And you can read it for yourself on page sixty-seven. Of this New Yorker. Alice Quinn. The magnificent Alice. This was back in the day, when Alice was the poetry editor. God bless that hardworking cheerful nice woman. She left recently and now it's Paul Muldoon, and I hardly know Paul Muldoon. And really I hardly knew Alice Quinn, to be honest. But at least she actually accepted some of my own poems. Thank you, Alice! And rejected some of them-damn her! Things that just hurt me to have them come back saying, This isn't for us. This one didn't quite work for us, but we're glad to have something from you.
"We're glad." The crafting of these kind no-thank-you letters. I assume Paul Muldoon will do it well, too. The really good editors have the gift. And they hurt so bad when they're nice. You get a turndown and then you flip through the magazine and you say, Why? Why did Alice accept this firkin of flaccidness here on page 114 and not one of my poems? Why?
I should probably send Paul Muldoon a poem. One of my flying spoon series, none of which I've finished yet. Some of Muldoon's poems actually rhyme, but not audibly. He's cagey that way. He teaches at Princeton. He's probably there right now, talking to students. "Hello, poetry students, I'm Mr. Paul Muldoon." He's a little older than I am, but not much. Oh, but the idea of starting all over again. I can hardly face it. "Dear Paul Muldoon. Glad you're on the case now at The New Yorker. We met briefly at that poetry wingding at the 92nd Street Y a few tulip bubbles ago. Here are some fresh squibs, I hope you like them. 'My feaste of joy is but a dish of payne,' as the condemned man said before he was publicly disemboweled. All the very best, Paul."
It's scary to think. Of course I'd kind of stopped sending things to The New Yorker even before Alice Quinn left. That's part of my problem, I think, is that I'd stopped already. And Paul will send them back, and he'll say, Great to have something from you, but these seemed a little… And then he'll have some apt adjective-"underweathered," or "overfurnished." "Elliptically trained." And I'll flip through the newest issue, walking back from my blue mailbox, hunting for the poem he chose over mine, and it'll be the same thing as always. The prose will have pulled back, and the poem will be there, cavorting, saying, I'm a poem, I'm a poem. No, you're not! You're an imposter, you're a toy train of pretend stanzas of chopped garbage. Just like my poem was.
HERE'S THE THING. I am basically willing to do anything. I'm basically willing to do anything to come up with a really good poem. I want to do that. That's my goal in life. And it hasn't happened. I've waited patiently. Sometimes I've waited impatiently. Sometimes I've "striven." I've made some acceptable poems-poems that have been accepted in a literal sense. But not one single really good poem.
When I look at the lives of the poets, I understand what's wrong with me. They were willing to make the sacrifices that I'm not willing to make. They were so tortured, so messed up.
I'm only a little messed up. I'm tortured to the point where I don't sleep very well sometimes, and I don't answer mail as I should. Sometimes I feel a languor of spirit when I get an email asking me to do something. Also, I've run up a significant credit-card debt. But that's not real self-torture. I mean, if you stand back from my life just a little-maybe thirty-five yards-I am a completely conventional person. I drive mostly within the fog lines. My life is seldom in crisis. It feels like a crisis now because Roz, who has lived with me for eight years, has moved away and left me, and I'm in considerable pain, but this little crisis of mine does not resemble the crises that Ted Roethke or Louise Bogan went through, or James Wright, or Tennyson, or Elizabeth Barrett Browning, with her laudanum. Or Poe.
One time, I remember, I was in a laundromat. It was a laundromat in Marseilles, France. "Marseilles." Do you hear that? It's a mattress of a word, with a lot of spring to it. "Marseilles." I was in there, doing my laundry, and I look over, and there's this guy there, this little guy. He was kind of pale, pasty looking. But moving with a methodical grace. And I said, Ed? And he looked up slowly. He nodded, cavernously. I said, Ed Poe? And he said, Mm-hm. And then he peered closely at me. He said, Paul? Paul Chowder? And I said, Yes, Ed! How are you doing? Been a long time. He nodded. I said, I see you're folding some underpants there.
He said, Yes, I am. Doing my laundry. You?
I said I'm doing my laundry, too. And I mean, if you're going to do your laundry, this place is probably as good as or better than any place I can think of. Marseilles, France. Or "Fronce," as we say.
And I said, Can I venture to ask how the poetry's going?
He said, It's going pretty well, pretty well. I wrote a poem, and I got paid for it, and it was in the newspaper.
And I said, That's fantastic. What's it called?
And he said, It's called "The Raven."
I said, Holy shit, Ed, "The Raven." Great title. What's it about?
And he said, It's about a man who has a visit from a raven.
And I said, That sounds really promising. What does the raven stand for? Death and fate and horror and government wiretapping and stuff like that? And he just looked at me. He wasn't about to explicate his poem for me. Which I understand. And I said, Well, listen, take care. I grabbed my bag of laundry. I said, It's been great seeing you. Stay happy. And he said, You too, it's good seeing you. We waved again. Take care, bye-bye. Watch out for the big swinging blade. And I walked out the door of the laundromat. Off down the street. And that was the time that I ran into Edgar Allan Poe.
GOD I WISH I was a canoe. Either that or some kind of tree tumor that could be made into a zebra bowl but isn't because I'm still on the tree.
It's late in the afternoon, and the bats are getting ready to go flying for bugs. Leigh Hunt has a poem about how this girl, Jenny, jumped from her chair and kissed him. I'm thinking of how difficult it is to look old poets in the eye. Their eyelids, which droop and have skin tags on them, like tiny pennants age has hoisted, fill me with a strange consternation. And I know that the old poets themselves are self-conscious-they're worried that people will see these two blinky pink openings in their face and think, Ugh, those look like flesh wounds with eyeballs tossed loosely into them.
I know that when my eyes get old and skin-taggy I'm going to be very happy to have glasses to hide behind.
Even now I have trouble looking people in the eye. You're supposed to "meet people's eyes." Meet them how? They have two eyes. You have to choose one. I start by looking at the person's right eye, intently, and then I begin to feel that I'm hurting the feelings of the person's left eye. As she's telling her story, she thinks, Why is he concentrating his attentions so fixedly on my right eye? Is he deliberately looking away from my left eye? Is there something wrong with my left eye? So then I shift over, and I stare into her left eye, till it's as if I'm falling down an optical pipe.
My eyes have to skip away, eventually. And when I'm asked a question I look out the window. People assume that I'm failing some kind of test of candor when I'm just not an eye-meeter, that's all. I'm just not going to meet your eye for any extended period. Period.
HOW ARE THOSE POETRY exercises coming? Did you do that thing I mentioned where you write down every real story somebody tells you or that you overhear in a twenty-four-hour period? Did I mention that exercise? Maybe not. I don't mean the stories that come to you on electric screens or through car loudspeakers but the ones from right around you. I overheard a story at the bank yesterday about a car-repair place that overcharged. And then somebody told me a story about a dog who ate a sock. The vet couldn't "shift it," so he removed the sock surgically and now the dog is doing well. And there were other stories, too. If you listen to them, the stories and fragments of stories you hear can sometimes slide right into your poem and twirl around in it. Then later you cut out the story and the poem has a mysterious feeling of charged emptiness, like the dog after the operation.