It’s Complicated

Many years ago, when I still trusted social media and used my Twitter account to communicate with friends and strangers who, like me, were interested in all things books, literary events, and, to my devilish delight, poetry gossip, I came across a tweet that read: What is a kiss? The sound loneliness makes when it dies. My heart ached. I loved that. Coming across such language was another reason I followed poets—they knew how to pick out a good line and then post it so that others could join in the virtual group hug.

The attribution was printed at the bottom of the quotation, in such tiny print that I had to expand it on the screen. Imagine my shock when I discovered that the lines that had made me clutch my chest were written by me. And then I remembered. Those words were not from a poem, but from a short story published early in my career. In the story, “Cactus Flower,” a man pining for his lost love locates the poet within to express that yearning.

I blushed, embarrassed that I was, in a sense, patting myself on the back. Moreover, I blushed because I had completely forgotten something that I had put out into the world. It was like those times someone in the audience would request that I read a specific poem, and when I struggled to find it in my book, they called out the page number, a tinge of frustration in their voice. How dare I not know? And may the gods protect me if I stumbled or mumbled, ruining the delivery. The only thing that saved me was recognizing that I too would be disappointed if a writer and I did not share the same level of enthusiasm for a piece of writing. In fact, something like that did happen to me. I attended a reading where the poet stood at the podium leafing through his book, haphazardly choosing what to recite next. When he uttered the title finally, my ears perked up because he had selected a poem I adored. But before he began, he changed his mind, saying: “Oh, not that one. It’s garbage.” My soul melted down to the floor.

The relationships we develop with our poems are complicated. Every so often, I get asked if I have a favorite poem among the many, but it feels wrong to single out one. I have go-to poems that I like to read aloud more than others—the crowd-pleasers—but to call them favorites is inaccurate. That’s usually my response to that impertinent query.

Once, I decided to do something different: to let chance decide. So, I promised to read whatever poem showed its face when I opened my book to a random page. I landed on a poem that used to be a go-to, back when my body of work was leaner. I gave it a spirited read, but it still fell flat because whatever connection we once shared had since fizzled. The audience clapped politely. I accepted my participation trophy then swore never to do that again. The premise of that piece—a critique of sidewalk preachers—appeared brittle next to the “free speech for all” sensibility I had come to espouse. I no longer believed sidewalk preachers were as invasive or annoying as I did back when I first encountered them on a college campus as I rushed to my next class.

I didn’t disavow the poem, however, because it had been written by a younger me. I recalled how pleased I was with the result. It was a poem that showed off my knack for the simile—a poetic device I used less and less with each subsequent book. But writing that poem made me want to write the next one. And the one after that. It’s part of a process I hope my students pick up while in poetry workshop: the point of discussing the poem today is to be able to craft a different and stronger one tomorrow. Ergo, no poem is a waste of paper.

But poets are capricious. Anecdotes circulate on the web about poets who became disenchanted with their past work. Alejandra Pizarnik, for example, published her debut, The Most Foreign Country, when she was nineteen. Later in life she renounced it while she was wrestling with profound questions such as the limitations of language. Or W. H. Auden, who referred to his beloved poem “September 1, 1939” as “trash” because he came to perceive it as emotionally dishonest. Charles Simic admitted to destroying his early poems, which he called “embarrassingly bad.” But his regret was not in having written them, it was in having erased them, even from memory.

As for me, I find myself deliberately avoiding reading work from my first books though they continue to be my first loves. They remind me of the young man who still had much learning and living and dreaming to do. It’s that young man who makes me sheepish about the past, not the poems he wrote. Perhaps that’s why I lost touch with those lines I happened to encounter on Twitter. Perhaps that’s why that reunion was so meaningful.

There’s a great distance between me and my early work, and I’m fine with that. I’ve changed as a poet. Even more significantly, I’ve changed as a reader. Currently, I approach poetry, a plane I have been inhabiting for many decades now, with my years of experience as a book critic and a teacher, yes, but also as a person fortunate enough to witness the field of poetry expand and welcome such a richness of voices and visions. I’m not saying it’s better or more interesting—it’s as good and as interesting to me as it’s always been. Otherwise, I might have abandoned the practice of writing long ago, like Rimbaud, who chose to explore the real world instead, or Laura (Riding) Jackson, who chose to explore language itself instead. I’m as grateful for then as I am for now. Without both, I wouldn’t have been able to recognize change, let alone my own growth.