Monday, January 05, 2004

A Little Light Reading

Jules just posted about her reading and her “library.” I’ve been thinking along similar lines myself, though I can’t pretend to match her voracity.  I just try to read a little poetry every day.  That’s not to suggest that I have a keen litcrit mind, or that I keep up with modern poetry trends, or that I key in on favorite poets, or that I even read the stuff carefully. But pretty much every day I have a few minutes of solitude in my salle des bains, and that’s where I keep my old copy of Norton’s Anthology of Modern Poetry.  I found it in a pile of discarded books on the sidewalk on Clement street near Green Apple a few years ago.  It’s the 1975 edition so it’s not even totally “modern” anymore, but it’s not like Hart Crane or Yvor Winters are doing much new work these days anyway.  There’s about 1400 pages of verse - rhyming, blank and free.  Sometimes it’s inspiring, or depressing, or inpenetrable.  I don’t care.  I just like to dip and sample randomly from a little Yeats or Wakoski.  It soothes my mind.  Typically I wind up thinking, these guys are pretty good - too bad I usually write such unmitigated drek.  But sometimes I don’t think too much of what I’ve read, and that gives me a little hope.  It makes me think that maybe drek mitigation is in the eye of the beholder.

The thing I enjoy most about this book, though, is not the poety itself. I can pound Pound and dicker with Dickenson forever, but I have noticed that the thing my eye always seeks out first when I pick up the dense flopeared volume is not the poetry itself.  Rather, I go to the introductory material for some random poet, and look for the biographical data.  There’s a page or four of critical analysis, affiliations and such professional profundities to start each poet’s section of the text, and somewehre in there is always a few sentences about that person’s life: where born; how employed; whether formally educated or an autodidact; whether emotionally stable or suicidal; whether happy in relationships, or bitter and lonely; where and how they lived and worked.  I read these biographettes and imagine genius in development, or atrophying.  I consider whether Sasoon or Day Lewis knew what would become of their lives, their work. I can envision the creative process playing out on a cliff in Big Sur or in a Welsh vale or on a merchant steamer way the hell out in the ocean somewhere.  I wonder how these tortured souls felt about their military service or their grey dusty day jobs.  And I wind up thinking, This could easily have been me.  Perhaps it even was.  Pound, H.D., and W. C. Williams met at my college and got clever haunting Hamilton Walk together.  Sure, I missed them by about 80 years, but who’s to say that all the decent developmental impetus was exhausted before I showed up on campus? 

I’m not deluding myself.  I’m not going to appear in anybody’s anthology of anything, unless Norton comes out with a volume of “Bogus Crap from the Net.” But at least I can close the book and walk out of the bathroom without being unduly depressed by the genius of others.  Some of them were pretty screwed up, and some of them were not too different than I am.  For some reason I find that comforting.