christina Rossetti's. But Fenton's right to include himself. His poem about being stuck in Paris is probably the best love lyric in the book, and we would feel cheated if it wasn't there. I wish to gimbleflap I'd written that poem.
Fenton also includes six quite good Wendy Cope poems. I once met Wendy Cope at a radio show in London. Her poem "The Aerial" is in my anthology. Unfortunately I see that it's also in Fenton's anthology. But that can happen, and it's not necessarily a bad thing, is it? Call it anthology rhyme-when a familiar poem tumbles around in a new setting.
I WANT TO TELL YOU why poetry is worth thinking about-from time to time. Not all the time. Sometimes it's a much better idea to think about other things.
Most of us have a short period of intense thinking about poetry, when we take a class in college, and then that's about it. And that's really all you need. One intense time, when you master your little heap of names-Andrew Marvell, Muriel Rukeyser, Christina Rossetti. Hardy, Auden, Bishop, Marvin Bell, Ted Hughes, John Hollander, Nicholas Christopher, Deborah Garrison, whoever, James Wright, Selima Hill, Troy Jollimore. Whoever they may be. Every so often you remember them. If you've memorized some poems, the poems will raise a glimmering finger in your memory once in a while, and that's very nice, as long as you keep it to yourself. Never recite. Please! If you recite, your listeners will look down and play with their cuticles. They will not like you. But sometimes if you quote just a phrase in passing, that can work. Like this: "As Selima Hill says: 'A really good fuck makes me feel like custard.' "
And after college there may be later phases as well, maybe one or two later phases where you suddenly get interested in poems again. I've had, I would say, four major phases in my life where I've been genuinely interested in poetry-interested in reading it, as opposed to writing it. Because writing it is a very different activity. Writing it, it's as if the word "poetry" is a thousand miles away. It's inapplicable. What I'm trying to do is make some new Rowland Emmett machine that doesn't have a name. I know of course that it's going to end up being called a poem, but "poem" is one of those bothersome technical terms. It's so difficult to pronounce. You either pronounce it "pome," or "poe-im" or "poe-em." It's not an English word, it's a Greek word that's had the end chopped off it, so it doesn't fit-it's got that diphthongy quality.