“He was in a fact a very gentle individual whose poetry was quite well crafted and probably merited the recognition he imagined it deserved.” When I was young it didn’t seem that life would be worth living if I couldn’t create a body of great poetry that would survive me. I wanted recognition and fame, in a serious, nineteenth-century, sense. Remarkably, I feel almost the same way today—with a bit more nuance. Today I believe that there are many other things that make life worth living, even my life.
From the outside, it doesn’t look as if I’m ambitious, but I do plot and make plans, like the one to float in Macy’s Thanksgiving Day parade in the form of a giant balloon, sort of like the flying manatee in a recent dream. In the worst case, they make a fishbowl, shaped like a lightbulb, especially for very tiny fish.
The other night I watched “Charlie Chan in Egypt.” Stepin Fetchit was in it. He walked so slowly that I actually became irritated and impatient with him. Then I noticed that he wasn’t as slow as he looked. He just made himself look slow.
I have a crude sense of my poetry’s worth, too crude for me to calculate whether it deserves 5, 50, or 500 years of life. Anyway, if it does last for 500 years that probably wouldn’t be a reliable indication of its value. A few people have told me that I
am famous. I think it would feel different if it were true.
In the sixties, in a workshop at the Poetry Project, one of the students had a rubber stamp with which she stamped her poems “IMMORTAL.”
“Community” is new to me. For decades I pretty much stayed away from other poets. When I reentered the rooms where poets moved and spoke, I was still hesitant. I became more comfortable, but not exactly relaxed. I now appreciate the community and like its members. But I still want to go home early and be by myself.
This leaving my room, then returning to it, might be the best I can do. Leaving and returning are both important. However, if I don’t leave my room often enough I might become like Claude Vignet in “The King of Bedlam” by Gérard de Nerval, whose “madness consisted in tearing up every piece of paper or parchment not written by his own hand, for he considered these to be rival compositions by inferior poets of his age who had usurped him in the graces of King Henri and his court.”
