I spent much of yesterday copying out the poems of Denise Levertov. She is a poet whose work I have known but not known; and as the summer wanes and I am beginning to feel myself opening again into my own work, I thought I'd see if she might be a door. She is.

Here's the opening of "For Instance":

Often, it's nowhere special: maybe
a train rattling not fast or slow
from Melbourne to Sydney, and the light's fading,
we've passed that wide river remembered
from a tale about boyhood and fatal love, written
in vodka prose, clear and burning--

Levertov is a poet who trusts the twists and turns of her sentences; a poet of elegy and moral rectitude, with a graciousness of gaze; who forgives and does not forgive. I copied out her poems, and outside my window two crows argued; a mob of bees bumbled among the thyme flowers; the cat tore apart a frog.

"Once a woman went into the woods," writes Levertov, in "Sound of the Axe."

The birds were silent. Why? she said.
Thunder, they told her,
thunder's coming.

If the birds were silent, who were "they"? The poem has no interest in answering that question.

Today will be another day of cloud and sun and rain and wind. The heavens are chaotic this week. The clothes on the line have been wet for three days, and the lettuce in the garden is coated with mud. I am trying to be a good girl, to do my work, to extract patience, though I am too old to be a girl. I imagine cultivating a fine carelessness.

"Everything is threatened," writes Levertov, in "In the Woods,"

                 but meanwhile
everything presents itself:
the trees, that day and night
steadily stand there, amassing
lifetimes and moss.

For now, the air is quiet, but already clouds arrange their formations, a regimental swirl blotting the hapless blue. I should close my eyes and work.

Rilke's "Letters to a Young Poet," letters 9 and 10

Your doubt may become a good quality if you train it. It must become knowing, it must become critical. Ask it, whenever it wants to spoil something for you, why something is ugly, demand proofs from it, test it, and you will find it perplexed and embarrassed perhaps, or perhaps rebellious. But don't give in, insist on arguments and act this way, watchful and consistent, every single time, and the day will arrive when from a destroyer it will become one of your best workers--perhaps the cleverest of all that are building at your life.

This passage from letter 9 spoke to me intensely. I have struggled all my life with doubt, with second guessing, with ambivalence: it has taken me most of my years to begin to see this behavior as "one of [my] best workers--perhaps the cleverest of all that are building at [my] life." Rilke is right: it's been important to "train" doubt--to "demand proofs from it." In the sphere of writing, doubt is where revision comes from. In the sphere of being a plain aging human being, doubt is where empathy and patience come from, but also the ability to stand away from the tumbling crowd of assumptions and declarations and say, "Wait a minute. Something is wrong."

At the same time doubt is so debilitating, and pervasive, and endless. I never learn not to doubt--for instance, when Rilke writes, in letter 10, that "art . . . is only a way of living." Yes, I think, and then I read on, about unreal "half-artistic professions, which, while they pretend proximity to some art, in practice belie and assail the existence of all art, as for instance journalism does and almost all criticism and three-quarters of what is called and wants to be called literature." Is that me? Am I part of that "three-quarters of what is called and wants to be called literature"? Doubt here becomes a nearly unbearable burden. Though I am not at all suicidal (do not worry, do not worry), I feel the necrotic pang: why bother to exist if one is only in "pretend proximity" to the art one has been working so hard to live for and within?

Anyway, those are my thoughts. My edition of the Letters includes Kappus's reactions to each of them, which I have decided not to read. I'm not very interested in listening to him contextualize Rilke's words. For some reason, the idea reminds me of those poets who stand up in front of a microphone and read a poem and then afterwards waste time explaining what the poem was about, what really happened, etc., etc.--a readers' tic that drives me crazy because it distracts me from the poem into sideshow storytelling. But you should feel free to follow your own predilections.

By the way: a few new comments have appeared on previous Rilke posts. Scroll down and see what others are thinking, and keep the conversation going.

Things that make me happy

1. Yesterday, my perpetual insomnia finally caught up with me. In the midst of cooking, I staggered and said, "I can't do this anymore." Then I lay down on the couch and went to sleep for an hour. When I woke up, I found out that Tom had finished making dinner, washed the dishes, done everything. This is how long-married people figure out that they still love each other.

2. This week three friends sent me notes about about their reactions to Same Old Story. Even though this collection has received very few public reviews, I have never had so many serious personal responses to anything I've written. They take the sting out of the generalized ignoring. In fact, they almost make me forget it.

3. Yesterday, my older son's oldest friend turned to me, without irony and with immense sweetness, and said, "Thank you for being my second family."

August 4 is the anniversary of the sighting of a supernova in Cassiopia (1181), Dom Perignon's invention of champagne (1693), publication of the first edition of Bartlett's Familiar Quotations (1855), Custer's opening clash with the Sioux (1873), Lizzie Borden's arrest (1892), and Elvis Presley's release of "Hound Dog" (1956).

It is also the anniversary of several events that never really happened:

The death of Mrs Maidan occurred on the 4th of August, 1904. And then nothing happened until the 4th of August, 1913. There is the curious coincidence of dates, but I do not know whether that is one of those sinister, as if half jocular and altogether merciless proceedings on the part of a cruel Providence that we call a coincidence. Because it may just as well have been the superstitious mind of Florence that forced her to certain acts, as if she had been hypnotized. It is, however, certain that the 4th of August always proved a significant date for her. To begin with, she was born on the 4th of August. Then, on that date, in the year 1899, she set out with her uncle for the tour round the world in company with a young man called Jimmy. But that was not merely a coincidence. Her kindly old uncle, with the supposedly damaged heart, was in his delicate way, offering her, in this trip, a birthday present to celebrate her coming of age. Then, on the 4th of August, 1900, she yielded to an action that certainly coloured her whole life—as well as mine. She had no luck. She was probably offering herself a birthday present that morning. . . .  

On the 4th of August, 1901, she married me, and set sail for Europe in a great gale of wind—the gale that affected her heart. And no doubt there, again, she was offering herself a birthday gift—the birthday gift of my miserable life. [from The Good Soldier by Ford Madox Ford; the ellipses are his.]

Ford contrived most of his novel's August 4 coincidences--but not all of them. In the early 1990s, as I was reading The Good Soldier for the first time, I came across the passage above . . . and realized that the date was August 4. I've never quite recovered from that jolt.

I am busy all the time, but I feel as if I have nothing interesting to say to you. I know you don't want to hear about the War of the Mice.

On Friday I finished editing a book about Oppenheimer. Next up is a poetry collection, followed by a book about uranium mining, and then (as a break from the atom) a book about Audre Lorde. It's been a long time since I have been so booked with books.

Today I plan to vacuum and launder and weed, finish reading Frost Place graduate projects, and look at the moon. Have you seen the moon lately? On Wednesday night, when I was standing by the side of the road, watching a one-armed man tow away my car, the moon was a curl of orange peel. Last night, as I sat on the couch eating whipped cream and raspberries and staring out the window, it was a cap, pale and fog-laced.

I hope it doesn't look like this:


The Waning Moon

Percy Bysshe Shelley

And like a dying lady, lean and pale,
Who totters forth, wrapp'd in a gauzy veil,
Out of her chamber, led by the insane
And feeble wanderings of her fading brain,
The moon arose up in the murky East,
A white and shapeless mass.

Commonwealth

Dawn Potter

When the historical process breaks down and armies organize with their embossed debates the ensuing void which they can never consecrate, when necessity is associated with horror and freedom with boredom, then it looks good to the bar business.

                        --W. H. Auden

Illegal after 8 p.m. (we don’t tell them

cops will mosey by from the doughnut shop

and drag them off to Rikers,

but they like to believe it anyway),

the boys have taken over the bar.  A few hip

passersby peer in through the rain-crazed plate glass,

then scuttle on at the sight of Paul, front and center

in his brand-spanking-new superhero cloak,

hogging the empty dance floor, while James bellies up

to a third root beer and hashes out a few good

subway routes with Ray the bartender.

He, from a far corner of his eye,

watches customers vanish into the fog, veiling not very

completely his anxiety and regret, though possibly

he doesn’t attribute them to these underage freeloaders.

It’s a mother’s privilege to assume

that her children cause more trouble in public

than anyone else’s, but he, childless,

has only his business to worry over:

maybe the “Commonwealth” sign isn’t pretty enough,

the gloss on the bar not seductive enough under the artful

candles: so when out of nowhere a laudatory egg

whacks the righthand window with a noise

like Christopher Robin’s popgun,

his alarm, premeditated and ready for anything,

flings him into the street to examine the goo

just like a regular fussy, pissed-off, middle-aged,

responsible gay man lamenting the goddamn

lack of respect kids today have for other people’s property.

Lingering inside on our shiny barstools, we friends

of his youth are bemused and, despite the free beer,

obscurely regretful that Ray, last bastion of irresponsibility,

has finally taken to muddled bourgeois worrying

like the rest of us.  The boys, always eager for fun,

rush out after him to exclaim over the mess,

no doubt pestering him with inscrutable “whys?”

and milling underfoot while he hauls out the Windex

and scrubs out the evidence, then smokes

yet another Camel in hopes of recovering the equanimity

that seems to have permanently deserted him

since the bar opened last Saturday.

The boys fizz and hop in the drizzle; smoke hovers

over the trio like a portable cloud, and at the bar

we friends of his youth, lovers and ex-lovers, in permutations

hardly worth discussing these days, consider them

as we might examine a Soviet-era inspirational poster

or a silent movie clip, all the subtitles screaming at us

in 1920s gangster slang, funny and unfamiliar

and vaguely frightening. Our eyes meet.

Now that Ray’s grown up, what’s next?

Fear, trembling, Kierkegaard all over again,

there’s just no escape from foreboding,

even in a freshly painted bar in Brooklyn,

good beer, sweet friends,

and kids old enough to stay up after dark

without turning into Robot Monster.

Quick, shove terror under the counter

before the secret-agent man shows up

to muscle Paul off to war in his little black cloak,

shred James’s heart, hand round needles for comfort,

pistol-whip the faggot new neighbor:

for it’s Ray’s fate to hold this fort,

stare out his polished window at the drinkers

who trickle in from the midnight rain

longing for happiness, a shot of Jägermeister,

a chattering crowd of seekers,

insomniac and wild, every one of them

doomed to a private, lurking future.

The hour’s arrived: Buy the boys

two tacos apiece, wipe sauce out of their hair,

toss them like spoons into sleep.

Yes, love, love, the same old bedtime story:

but say it again, who knows?—

joy might send up a flare

bright enough to read by, at least for a minute.

***

While trolling through some old unpublished poems, I found this piece, dated 2004. It has its flaws; but if nothing else, it captures those those days when I finally began to let myself go sentence-wise. That marked a big shift in my writing: the poems began to run, in ways they hadn't before.

[Newspapermen] did not feel it so necessary to assume an objective tone in our reporting [in the 1870s]. We were more honest and straightforward and did not make such a sanctimonious thing of objectivity, which is finally a way of constructing an opinion for the reader without letting him know that you are.

      --from E. L. Doctorow, The Waterworks


Beyond is a brightness
I am not equal to

Yet what I see
Turns into what I want

     --from Sophie Cabot Black, Bird at the Window


I'm not sure that these extracts have anything to do with one another, but both struck me this morning, as I sat here trying to forget how much of my day I've already devoted to dealing with an ear-infected poodle, a rascally cat, and an ex-mouse who spent his last hours dancing incontinently over my kitchen counters. [I wonder if I am the first person to turn "incontinent" into an adverb. I think I should also be the last.]

It's a cool morning: a scant 50 degrees and overcast, as usual. The angle of daylight is autumnal, and we've only reached the first of August. My feet are cold, and already I am thinking about firewood, yet the corn has only just now come into tassel and the tomatoes are still green.

Next weekend the boys and I are going to Vermont for a few days, to visit my family. Then J goes back to college, and P goes back to high school, and I begin another round of travel. First, I'll go to Star Island in New Hampshire to teach at a retreat, and then I'll go back to New York City. Yesterday I was invited to read at the Verdi Square Festival of the Arts, alongside a handful of my favorite poets. I am so pleased. I will go to the city by myself this time--nine hours south on two buses, a clutch of books on my lap. The leaves in the parks will be yellowing, and I will kick them with my boots. I have voyaged so much this season, as the weeds in my gardens will testify. But the travel has been good for me . . . my thoughts en route; my eyes, watching.

Someday I'll write poems again; I can feel them burgeoning. In the meantime I read and look out the window, and work on other people's manuscripts. I try to remind myself that editing is like playing scales: I may not be writing my own poems or essays, but I am thinking hard about writing. I am listening to sentence cadence and paragraph structure and line breaks and the breath of commas. I try to remind myself that all of this is nourishment. The paycheck is nourishment also.