First Loves
In this series, we ask poets to write about the poem or poems they considered 'first loves"--those which captivated and haunted them, and inspired their love for poetry. We are pleased to continue this feature with the following responses.
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Charles Bernstein--
The first poem I ever loved is being written by a child in a language I will never understand.
As a boy, during the war (the story would always begin "during the war"), there was Churchill on the radio reciting Claude McKay's "If We Must Die," which brought that great poet to my attention and led me to his "Constab Ballads," the first book of poetry I was able, successfully, to commit to memory (just before being released from the Home that first time).
I remember, as if it were another life, those nights that Khlebnikov was my babysitter. After giving me a hot plate of Campbell's Vegetarian Baked Beans with cut-up franks, and then tucking me into bed, he would perform "Incantation by Laughter"--a magical journey into a world neither here nor there, yet always close at hand. Although I also admired his "supersaga" Zangezi, which he wrote while bouncing me on his knee (or so it has often seemed), I was definitely partial to his shorter zaum poems.
The memory plays such tricks so that when identified as a poem, as literary, the language one loves ceases to be that but exteriorizes itself, like a twelve-story free-fall that calls itself a hoe (to rake the verses in the park of the mind). Which is to say, no such account of this subject, however oblique, could be complete without mentioning our family camping trip to the Yukon, where my elderly grandmother read to us, as if from inside a raging campfire, Zukofsky's "A"-9:
Love acts beyond the phase
day wills it into--
Hate is obscure, errs, is pain,
furor, torn--a
Lust to adorn aversion, hope--love eyeing
Its object joined to its cause, sees path into
Things the future or now,
that poorer bourne....
Yet I think it must have been (yes, must have been) the poetry of Allen, in riposte to Burns, that gave me an early hint at my True Calling.
"Say goodnight Gracie."
"Goodnight Gracie!"
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Henri Cole--
From the start, I was drawn to poems that resisted my intelligence. In the poems of Hart Crane I found this resistance especially exciting because they were by a homosexual often writing about love. I read them at a time in my life when love and poetry were the only things that mattered to me. Not surprisingly, one was the source of pain and the other was a kind of painkiller. In truth, nothing much has changed since then. Crane's poems still send a bolt through me. Pain glitters on the edges of them; I expect it is often the pain of unsanctioned love. I like to think this love, despite its humiliations, was enabling to him as a poet, that an absence in life helped him to find a presence in art.
Perhaps, I sometimes rationalize, the ecstasy of sexual love is not so different from the near religious fervor of creating, or rather assembling language into poetry. "Permit me voyage, love, into your hands...." he writes in his lyric sequence "Voyages," a poem that seems to use the flux of tides as a trope for the coming and going of Crane's own merchant marine-lover. I believe that as a young man I was "a terrible puppet of my dreams" when it came to love. I suppose we all are. Crane felt no different writing "And so it was I entered the broken world / To trace the visionary company of love... / But not for long to hold each desperate choice." It was the cryptic surfaces, the language of non self-exposure, much of it encoded with suffering, that interested me most in Crane. At a time when I could not bear what was minimal and plain in poetry, he gave the young homosexual I was a model, an inflected language, an ecstatic voice, to begin to write about the social and domestic life I wanted to reveal secretly in art.
This evening, as I write, through my desk window, across the park, I see one man embrace another on a rooftop terrace. What I witness unexpectedly is the invisible, the true, which is what poems are, what mine strive to be. Some might say I have confused my own dreams and ambitions with Crane's, projecting myself upon him. Nevertheless, it was this projection that illuminated, in my twenties, many solitary Manhattan nights, which, like the bottom of the sea (where Crane is) were cruel and desolate.
Cruel and sudden, hast thou since
Purpled thy nail in blood of innocence?
Wherein could this flea guilty be,
Except in that drop which it sucked from thee?
--John Donne, from "The Flea"
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Billy Collins--
My first love was a tall, thin brunette named "The Flea" by John Donne that I met when I was in college. Prior to that, of course, I had been exposed to many species of writing, great and small. All sorts of rhymes, stories, and poems had made their impressions on me, as they did on all of us--everything from the venerable Mother Goose to the Latin responses to the Mass that I memorized and recited as an altar boy. In the house I grew up in, reading was a perfectly acceptable activity and before I had learned to read, my mother read to me, especially from the classics of sentimental animal fiction-books like "Black Beauty" and "The Yearling." Plus she housed hundreds of lines of verse in her head, memorized when she was a girl. Lines for every occasion. Whenever we were outdoors on a cold, windy day, for instance, she would never fail to intone these lines from "As You Like It":
Blow, blow, thou winter wind,
Thou art not so unkind
As man's ingratitude;
Thy tooth is not so keen,
Because thou art not seen,
Although thy breath be rude.
But of all my early flirtations and infatuations with language, I think of "The Flea" as my first love because it was the first poem I had ever read that was so good--so ingenious, so witty, so bold in its sexual playfulness--that I wished to heaven that I had written it. I now realize that the distinct twinge of jealousy I felt toward Donne was the first symptom of what was to develop into a chronic love sickness for poetry.
If the ultimate inspiration for any poem is another poem which is perceived, as someone put it, "as an object of rivalry and imitation," then "The Flea" was the first poem to turn me green. I could not believe how cleverly the speaker had woven his seductive argument around the presence of this tiny insect, "where we almost, nay more than married are." And I was amazed at how the woman's presence and her very responses were contained in the white spaces between the stanzas so that the reader was made witness to both sides of this lively give-and-take, this intimate battle of wits. What's more, the poem is the only seduction poem I know written by a man that credits the female object of desire with a measure of mental quickness equal to his own. Donne's mistress, who "triumph'st," is not some Elizabethan sonnet bimbo who needs only to be told that her cheeks are like roses.
I even remember the moment when I was smitten. I was sitting with a friend out on my sloping lawn in front of the college library on one of the first balmy days of spring. The poem had been covered the previous hour in a class on metaphysical poetry, and I flipped back to its page in a light-blue anthology of Seventeenth-Century Literature, which I still have here on a shelf. Then I stood up and read it out loud. "That is too much, my man," my friend said (for that was how we spoke in the days of beatnik glory), and we both laughed out loud and shook our heads over what a droll cat this John Donne was. And from that day forward, I should admit, if one of us found ourselves in the presence of an attractive girl, we would sometimes put on our best metaphysical face, look her directly in the eye, and implore her to "Mark but this flea, and mark this, / How little that which thou deniest me is." Never, of course, to any avail. Poetry, as we know, makes nothing happen.
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Robert Creeley--
Not ever having thought to be a poet, it's hard to recall what most moved me toward it when young--except for what was part and parcel of our usual small town life, my older sister Helen's own interests in poetry, my Aunt Bernice's occasional contributions of poems for the various editorial pages of the newspapers where she lived, my grandmother's store of remembered verses. We were not literary persons, so to speak, nor have I managed or wished to become one. I wanted to write stories and novels, if it proved I could write anything. Despite liking things like the Brownie Books and R. L. Stevenson's whimsical lyrics, and Edward Lear, and James Whitcomb Riley's "Little Orphan Annie"--and no doubt far more than I can ever now retrieve--it was still a world in which poetry could find small place. In West Acton, Massachusetts in the thirties, it simply wasn't for boys.
So what I remember finally is what I have to--because I can't ever forget. It's the eighth grade? Miss Stolte, blonde, slim, quite tall, quick almost ironic manner, desperate in a way I can now recognize, lonely, disdaining, speedy, begins to read. We have badgered her mercilessly until she yields. But she must enjoy her powers? She is reading a poem by Alfred Noyes, which I find wondrous, arousing, sensual beyond anything I can put words to:
The wind was a torrent of darkness
among the gusty trees,
The moon was a ghostly galleon
tossed upon cloudy seas.
The road was a ribbon of moonlight
over the purple moor,
And the highwayman came riding,
Riding, riding,
The highwayman came riding,
up to the old inn-door.
Already the world shifts and transforms, becomes suggestive, half hidden, with the center of that man "riding, / Riding, riding..." I am fascinated. Then comes Bess, and no matter how many times we persuade Miss Stolte to read this poem, "The Highwayman," I stir entirely, sexually aroused, still unaware, as they say, of what is happening to me as the rhythms gather and insist:
And over the cobbles he clattered and
clashed in the dark inn-yard.
And he tapped with his whip on the
shutters, but all was locked
and barred.
He whistled a tune to the window,
and who should be waiting there
But the landlord's black-eyed daughter,
Bess, the landlord's daughter,
Plaiting a dark red love-knot into her
long black hair.
Now one has come into this world of night and heroic presences and love in all its physical proposal, and the persistent fact of a particular time passing, even as the horse's hooves clatter and clash. Was this to be the other side of one's life, beyond the insistent daylight? I gave myself up to it entirely. The story winds and pauses, hangs in the balance, continues. Finally, it has to end:
'Still of a winter's night,' they say,
when the wind is in the trees,
When the moon is a ghostly galleon
tossed upon cloudy seas,
When the road is a ribbon of moonlight
over the purple moor,
A highwayman comes riding,
Riding, riding,
A highwayman comes riding,
up to the old inn-door.
I was delighted to read that Tennyson, when an old man and all but faded from the public scene, arranged to have Noyes brought out to his country home, so that Noyes might read his poems to him. Louis Untermeyer, the anthologist and chronicler of such matters in my youth, wrote years ago complacently of Noyes himself: "Unfortunately, Noyes has not developed his gifts as deeply as his admirers have hoped. His poetry, extremely straightforward and rhythmical, has often degenerated into cheap sentimentalities and cheaper tirades; it has frequently attempted to express programs and profundities far beyond Noyes's power." Will we ever know, finally, what it is that poetry is supposed to do? Will I, for one, ever care?
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Eamon Grennan--
An old man in a lodge within a park;
The chamber walls depicted all around
with portraitures of huntsmen, hawk, and hound [....]
--Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, from "Chaucer"
First love? Who knows. Something in the mother tongue, I suppose. What I remember is my mother singing: Daisy, Daisy, give me your answer do! I'm half crazy over the love of you. So she was, I knew, half crazy over the love of me. Or Hello Patsy Fagan, you're the apple of my eye. So I was the apple of her eye. A strange thing. Or, You are my sunshine, my only sunshine, you make me happy when skies are grey. That was the sunshine coming through the clouds over the back garden. Somehow, it seemed, I was in those songs. What I remember is the sound of her voice, where the beats fell, the rise and the fall of the words all knitted together in a way that wasn't just talking, but something more, something different. Different too, were the nursery rhymes my grandmother taught me--Baa baa black sheep have you any wool? the stiff old lady in black would ask, and Mary Mary quite contrary how does your garden grow? and I would see the black sheep and the little girl who lived down the lane (which was the Gipsy's Lane I was afraid of, that ran near my granny's house), and I would see the girl in her funny garden of cockle bells and silver shells and pretty girls all in a row. And different again were the new sounds I heard at church, the hymns at the children's Mass or on the May procession (Faith of our fathers living still, in spite of dungeon fire and sword, or, in a more pacific vein, Daily daily sing to Mary), or the staggering novelty of the Latin, all mystery and incense, at Benediction. Tantum ergo, sacramentum, we sang, or Pange lingua--only a familiar word or two making common sense to us, the rest all lilt and ritual, a sort of perfumed, swooning sense of community.
But I was thirteen or fourteen, I think, and at a boarding school run by Cistercian monks in the middle of Ireland, before actual poems started to take hold. And the two that remain with me as a beginning, as truly and consciously loving encounters, the two that even now involuntarily conjure the same inchoate pleasures that I think I felt then, were a poem by Longfellow and a piece of a poem by Wordsworth. And I still wonder exactly why, the way one wonders about the "meaning" of a dream that can't be shaken.
What was it about Longfellow's "Chaucer" that sent me into a daze of delight and satisfaction? I think I must have been relishing (because I still relish) the way the words came off the page as things in the world. In the monastery school I was surrounded by fields and trees, the rich, sometimes somnolent midlands of Ireland. Country smells--of growth or decay--whenever you walked outside. So the poet's picture of another poet--who was only a name for us--"in a lodge within a park" had an oddly intimate feel to it, and there was something comforting about the fact that he listened to the lark, laughed at the sound of it, Then writeth in a book like any clerk. What I particularly loved, however, what stays most vividly with me, are the last few lines, in which Longfellow describes what became for me, I think, a perfect illustration of what might happen when one read a poem, a model of how to read, even a reason why to read: And as I read, he says,
I hear the crowing cock, I hear the note
Of lark and linnet, and from every page
Rise odours of plowed field or
flowery mead.
"Odours" indeed! Sitting at my small desk, reading those words, my own head was full of smells, the smells of the wet sportsfield where we played rugby or hurling, the sharper green smells off the laurel bushes on the avenue.
Of course I wasn't conscious of the things I'm saying now. But they were, I believe, tucked inside the experience, making it what it was. Which is true too about one of the Wordsworth pieces in our Intermediate anthology. Although I loved "Tintern Abbey" and "Nutting," and "There was a boy," which were also in the book, it was also "The Stolen Boat" (another extract from The Prelude, which, like Chaucer, was only a name to us) which stirred me most. I wonder why. When I look at the passage now, it is not the whole of it, but only a few lines that touch the zone of deepest memory, drawing me back to the study hall in Roscrea, the rustling silence broken by the sound of whispering or a small boy coughing, a desktop lifting or being quietly closed. The boat, says Wordsworth, leaves "Small circles glittering idly in the moon, / Until they melted all into one track / Of sparkling light." Such a clear picture that gave me, a picture of something that has fascinated me ever since--the play of light on water--and which, whenever I see it, especially at night, I think I must be seeing it in these words. Then comes the core of the poem, the sight of a hill rising up out of the darkness: "a huge peak, black and huge, / As if with voluntary power instinct / Upreared its head." This, I remember, was the most notable and affecting poetic image that I had ever met. It still is, still has that old power, rooted in that repetition, "a huge peak, black and huge," and then the sheer and literal animation of the mountain, in a movement of language that went far beyond personification. That was probably the first time, too, I had come across the use of "instinct" not as a noun but as a verb, the way your mind had to hover over the meaning. And I believe now that it must have been the most notable example I had ever experienced of the physical power of enjambment, the startling plunge from line ending to line beginning, the powerfully physical way "upreared"--placed at the start of the line like that, enacted, dramatised its own meaning, making that fearful peak loom over my mind so that I had no trouble sympathising with the terror Wordsworth was remembering, how the mountain, with "measured motion like living thing, / Strode after me." Then--the next hook in the poem--I remember being shaken by the language with which the poet takes in the experience till it becomes an element of his inner being and imagination: "but after I had seen / That spectacle, for many days, my brain / Worked with a dim and undetermined sense / Of unknown modes of being." God knows what I made of that phrase "unknown modes of being," as an "idea." But I could feel it: what a nightmare was like, or the vague terror, fright in a major key, that was for me part of just living in a context where you had to be on your own a lot. It was this that the last lines of the poem referred to:
But huge and mighty forms,
that do not live
Like living men, moved slowly
through the mind
By day, and were a trouble to my dreams.
And all these lines and words and phrases, I now see, are precisely what my own feelings were in reading the poem. I was possessed by it.
I think, too, that what impressed me, made me love this poem, was not only how it lived out in language the totality of a big emotional experience triggered by a small event, but how it sounded, the muscle of its movement, the beat of it, and that great final chord closing the door with such convincing finality. It was a language of "just telling," but a telling of something intimate and authentic in a language able to make me see and feel all the emotional stuff that pulsed inside that frightened and exhilarated moment's happening. I don't know. There was something very knowable and at the same time immense about what was going on here. If I loved the Longfellow poem about Chaucer because it gave me a sense that the language of poetry could be as palpable as the things of the world, could let us know the ordinary world in an immediate way, then I think I must have loved the Wordsworth piece because of how it let me know that the deepest emotional states--of guilt, fear, exaltation, weirdness--could be registered in a language as physically immediate as the things of nature itself, and how it brought home to me something of the way in which the natural world itself had a sort of primary force, a force as cogent as, but far less consoling than, the forms in which our religion asked us to understand the world. Of course this is all hindsight, and I had no way of thinking such thoughts about these poems then. But I feel fairly sure that some such elements were an unconscious part of my response to the poems, were part of the reason they left their mark on me, and why that mark was as indelible as the mark of love always is, "with all its aching joys," as Wordsworth says, "and all its dizzy raptures."
But oh! that deep romantic chasm which slanted
Down the green hill athwart a cedarn cover!
A savage place! as holy and enchanted
As e'er beneath a waning moon was haunted
By woman wailing for her demon-lover!
--Samuel Taylor Coleridge, from "Kubla Khan"
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Anthony Hecht--
When my youngest son was about five, he fell giddily in love with a Shakespeare comedy he had found on a BBC TV program. He was truly delighted by the pageantry, the slapstick, costumes, music and general air of festivity. He wanted more. And so, when students at the university where I was teaching put on a production of Macbeth, my wife and I, carefully explaining that this tragedy would be pretty different from the highjinks he had so loved, asked him if he would like to go. He was emphatic, and he loved the show. Asked, when we got home, what most impressed him, he said that there were some lines that delighted him: "Double, double, toilet trouble." This pleased me because a) it is true, b) it has the strange charm with which children, failing to comprehend some adult locution, recast it in terms of their own (as a child I believed there was somewhere a country called "Tissovthee" which, a song claimed, was mine), but c) chiefly because it reminded me of what elements in poetry first appealed to me.
A child's emotional life is enormously powerful but narrowly and imprecisely focused. Fear may be among its chief ingredients, and as for love, it is too strongly fused with dependence and anxiety to be anything like the mature feelings we commonly think of. And the poems that first resonated for me, I now remembered, were those nursery rhymes that were rhythmically compelling because, exactly like the witches' rhyme in Macbeth, they were spells, incantations, forms of magic. Such, for example, was one that went:
Hinx, minx, the old witch winks,
The fat begins to fry,
Nobody home but jumping Joan,
Father, mother and I.
Stick, stock, stone dead,
Blind man can't see;
Every knave will have a slave,
You or I must be he.
Like many such children's rhymes, this was a riddle, and all the better for being impenetrable. Mother Goose was full of such fine, insoluble puzzles.
When I went to school I didn't much care for any of the poetry I was made to read. When it was not devoted to "boring" description, it was a contrivance that required a specific, predetermined emotional response. And such responses seemed like all the other values imposed upon me by the adult world, which I profoundly distrusted. But it wasn't long before I found what later my son was to discover in the convocation of Shakesperean witches: poems that dwelt in the realm of the marvelous and the uncanny, for which there was no prescribed response. I found them in the poems for children by Walter de la Mare, for example in this:
Who said, 'Peacock Pie'?
The old king to the sparrow:
Who said, 'Crops are ripe'?
Rust to the harrow:
Who said, 'Where sleeps she now'?
Where rests she now her head,
Bathed in eve's loveliness?--
That's what I said.
And it was not long before I found this same eerie, spellbinding quality in other places, such as John Donne's
Go and catch a falling star,
Get with child a mandrake root,
Tell me where all past years are,
And who cleft the devil's foot,
Teach me to hear mermaids singing,
And to keep off envy's stinging,
And find
What wind
Serves to advance an honest mind.
And again in Thomas Campion's
Thrice toss these oaken ashes in the air,
Thrice sit thou mute in this
enchanted chair,
Then thrice three times tie up this
true love's knot,
And murmur soft, She will, or,
She will not.
Go burn these pois'nous weeds
in yon blue fire,
These screech-owl's feathers
and this prickling brier,
This cypress gathered at a
dead man's grave,
That all thy fears and cares
an end may have.
Eventually I was to find this kind of spell sustained weirdly and excitingly in such a poem as Coleridge's "Kubla Khan," with its marvelous ending,
....with music loud and long,
I would build that dome in air,
That sunny dome! those caves of ice!
And all who heard should see them there,
And all should cry, Beware! Beware!
His flashing eyes, his floating hair!
Weave a circle round him thrice,
And close your eyes with holy dread,
For he on honey-dew hath fed,
And drunk the milk of Paradise.
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Maxine Kumin--
In grammar school when I was in the fourth or fifth grade, Miss Blomberg exhorted us to memorize work by such sterling American poets as Longfellow, Whittier, and Lowell. Gold stars were given out to those who could rise, face the class, and recite flawlessly, or nearly so, parts of "Tell me not, in mournful numbers / Life is but an empty dream" or "Blessings on thee, little man, / Barefoot boy with cheek of tan!" or, in my case, a sizable chunk of James Russell Lowell's "The Vision of Sir Launfal."
It is true that I had already learned by heart some of Robert Louis Stevenson's A Child's Garden of Verses, but these were accidental acquisitions from reading and rereading. While I enjoyed having them in my head they did not perplex and stir me as Sir Launfal did. The part I chose to declaim, at Miss Blomberg's bidding, begins: "And what is so rare as a day in June?" It is Wordsworthian in its romantic fervor, hypnotic in its exact tetrameter, and here and there, departs from its "June/tune" monosyllables to rhyme "glisten" with "listen," "chalice" with "palace." Of course I had no idea what a chalice was, but it sounded delicious. The "cowslips that fluttered in meadows green" were equally foreign to me; about thirty years later I discovered, picked, and cooked marsh marigolds, as they are known in New England.
But what gave me goosebumps was the description of the two birds, the male who "sits at his door in the sun" and the female who "feels the eggs beneath her wings / And the heart in her dumb breast flutters and sings...." The concluding couplet tapped out its rhythm so satisfyingly that I felt an unreasonable exaltation: "He sings to the wide world, and she to her nest--/ In the nice ear of Nature which songs is the best?" "The nice ear of Nature"--how I reveled in the sound of it, and in the benevolence of this sunny, attentive mother. All was right with the world.
After my triumph with this 24-line section, I went back and set about learning by rote the stanza that precedes it, the one where "The beggar is taxed for a corner to die in" and "At the devil's booth are all things sold...." The cadences were the same but the magic was missing. "We bargain for the graves we lie in" terrified me and I quickly abandoned the project.
Miss Blomberg's gold stars were not the kind that are pasted in the middle of the forehead. Hers were solid cutouts, painted with a gritty gold paint. I treasured mine until the paint flecks began to fall off, revealing plain brown cardboard beneath. But nothing tarnished the sturdy four-beat lines so gratifyingly end-stopped that they thumped in my head. Nothing soothed me so well as "Then, if ever, come perfect days...."
I think we internalize the poems we have by heart and they operate by osmosis to influence the writers we become. I favor the iambic tetrameter line, instilled in me by James Russell Lowell and sharpened by my later infatuation with Auden. Mostly, though, I am grateful for those old-fashioned teachers who revered the poems of a bygone era and by exacting from us our twenty-odd lines a week gave us an inner library to draw on for the rest of our lives.
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Ursula K. LeGuin--
On the bookshelf of the house where I spent summers as a kid there was a small dark-green book called, I think, Fifty Famous Narrative Poems. A real sexy title. But on long August days in the Napa Valley when it's too hot to move, a kid will read anything. Coleridge was in it, and got really deep under my skin, but Macauley's Lays of Ancient Rome were in it too, and my brother and I can still recite antiphonally, sixty years later:
Lars Porsenna of Clusium
By the Nine Gods he swore
That the great house of Tarquin
Should suffer wrong no more.
By the Nine Gods he swore it
And named a trysting day,
And bade his messengers ride forth,
East and West and South and North,
To summon his array....
It's the headlong gallop, the go-for-broke beat, that picks you up (if you're naive enough not to have been taught to resist it as naive) and takes you along for the glory ride. It doesn't matter if you have no idea who Lars Porsenna was. Years later it dawned on me that he was an Etruscan, and Clusium has to be Chiusi, in Tuscany, and the whole thing really happened--Macauley was, after all, a historian--which is neat, but inconsequential. It's the beat that matters.
So I had the good luck to learn early on that one of the things poems do is tell stories, which kept me from being afraid of them; and to learn (bodily, not intellectually, of course) that it's the beat that tells the story.
Another piece of good luck I had, a bit later, was to find the poems of Algernon Charles Swinburne. Now some might consider this like a thirteen-year-old finding that Southern Comfort tastes nice. Get that bottle away from her! Quick! Pour it out! --But Swinburne took me past story, past meaning, into the pure music of the word.
Out of the golden remote wild West
where the sea without shore is,
Full of the sunset, and sad if at all with
the fullness of joy....
O sister, sister, thy first-begotten!
The hands that cling and
the feet that follow,
The voice of the child's blood
crying yet
Who hath remembered me? who hath
forgotten?
Thou hast forgotten, O
summer swallow,
But the world shall end when
I forget.
Dead dreams of days forsaken
Blind buds that snows have shaken
Wild leaves that winds have taken
Red strays of ruined springs
It's the sound of the words that still brings tears to my eyes, the pure tune of them: just as the tune of "Ca' the Yowes" or "Oft in the Stilly Night" brings tears, or brings one for a moment to the thoughts that lie too deep for tears. Reason has nothing to do with it. The reasoning mind cannot think those thoughts. Swinburne was a sad, silly man most of whose work verges on, or is, pure tosh, but he was a poet. He was the real, absolute, unreasonable thing. I am grateful to him for showing me once and for all that, though reason may (and usually better had) guide the art, in the end it serves the art.
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D. Nurkse--
My first love was the poetry of Ecclesiastes. Simpler than silence, exacting as music, possibly a little nasty, the Preacher's voice entered the classroom and tested everything.
Numbed by adult threats and promises, by words that meant more and less than what they said, I was faced with a song that had no plot, no narrative, and pierced its own assumptions. He that increaseth knowledge increaseth sorrow. A stubborn man was chanting from death, confining himself to what can be seen and touched.
Or ever the silver cord be loosed, or the golden bowl be broken, or the pitcher be broken at the fountain, or the wheel broken at the cistern: Then shall the dust return to the earth as it was: and the spirit shall return unto God who gave it: Vanity of vanities, all is vanity.
Like many loves, Ecclesiastes seemed cold and arbitrary. But when daily life resumed, when we children were ordered to cut out paper bunny rabbits with square-tip plastic scissors, I had a secret. I had glimpsed a language more powerful than order, more intimate than my own emotions.
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Marie Ponsot--
Thanks to lullabies, prayers, and Mother Goose, I had this much by heart before I could talk: Words say that people are present. And some words come together to make a place. It takes shape in the little stillness it causes to surround it, pleasing both speaker and listener.
The first stanza that I knew to be a poem, I can still hear in my grandmother's voice:
Sunset and evening star
And one clear call for me,
And may there be no moaning at the bar
When I put out to sea.
She'd say it--maybe just the first line, as the rest hung in mind--with her face lit, turned to a radiant, fading sunset. What a word, "evening."
I was read to, long after I could read. Bedtime meant Poems for Children; I'd ask for a long one, to stretch the time. Then mother would shut the book, pause in the lit hall, and recite, "I wandered lonely as a cloud / That floats on high o'er fields and hills...." for me to hum myself to sleep with, years before I noticed its content.
Mother's poems murmured. Not so my father's. I imitated his laughing rendition of "The Raven" in a fake-scary voice, as I joined in on the Nevermores. I relished the suspense, not of its story but of its sound. What a sound, Nevermore.
The first book I bought on my own--with saved lunch money--was H. D.'s Sea Garden. "It's out of print," said the Brentano's man. "Try the Holliday Book Shop." Fifteen, very shy, I hated to climb its tall red-carpeted stairs and face its elegant strangers. But I did. They had it. It cost five dollars. I took it home in subway bliss. H. D.'s sound was perfect, each syllable a step or gesture. It made other free verse (then the dominant convention) seem thick-eared: "bound round the ankles / with myrrh / with violets / and with half-opened myrrh..." Half-opened-yes. Bliss.
Next I bought Muriel Rukeyser's Theory of Flight. Its thrilling vigor set me scribbling in echo of her sharp American urgency, envying her knowledge of labor unions and real life.
How grateful I am for this chance to re-visit that early, unconsidered joy. I see I've explained nothing, and left out some of the best (the Odyssey, Baudelaire, Shakespeare, Gawain, Aucassin, more) of a long, dense, undifferentiated dream. I read and read and wrote and never thought, "I'm reading; I'm writing." I loved, unmediated, the imagining voice of poets (taking the outside in and the inside out, fusing the two given worlds) a voice I heard as the power to desire true free speech.
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Leslie Scalapino--
My first knowledge of poetry, in junior high and high school, was Homer and Shakespeare; and Greek tragedies, which are also poetry.
I went to Reed College, where I took a poetry course from Kenneth Hansen in which we read Williams, Moore, Eliot, Stevens and Pound. I remember loving the poems of Williams, Stevens, and Moore.
We were all required to write a twenty-page paper on Pound's Cantos. Reading the Cantos, beautiful, was for me also to feel the effect of Pound's fascist mind, not simply to connect with the information that he had in fact been a fascist.
Wrestling with this authoritarian perception of reality caused a chasm to open up, a maelstrom to occur. I couldn't write the paper; finally went to the dean to say that I had to drop out of school; was sent by the dean to speak to Professor Hansen who merely said, "Not everyone likes Pound. You can write on something else."
Yet this very young grappling with Pound's Cantos introduced me to poetry being thought or apprehension as interior conflict arising from or being the social. So I'd designate as "my first love" the first page of the Cantos (especially since it's also Homer).
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Ntozake Shange--
I always knew I liked poetry more than anything. More than boys. More than butterflies. More than fresh sheets on a hot St. Louis night. I'm not sure I liked poetry more than dancing or Jackie Wilson. Or sleeping on the second-floor screened porch when even fresh sweet sun-dried sheets were no match for the weight of the air of my sister's wandering limbs.
My mother, Eloise, had benefited from what were then called 'elocution' lessons privately given in the home of a striking yet demure Southern woman once removed to the Bronx. There she mastered Whitman, Whittier, Wheatley, Shakespeare, Dunbar, and Paul Laurence. This eclectic mix of word crafters were my lullabies, soothing rhymes, and demonstrations of slowly garnered memorization skills. This, I suspect, is where my love of poets began. They served a purpose, even in the short but widely lived life of a small colored child in East Trenton, where the houses and trees were as small as my arms' reach to my mind. Or later, in the magnificence of a St. Louis dawn I heralded the coming light with words, just as my mother had greeted me. These are the very beginnings of my romance with language. At least I can go back with a reasoned mind, no further.
But mine was no constant love. I flirted with Baudelaire and Artaud because I longed for some immersion in dream. My life--in the midst of the civil rights movement's beginnings, when children played a fundamental role--was highly irrational. Racism is irrational and therefore my environs were fraught with absolute craziness. Surrealism by thirteen was actually a grounding influence which makes me smile now. Even today if I'm beseiged by pressures beyond control, off I go in search of "dada."
I have always been a performing poet. I believe from Euro-American training that the Greeks were right: poetry must be heard. I knew as a black person that when I asked somebody for a poem, I didn't mean for them to give me a book. I meant for them to "deliver" it, say it, make it jump, fire in the air with power and magic. This was always. I didn't say to myself, "I want to do that; I want to be a poet." It didn't happen until I saw Amiri Baraka and the Spirit House Movers. I'd grown to love LeRoi Jones because of the delicacy of "suicide note," but it was also because of the music and cultural textures that the Spirit House Movers offered on "1960 something..." The lines "Ruby Dee weeps at the window / being what we all will be / sentimental / bitter" are like love songs to a people, like a personal serenade from an absolute stranger who took my heart. That's when I knew I could say, "I want to do that."
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W. D. Snodgrass--
I have to confess that my first loves in poetry were outmoded and half-forgotten things that our teachers read aloud. I went to grade school in a small, industrial city (Beaver Falls, Pennsylvania) with a large immigrant population: Italian, Polish, Greek, Hungarian and Romanian. This made for a somewhat rough-and-tumble atmosphere. But we had some splendid teachers. One of our English teachers was a tough old bird who really did teach us grammar; now and then, though, she'd get tired and take a class period to read us poems--with obvious joy and energy. The only title I remember is "The Raggedy Man," by James Whitcomb Riley. I suspect that most of the poems were equally sentimental and outside any standards I'd care to own now. But she became simply rapturous and we got swept away--even, though they might not have admitted it, some of the toughest kids.
The first poem I remember loving outside school was "The Marshes of Glynn" by Sidney Lanier, which I may have first heard on some radio program lamenting his death in the Civil War. I hunted up the poem and memorized the first stanza; astoundingly, I can still recite it. Recently, I stumbled upon a copy and was equally surprised to find that I still admire the opening and find the rest overdone--the music takes over and kills all sense. That's much what I've found with his theories about music and poetry--he's onto something magical but rides it to death. Still, it confirms my suspicion that what counts is to hear a poem read out loud by someone who loves it.
Later, in high school, I had another English and home room teacher who directed the school's plays. Handsome and a little bit earthy, she played alpha dog to a wild pack of rowdies and pranksters: the stage crew. She took no nonsense--cuffed them around if necessary. Everyone admired and some adored her. She read aloud, taught us Shakespeare, and made us read aloud or act out whole scenes in class. This could get down and dirty and was almost always lively.
