My Journey With Poetry In Brief

As I look back through the haze at the early influencers of my poetry, I come up with three names. The first discouraged me from ever writing again. The second was so wrong he led me to discover myself and the third opened the possibility of what a poem could be.

In 1975 I found myself in a small group of notable poets in a workshop led by a Central American poet named Alvaro Cardona Hine. He was a translator and a distinguished poet with a finely-honed critical faculty. I was in way over my head. Any pretensions I may have had were to be squelched. After about a year I quit. I was told that I had come a long way but had still not written a poem.

Alvaro’s idea was that a poem cannot be willed. One must wait till it comes, unsummoned. That shut me up for three years. I think he was partially right. Images do arrive along with unforeseen connections but the original impulse can be cerebral even if it doesn’t leave a trace.

In 1978 or ’79 I was at a ten-day poetry gathering which featured Gary Snyder. Stealing the words of Confucius he advised us wannabe poets that we must first learn the names of trees. Again, I was miffed. I didn’t know a maple from a sycamore. Trees were for climbing or carving. Some were home plate or the goal line.

Snyder’s words help me define who I wasn’t. He was a mountain man. I didn’t know bear shit from dog shit. I was a street urchin and I declared myself a poet of the big city. Snyder was wrong. We’re not writing a glossary. We are writing our lives and the power of our observations and imagination. My manifesto is to be authentic and allow that voice to find expression.

It was at this time that I also discovered the work of Philip Levine. His subject was the assembly line of automakers in Detroit. He included oil stains and grease along with the daily grind of the workers. He opened the possibilities for where a poem can go.

If he could write about his working life in a conversational voice, I might find a way into the humdrum of pharmacy. I might even find words to speak about my estrangement from the natural world which ultimately leads to a way in.

How prose dares to call itself poetry is a mysterious process. An image appears with language that sings to me. It has tendrils with connectivity. It invites leaps. It meanders sometimes losing the original triggering point. The lines gather into a cadence so that each word has to be earned. Spacing distinguishes it from prose on the page and when read aloud. It comes with urgency and concision. It is not a bulletin or just heightened rhetoric. And it is more than what Gore Vidal said when he snipped that poetry is carefully ruined prose. Not so, a poem can alter perception. As W. C. Williams said, men die every day for lack of that heightened sensibility.