Serious writing.
About this time, with my first attempts at keeping a journal, other poems cropped up, like mushrooms appearing overnight on a lawn.
The poem to Amaris is simple but written in a few minutes, complete. In the same, quick way I came up with three more good poems, translations from the Greek anthology, all written in the café Med one night within an hour as I was flipping through a book I’d just bought at Moe’s bookstore called the “Limits of Art”. It had the Greek originals on each page and an English translation below each one.
But some were so poor I felt an overwhelming urge to improve them. All my other attempts at poems in this book were long, slow abortions, re-written many times until they came out finished and presentable, some taking years and dozens of long nights, agonizing edits. But there was one poem I wrote that came out whole, in ten minutes, because of the overwhelming emotion of the moment, sitting one evening in the gloom of my mother’s basement apartment, just after she came downstairs after a telephone call and told me my Grandfather had just died. Written January 28th. 1981, about seven p.m.:
He breathes no more who lately was a man.
One little germ has brought an empire down.
The cord is cut, the ship drifts from the land
And we are left, bereft, to stare and stand.
He sees no more, who lately saw so much.
He is not sleeping. His eyes are closed forever.
And our eyes too are in one sight diminished,
The joy we had in seeing him is finished.
Gone is a man of many years,
The sum of hopes and cares and tears.
And yet more tears shall pour for him
Though he is but a thought, which too, must dim.
Keep him a place, in memory, alive!
How many memories with him have died?
What old acquaintance, treasured in his head
Is now by all forgot and doubly dead.
Time ruins all and everything goes rotten
As one by one we’re buried and forgotten.
Since I’m gutting this old notebook of everything I like, I’ll add the three translations I made from the Greek anthology, taken from the volume I mentioned, ‘The Limits of Art’. It seems the poems I wrote swiftly, almost without thought or reflection, came out the best. I was sitting in the café Med that evening thinking how ridiculous I must look carrying around my books and notebooks in my hand, not even a backpack, like some schoolboy. But in this grudging mood I began turning over the pages and my eyes fell upon this stale translation of a beautiful amatory poem. Book V. number 102:
You will see, Dioclea, a rather slim
Little Venus, but blessed with a sweet
Disposition. “Then there won’t be much
Between us. But falling on her thin
Bosom I will be all the nearer her heart.”
Besides the stupid, literal, word for word rendering of the Greek, it bothered me that the Greek word in the last line meant ‘soul’, not ‘heart’. So I caught up the spirit of the epigram and came up with this:
Some say my girl’s as skinny as a pole.
They ask me where I find her charms.
I tell them when I hold her in my arms
Her heart beats all the closer to my soul.
The other two I don’t have the references to, for those rare few who might want to look up the originals in Greek. I don’t have the book anymore. But here are my translations:
Someone has told me, Heraclitus, of your fate.
A tear comes to my eye
As I remember how, of late
We talked the hours by.
You are but dust, good friend, thrice old
Yet not all dead.
Your nightingales still sing. Death’s cold
Hand they’ve out sped.
On a famous flute player:
The hopes of man are fickle fairies.
Fate now sits on Lesbon’s head.
No more in golden courts he tarries,
Flute in hand but lies here dead.
Spirits of the grave be fair,
His wooden flute you cannot hear.
Look on his stone, a stone flute trace
For shades and for a windless place.
Such moments of inspiration are rare, like an elixir, and despite whatever the world thought of me or my condition, they redeemed me to myself and kept me in good spirits. I knew the first translation was great, right to the point, terse, well rhymed, not a wasted vowel (and only two words of more than one syllable), in all, sleek and beautiful.
All my finished poems attempt to reach this very high bar. Those that didn’t I abandoned and my journals are filled with those aborted attempts and pages of crossed out lines. So my monument is one slender volume of poems, sixteen in all and my early notebooks (the first seventeen) are the commentaries upon them, the footnotes.
I wonder what it is, for me and so many other poets and musicians, that in our twenties we are prodigious with ideas for songs and poems. In our thirties we write a few more. But then the talent or desire fades away. And with musicians, they just perform their old stuff.
I wrote all my poetry by thirty two. I toyed with lines a few years longer, improved a few, and then at thirty-six, just to be done with it, I collected sixteen of them and made a little book and closed that chapter of my life forever. I haven’t even thought of writing a poem since then.
You can only really fall in love, be swept away by love, when you’re young. The same with poetry and me. It was a kind of rapture. With age you develop a calculating mind which can’t be turned off. The magic is gone or explained. You see through it. The same with love. I might find an agreeable companion at this age but I’d dissect her first. My assessment of her attributes and wants would resemble more a ledger book than a poem. When I was young I dove headlong off the cliff. Now I won’t even approach the edge.
I wonder if this is what happened to the most precocious of all poets and the best, Arthur Rimbaud, done with poetry by the age of twenty, forever.
I’ve been reading my oldest notebooks again, my first baby steps in poetry and original thought. Most of it is sad stuff, embarrassing to look at. The next few notebooks show a slow progress in rational thought and more concise prose. But there are paragraphs here and there that are a pleasure to re-read. I chanced upon this one that mentions Rimbaud and it shows how certain questions for me haven’t changed at all over decades of time. It’s not dated but it is from the fall of 1981:
“I wonder sometimes that art is not the statement of conclusions about life, but more a register of contradictions. Poems are often thoughts in transit, or even questions. The artist is the one who writes down his mental processes. But I have only conclusions to record and they don’t make for literature. Many conclusions are not even ineffable, like the truths of some religion, more in feeling than in mind, and too vast and too vague to admit description or definition. Or else they appear commonplace in the end, although there was a great deal of profound revelation in getting to them.
This again leads to the conclusion that it’s not the end, but the approaching it that makes for good poetic, dramatic literature. Perhaps I’ve come to too many conclusions to be an artist. Maybe this is what happened to Rimbaud. Perhaps it’s a weakness of mind that accepts conclusions at all. This gives me a way out. I either have a weak mind or can go on, beyond my present conclusions and perhaps be an artist”.
