In Their Own Words
Douglas Crase on “True Solar Holiday”
True Solar Holiday
Out of the whim of data,
Out of binary contests driven and stored,
By the law of large numbers and subject to that law
Which in time will correct us like an event,
And from bounce and toss of things that aren't even things,
I've determined the trend I call 'you' and know you are real,
Your unwillingness to appear
In all but the least likely worlds, as in this world
Here. In spite of excursions, despite my expenditures
Ever more anxiously matrixed, ever baroque,
I can prove we have met and I've proved we can do it again
By each error I make where otherwise one couldn't be
Because only an actual randomness
Never admits a mistake. It's for your sake,
Then, though the stars get lost from the bottle,
Though the bottle unwind, if I linger around in the wrong
Ringing up details, pixel by high bit by bit,
In hopes of you not as integer but at least as the sum
Of all my near misses, divisible,
Once there is time, to an average that poses you perfectly
Like a surprise, unaccidentally credible
Perfectly like a surprise. Am I really too patient,
When this is the only program from which you derive?
Not if you knew how beautiful you will be,
How important it is your discovery dawn on me,
How as long as I keep my attention trained
Then finally the days
Will bow every morning in your direction as they do to the sun
That hosannas upon that horizon
Of which I am witness and not the one farther on
—Set to let me elect you as if there were no other choice,
Choice made like temperature, trend I can actually feel.
"True Solar Holiday" appeared in Oxford Poetry (U.K.) in winter 1986/87, was translated into Italian for Spazio Umano (Milan) in 1988, first appeared in the U.S. in the Yale Review in 1989, and was included in The Best American Poetry, 1989, where it was accompanied by the comment reprinted here. It was also included in The Best of the Best American Poetry in 1998, and inspired the lyrics of the experimental piece "True Holiday," composed by the Berlin-based group The Magic I.D., sung by Margareth Kammerer, and released on erstwhile records in 2008.
On "True Solar Holiday"
The trouble with talking about a poem is that what you say will repeat or replace or wreck the poem, when the reason you wrote it in the first place was that prose doesn't go far enough. On continents so clogged with human chat, anybody would think twice about bestowing more waste no landfill will accept. For a time, it was exciting to write and compose and perform in ways said to celebrate randomness, while life, though improbable, seems, even as DNA is, a defense against randomness. The least guileful aesthetic may not be exactly upfront, any more than the critic who offers 'this quote I have taken at random.' Whatever it was, it turns out that if you describe it—by poem equation dance performance picture—it is no longer random. Maybe that's why all evolution should end up talking so much.
The Astropastorals
(Pressed Wafer, 2017)
