re-reading...

sunset-time, gilded river. this past saturday.

First of all, this statistic is shocking to me -- that only 1% of Canadians have read a book of poetry in the past year. That's about 334020 people... which maybe isn't a small number. But compared to the number of people who have likely read textbooks or non-fictiony things, it is rather small. Compared to the number of people who have definitely read at least one novel this year, it is really quite tiny. Compared to the number of people who have undoubtedly read the newspaper or the TV guide or the magazines you get at the grocery store line-up, it is postively miniscule.

And like my dear friend notes in her comments, which I have linked to above, I just cannot fathom such a poem-less life, because poetry is something I think about all the time, constantly. It is just part of being, finding poems, making poems, reading poems, hearing poems. That is what I do.

It makes me want to put poems everywhere. Tuck them randomly under car windshields. Leave them on bus seats, slip them under doors. Strategic wallpaper for the world... Not in an 'I'm taking over the world & everyone should do read poems because I know what's best for everyone' sort of way (well, maybe an iota or two of that) but because I really would just like to share things. Because some people haven't read Valzhyna Mort or Michael Longley or Adrienne Rich or Theodore Roethke. Or Anne Carson or e.e. cummings or William Wordsworth or Gregory Corso or Pablo Neruda or Oksana Zabuzhko. & to me, this is a bit sad, you know? Because there is so much richness. & this is summed up so aptly, in a poem by William Carlos Williams that Adrienne Rich quotes as the epigraph to her book, 'What is Found There':

It is difficult / to get the news from poems / but men die miserably every day / for lack / of what is found there.

I could write an autobiography in poems, how poems have nourished me. One of the first poems I ever loved was Robert Frost's ubiquitous poem about the snowy woods. I was eight & I already loved to write haikus & couplets. With this poem, I admired the calm even-ness of the rhyme, the lilting sleigh bells. I loved thinking of how my footsteps creaked in the snow, when I went on walks in the early winter evenings with my mother. I loved stopping, letting her walk on ahead, while I stayed mesmerized in the quiet, the swirl of snow under the streetlights. I memorized it & when I have panic attacks I still say it to myself in attempts to slow my heart. but i have promises to keep & miles to go before i sleep

Then when I was 11 I met e.e. cummings with in just spring --

& he made me want to write things, poems, all the time. At one point, I tried stories too. But I came back to poems.

He wrote, in 'Forward to an Exhibit: II':

Why do you paint? / For exactly the same reason I breathe. / That’s not an answer. / There isn’t any answer. / How long hasn’t there been any answer? / As long as I can remember. / And how long have you written? / As long as I can remember. / I mean poetry. / So do I.

& later I met Wordsworth, with 'Tintern Abbey' & that force that rolls through all things, which touched me deeply. I had the requisite affair with Sylvia Plath as a 16 year old, but then I met Anne Carson who was even more enriching, so... Just this evening I was flipping through Plainwater again, & got stuck once more on her poem-prose-essay The Anthropology of Water. My copy of the book is creased & folded & caressed, pen & pencil scribbles underlining the sentences that stuck to me, shocked themselves into me. I carry so many memories in this piece; one line, highlighted in fading silvery-blue pen takes me back to the floor of a bookstore where I sat reading this at 17, trying not to cry a little in public but failing miserably because when she wrote

Language is what eases the pain of living with other people, language is what makes those wounds come open again

how could I not?

I have a lot of poems in my head now. There are poems I've met that made me physically weak in the knees, like that time when a friend & I first heard recordings of Adrienne Rich reading her poetry (when she said 'I am a woman sworn to lucidity', I had a wave of shivers). There are poems that I sometimes have the urge to get tattooed on my body in sinuous Cyrillic cursive; the urge to get tattooed passes, but not the wish to feel inscribed.

I love it when I know other people who know certain poems & lines from them become fantastical intertextual codes. e.g. the road was a ribbon of moonlight over the purple moor! (noyes) or pasting Tannu-Tuva postage stamps all over the picket fence (corso). I love it when people read me poems, especially ones they've written. I could listen infinitely. & I like it when they compel me to read mine, even if I'm hesitant at first.

One day a few months ago, a dear friend left a poem they had written in my mailbox. It was pretty much the loveliest thing ever, for a multitude of reasons, but just that gesture, of leaving a poem for me to find in my mailbox... I cannot quite describe it. The only thing that surpassed the goodness of poem-discovery, was writing one of my own and then sneaking down an alleyway to surreptitiously slip it into their mailbox... & then thinking about them finding it, reading it, & feeling something of what I had just felt upon discovering theirs, feeling all of what can be found there, in a poem.