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.
Tennyson also said, to this man, that he didn't want any biography of him written: "I don't want to be ripped up like a hog when I'm dead."
I DECIDED TO TAKE the white plastic chair down to the creek. There's a creek at the bottom of the hill of sand on which my house sits. I had the chair in my hand, and I had my gear and my Sharpies and my presentation easel for practicing, and I looked as if I was prepared for an expedition up the Orinoco. I was about to turn down the hill when I heard tires on my driveway. It was my neighbor Nan's yellow Subaru. I peered toward her car and thought I could see her face and through the branchy reflection a wave, maybe a nervous wave, I don't know, and then her window came down. She said, "Are you off somewhere with your white chair?"
I said that I was going down to the creek to think over the origins of rhyme.
"Would you be interested in a chicken leg?" Nan asked. She said that she did Meals on Wheels once a week, and she had an extra meal because someone had been away at a doctor's appointment. She got it out of the box in the back seat and showed it to me. It was an orange piece of chicken in a segmented tray with a sheet of plastic glued over it. There were secondary pockets, each shaped like lungs, one of which had yellow pieces of corn pointing in all directions, and one of which had beans pointing in all directions.
"Mmmm," I said. "Don't you want it?"
Nan said she didn't want it. "Would you care for the slice of bread and the carton of milk, too?"
I said yes indeed I would.
She got in her car and began backing away. "Enjoy yourself!"
I waved and stuck the Meals on Wheels meal into my equipment bag, at an angle, and tucked the bag of milk and a roll in another place. Then I carried my white plastic chair down through the patch of skunk cabbage to the creek and put it right in the water and sat down on it. Immediately the rear chair legs worked their way down through the mud, and I sank an inch.
The spring floods have changed everything, as they generally do, and so I'm sitting now at the base of carved-away banks that are about five feet high, looking up at the under-sides of ferns. There are innumerable ferns.
Why is rhyme so important to speech?
I think I'm going to give this chicken a try.
Wow, it's fantastic. Meals on Wheels chicken. Fantastically good. Fleshy as hell, though. The flight muscles of a bird. Think of it. Wash it down with a little milk, strange as that may seem. Mmm. Excuse me.
And there's a piece of bread in waxed paper, with a pat of margarine, dyed very yellow. Not bad. Honestly, the chicken and the bread are so good that I wonder how the corn and the beans can top them. But maybe they will.
Beans are good. Corn is good. My first Meals on Wheels meal. What does that mean? Is Nan worried about me? Does she feel sorry for me? Does she think I'm an old guy?
There's an incredible amount of pollen blowing sideways past my face. I can see it sometimes. Hundreds of thousands of little grains on their way somewhere.
QUITE QUICKLY after you're born you begin to suck. The sucking teaches you some lessons. First, that if you pull your tongue back a certain way, a warm delicious liquid that is not your own saliva flows into your mouth. And second, that your tongue is an unusually important muscle.