A woman asked a question: did I agree or disagree with Philip Larkin when he wrote that it was better to read poems silently to yourself than hear them read aloud? I said, Well, Larkin was right that when you heard a poem read aloud you never knew how far you were away from the last line, and you didn't know what the shape of the stanzas were, but on the other hand if they didn't sound good when read aloud then forget it. I said I found Carl Sandburg unreadable on the page, but when I drove around listening to him read in his wildly mannered way-"in the coooool, of the tooooooombs, of Chicaaaahgo"-then I loved it. Sandburg gives every syllable a special extra squeeze. I told them that Sandburg was so incredibly popular at one point that he had a secretary to help him answer his fan mail, and he'd go through it and write "Send A" or "Send B" or "Send C" on it, meaning that the secretary should type boilerplate letter A or B or C as a reply. So there was something to reading poems aloud.
I sold one book-a copy of Worn. A man came up and said he'd bought all three of my books but he didn't have them anymore because when he got married he decided to clean out his shelves and he took a few hundred books to a book dealer and the dealer gave him a ridiculously low price but he took it. And now he was divorced and buying books again, and would I sign this one and this time he would keep it. So I did.
ON THE WAY back up Route 95 I sang along with Slaid Cleaves doing his song "Sinner's Prayer" until I couldn't stand it anymore and I called up Roz and left a message.
I said "Hello, I'm calling to give you a progress update. I've done the reading in Cambridge, check, and I'm almost done cleaning out my office, almost check, and my finger's healing up well-thank you for taking care of me that day- and the introduction is now progressing. So things are moving along. And I'm hoping you'll come back sometime and hang your tablecloths back on the line." And then I added: "And I just wonder if there's anyone who knows you like I do!" And then I couldn't talk any more, so I hung up.
One time when Roz was still with me I came home late from a reading in Madison, Wisconsin, and she was already asleep, and so was the dog. I kicked Smacko in the head by mistake in the dark, not too hard, but he made a little growly yelp, and I said I was sorry to him, and that woke Roz. I got in bed, and she smelled so smilingly sleepy that soon I had my hand on her hip and I said, "Baby, that is one big sexy hip."
She stirred and said, "Yikes, what's going on here?"
I said, "I don't know, what's going on with you?"
She turned and unbuttoned her pajama top over me, and I could see one of her breasts outlined in the orange light coming from the street. Her breasts didn't have to rhyme, but in fact they did rhyme.
THE MOUSE HAS COME OUT from the control panel of the stove, and he's making a lot of noise by scraping things off of the burners with his mouse teeth. He wasn't discouraged by the Boraxo I sprinkled around, or the spritzes of Windex. I set up a humane trap of a toilet-paper tube with a dab of peanut butter on the end, balanced tippily on the counter out over the trash can, but he wasn't fooled. He's scooting silently across the counter now, in search of the Lava soap, which he gnaws at. He eats the corners first. Imagine eating lava soap. His head is very long, like a weasel's head. He lives in fear. If I lift my arm he dashes back. But then he creeps out again. He's bolder than he used to be. He doesn't know whether it's okay to be a part of my life or not. And I would be quite happy for him to be out and about, and even gnawing at my soap, if he wasn't constantly taking little craps everywhere. What a foolish thing for him to do. I may have to buy a trap from a guy in Sandwich, Massachusetts. It runs on a maze principle and is supposedly not traumatic for the mouse. It's called the Mouse Depot. I can't have fifteen mouse droppings on the stove every single night, and that's sad because I'll miss him.
You know what? I could write forever. This is me. This is me you're getting. Nobody else but me.
You may not want me. I don't care. I want you to have me. That's the way it works. I'm here giving and you're there taking. If you are there. I can't know and you are probably falling asleep. You have many reasons for reading what you read. You want to, quote, "keep up." Good luck. You want to know what somebody who was rumored to be on the short list for poet laureate of the United States would write after it turned out that he wasn't in fact chosen. What does he write about then? Hass was chosen, and Pinsky was chosen, and Kooser was chosen, and Simic was chosen. And Kay Ryan was chosen. Goody.
Goody for all of them. It's all about a piece of steak. There's that Jack London story, about the old tired boxer who almost wins a comeback, but he doesn't because he didn't have enough money to buy that one piece of steak he hungered for the day before-the steak that would have given him the strength to land the big punch. So he's beaten. He's smacked around. He bleeds. He fails. That's me. If I could only have written a good flying spoon poem back three years ago when I first wanted to, I might be poet laureate right now. Maybe. Probably not. But maybe. I might be going to fancy diplomatic receptions and talking to flirty women from the Spanish embassy with no shoulder straps and eating steamy vulval canapes that leap into my mouth practically of their own volition. I would be part of the Washington evening scene, and I'd be sent invitations to receptions engraved on heavy stationery, with very sharp corners and skimpy tissue overlays that would fall and glide low and long across the floor. I'd own a black-tie outfit. But it has all happened a different way. I'm up here in Portsmouth, city of brick sidewalks. And I like this city a lot. But I'd love those canapes, too.
14
I'VE JUST HAD A SHARP FLARE of an emergency, but I think it's now under control. What happened was I remembered that I should put my passport in my briefcase so I wouldn't forget it when I went to the airport to go to Switzerland.
And then suddenly I wondered: Is my passport possibly out of date? I thought, no, it can't possibly have expired. I looked in my top drawer among the socks and the under-pants and my fragile folded birth certificate, and there it was. I flipped it open with my paperback-holding fingers and looked inside and there was my more-than-ten-years-younger face, and yes: it was expired. My flight is on Monday night, and this was Thursday.
I called the federal government of the United States, and a nice woman who worked there made an appointment for me in Boston on Monday morning at nine-thirty.
YOU SEE, this is what I'm up against. This little book here. Published by Farrar, Straus, which publishes Elizabeth Bishop. It's James Fenton, An Introduction to English Poetry. Very nice indeed. In it he says some true and interesting things and some false things.
We can't blame him for saying the false things, because he's saying what everybody has always said from the abysm of time. First he says that iambic pentameter is preeminent in English poetry. No it is not. No it is not. Iambic pentameter is an import that Geoffrey Chaucer brought in from French verse, and it was unstable from the very beginning because French is a different stress universe than Middle English and it naturally falls into triplets and not doublets. No, the march, the work song, the love lyric, the ballad, the sea chantey, the nursery rhyme, the limerick-those are the preeminent forms, and all those have four beats to them. "Away, haul away, boys, haul away together, / Away, haul away boys, haul away O." Fenton's own best poems use four-beat lines.