A Poet's Alphabet <continued>
M is for music, which I listen to through earphones when I write prose, but
not when I write poetry. What I listen to again and again are the slurred
confections of Delius, Wagner, or Tchaikovsky. Their music is nothing that
jeopardizes my need or my ability to concentrate. Yet I am stirred by it,
seduced into a vague rhythmic certainty. Everything is better; everything rises
to an occasion that exceeds even the jammy excess of the music. I write as if
on an endless sea of surges and satisfactions.
N is for Neruda, who was a genius but in whose writing beauty and banality
are inextricably mixed. His poems are a sort of wishful thinking. To read him
is to participate in the verbal correction of what are universally perceived as
social or natural inequities. Mundane items, modified by adjectives denoting
the rare or celestial, are elevated to a realm of exceptional value. A toad is
melancholy, wine is intelligent, a lemon is like a cathedral. He is a
cosmetician of the ordinary. When we read him, we are happy because everything
has attained to a condition of privilege. The universe is good after all.
Neruda's verbal utopia, depending on one's gullibility, is a harmless antidote
to a harrowing century. His genial reductions have moved people to a simple and
accommodating attitudes towards poetry who otherwise would have no use for it.
N is also for nothing, which, in its all-embracing modesty, is the manageable
sister of everyting. Ah, nothing! About which anything can be said, and is. An
absence that knows no bounds. The climax of inaction. It has been perhaps the
central influence on my writing. It is the original of sleep and the end of
life.
O is for Oblivion. I feel as strongly about it as I do about nothing.
Forgetfulness, the fullness of forgetting, the possibilities of forgottenness.
The freedom of unmindfulness. It is the true beginning of poetry. It is the
blank for which the will wills. And O, lest I forget, O is also for Ovid, II
Naso, the first of the great exiles, whose book of changes, whose elevation of
changing to a central place in the kingdom of the imgination, has made me wish
to mention him, even if he has not directly influenced the poems I write. After
all, what could I take from his beautiful telling of Echo and Narcissus or
Jason and Medea? How could I dulicate the Song of Polyphemus? Maybe if I worked
very hard I could produce a stumbling version of his fluency, and maybe a pale
likeness of a few of his monstrous particulars, but never the two together. He
was an effortless surrealist, a poet of boundless charm. And all it got him
from the puritanical Augustus was exile to the shores of the Black Sea, in a
place called Tomis.
<To be continued.... >
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