On Crestfallenness: A Pilgrim, Not a Tractor

I didn’t want to write this essay. My heart did. My ears did. But my poet-soul, ever fearful of exposure, downright trembled. Crestfallen sounds like the experience it describes: the sting of unmet expectation, then a low drop. When I pronounce crestfallen, with all its spiny consonants, I hear the mortified hiss the ego makes when it snags its fool self on desire.

What’s desire, for poets? Well, I’ll speak for myself. I want to tell you everything, and I also want to keep silent. I want my poems to stitch magical knots in the air, to make an elaborate web leading back through time. I want my books to smell like a combination of fresh apples, coconut, and buttered popcorn, but I also want the poems to feel ancient in your hands, like wood covered in painted leather. I want my poetry to take you all over the world, and I want wildly unheard-of worlds to emerge with each poem. As I hand you these worlds, each a translucent fruit slice balanced on the edge of my paring knife, I want you to taste revelation on your tongue.

In one of his Certain Sonnets, Sir Philip Sidney complains: “Desire, desire! I have too dearly bought,/with price of mangled mind, thy worthless ware.” He wrestles with desire’s paradoxical nature, the tantalizing way it pulls us toward the next ardent love-question, the next possibility for insight, while leaving us forever wanting.

Desire, Sidney argues, both emboldens and makes fools of glory-seeking poets: “In vain thou madest me to vain things aspire/In vain thou kindlest all thy smoky fire.” By nature, we poets tend many unquenchable flames. We burn for our subjects and we burn, just as brightly and as dangerously, for our poems, whose moments of ecstatic insight we track across the glimmering field of the page.

What do I seek in the field? What puffs up my little crest of poet-esteem, and what deflates me? Recently, I revisited the boarding school in Lugano, Switzerland, where I spent the first two years of my teaching career. My hosts, knowing I’d been proficient in Italian in that Before Time, invited me to visit an advanced Italian class and talk with students about the essence of poetry.

Preparing that lecture gave me kinetic joy. I’ll never be as fluent in Italian as I am in English. Still, sometimes, I break through. Verbs rush forth in their correct moods and conjugations. A spectral, yet expressive, self emerges who is almost me, crossing between worlds. For suspended moments, I’m permitted to enter a vibrant reality where deep, reciprocal understanding is possible.

For me, such reveries closely resemble poetic inspiration: fleeting, otherworldly, addictive. My trip to Lugano was my first in many years, but, to my delight, I remembered so much Italian, more than I’d thought I would. In Milan, I entered the famous Feltrinelli bookstore with saloon-cowboy swagger. If I understood the first page of whichever book I beheld, I bought it. For a little while, I disappeared into the high green fields of literacy, rediscovered.

Months later, though, as I try to retain those memories of blissful fluency, I’m more likely to recall my gaffes and missed conjugations. Every day of my trip, I clumsily transposed essential words—forward, both, besides, also. Once, I rode a Swiss elevator several times from the top of a parking garage to its basement, waiting until I was alone so I could press the button for each floor and divine my location by sight. I was too tired to strategize how to ask a stranger for directions; my head swam.

Such moments brought me down from my former linguistic heights. How could I forget the rhythmic, practical words I once knew? How could words have the audacity to abandon me, a poet? My dejection felt all the sharper in contrast to prior triumphs—sometimes only minutes before—when I’d successfully elaborated an abstract concept in conversation. Desire, desire!

In The Art of Recklessness, the late Dean Young writes: “Let us forgive ourselves for writing poems that aren’t better than every other poem that has ever been written.” When I get crestfallen about my gifts, about my ability to make meaning in language, about how my poems may land with an audience located just beyond my physical reach, this feeling is at the heart of it. I want each poem to be the last word, the definitive take. I want to enter that electric field of empowered fluency and never leave.

Rearrange the letters of crestfallenness and you get centerless flans. Crestfallenness points, embarrassingly, to the sugary, overheated dome of my perfectionism at the exact moment it collapses. I feel crestfallen when I think too much about glory and not enough about the work, when I fail to flay the tough, silvery membrane between intention (what I want) and attention (what the poem reveals). “The poem always intends otherwise,” Young advises. “At every moment the poet must be ready to abandon any prior intention in welcome expectation of what the poem is beginning to signal.”

I’d like to abandon my crestfallenness for a spirit of “welcome expectation.” I’d like to read signals, entering the field of language dressed as a pilgrim, not a tractor. How would it feel to step back from intention, to refrain from marking a set path through the field? In that Otherwise, my poems emerge with their great horns and shining eyes. They already are complete. They already are real. My job is to witness, to encounter, to love those poems onto the page. Love; this is the work.