So, postpartum depression.

I think most writers probably suffer from it, but I didn't know that in 2004, when I published my first collection of poems. And it is possible that poets are particularly vulnerable to such melancholy. When you've worked as hard as you can to create something valuable yet you publish in a genre that has so few sales, so few reviews, so few readers, you're probably guaranteed a spate of after-publication sadness.

At least now, after three books, I'm experienced enough to expect gloom. But like a mother with a new baby, I still feel terribly guilty about it. Look! Here I am with a new book! Everyone wants to get published, and I've done it three times! Look at his beautiful fingers and toes! How lucky I am!

That sort of cheerleading doesn't help much with either a wailing, inconsolable infant or a box of unread poems. However, yesterday I did receive a note from my friend Angela. This is what it said:

“Yo, Shakespeare. Write an essay about unrequited love, false promises, fake IDs, blown head gaskets, radio late at night, sex with the same man after twenty-five years . . . you know.”

This seems like a good idea. I think I will.

One thing that persistently moves me about the Bate biography of Keats is the way in which the author deals forthrightly with the topic of ambition . . . not for prize or position, not for any exterior sign of success, which today seems to be the term's general connotation, but ambition for greatness, ambition to sit alongside Shakespeare and Milton.

Yet Bate doesn't perceive this ambition as hubris so much as an entirely sympathetic and even modest yearning. To a great extent this attitude has to do with the fact that he's writing about Keats, who really did have reason to yearn for greatness. But he also offers me latitude to acknowledge my own yearnings and fears. Why shouldn't I wish to be the poet that Milton was? That Keats was? Very probably I'm not. But why shouldn't I hope, and write like one who hopes?

from John Keats: A Biography

W. Jackson Bate

Whether we want it or not, the massive legacy of past literature is ours. We cannot give it away. Moreover, it increases with each generation. Inevitably, we must work from it, and often by means of it. But even if we resist paralysis and do try to work from and by means of it, the question at once arises, does the habitual (and almost sole) nourishment of the imagination by the great literature of the past lead to the creation of more poetry of equal value? . . . Keats . . . was to feel such apprehensions only too keenly. For the moment, we are only stressing that, much as Keats might wish to face common experience imaginatively and vividly throughout the next three years, his principal impetus, like that of most poets of the past century, was literary; and that still--with all the liabilities that this self-consciousness might imply--he managed to make headway, and at a sure pace. The magnetic appeal of Keats to every later poet is that somehow the dilemma is constructively put to use.

Yesterday I spent the morning teaching poetry at a central Maine middle school. For at least a decade the school's librarian has valiantly organized an annual Celebration of Reading, and for a few years I've been a regular presenter. It's a local gig, and only a half-day of work, and this year I had the pleasure of team-teaching with fiction writer Patrick Shawn Bagley. Yet despite those advantages, this is consistently one of the hardest gigs I do.

It's easy enough to run a good workshop when students and teachers are excited and involved. But year after year, the students in this school are quiet, stifled, repressed. By the end of the hour-long session, they begin to loosen up, but getting to the end of that hour can feel like the hardest work I've ever done. Meanwhile, the teachers, the students, my co-teacher watch me snarling myself into a mess. It's a bad feeling, but instructive . . . not just as a demonstration of the perils of the classroom but also as a reminder of the immensity of imaginative loss that can afflict an entire population. It's heartbreaking, really--a school, stocked with perfectly nice teachers and a decent building, that nonetheless year after year turns out students who don't know how to let their minds wander.

Having Patrick alongside me was good, for a number of reasons. He is a serious writer and reader in a genre that isn't mine, so we share a similar mission and mindset about the work but have disparate goals. He's also interested in being the kind of writing teacher whose focus is connecting the vocation with the human being--which is not a usual approach among people who are working with kids. Most importantly, though, his daughter attends this school. And he worries and cares, because this is his town, and her town. And despite all the ways in which we might love and respect the inarticulate difficulties of being citizens in Somerset County, when they begin to weigh down our own shining, curious, questing children, we are afraid.

Last week a correspondent from the Waterville Morning Sentinel sat at my kitchen table and interviewed me for a forthcoming article in the paper. Among other topics, she introduced activism: "Your work doesn't seem obviously activist," she said, and I felt surprised, and a little embarrassed about how insular my writing can be. No, I don't talk much about wars or oil spills or poisonous anti-intellectualism or human rights, though I'm distressed about them all, though I vote the straight bleeding-heart-liberal ticket. But as the reporter and I talked, I began to realize that, in fact, if I am an activist about anything, it's about these school writing workshops. When I have students who ask me, in all perplexed honesty, "Is it okay if I make this up?" . . . when I have parents who tell me, "I had no idea my daughter had so many feelings," I do see that the writing matters, that thinking matters, that the adventure of imagination matters.

So even though I kind of hate this middle school gig, I'll do it every year I'm asked: because if Patrick and I don't stand up in the middle of that room of silent children and say, "Hey, kids! Telling lies matters!" I fear that no one else will ever let them know.

from John Keats: A Biography

W. Jackson Bate

For a century and a half we have prated of folklore, tried to resurrect it, moaned the loss of its simplicities, and condemned our own lives as humdrum in comparison. We have praised the psychological clairvoyance of the traditional myth, and appeared to rejoice over its complex use, and reuse, in fiction, while, for all our talk, we have not seriously appeared to match it in real life; and indeed, if we do encounter it there, we may even feel embarrassed for a moment unless we can put it at arm's length while we get our bearings: we ourselves are genuinely moved, but fear that others will think us simple. Dickens, whose own early life is something of a counterpart to that of Keats, understood our divided natures. The affectations by which we complicate life for ourselves and others, feel that we ought to shun the familiar, and mince (in our approach either to art or social life) into what Johnson calls "the habitual cultivation of the powers of dislike," and "elegance refined into impatience," all appear on the large comic stage of Dickens. Against this plays the simple motif of the orphan of folklore, and we respond to it.

I'm reading a biography of Anne Sexton that I'm not certain I feel like reading anymore. This will be the third or fourth time I've read it, and I do like it: I do think the biographer is a broad and thorough writer, and I do care very much about Anne and her poetry, as well as my feeling, in general, about her generation of women poets--that they explicate my life as a daughter.

But I'm tired of the psychiatric overlay; I'm tired of the medical angle of poetry. And when I say I'm tired, I don't imply that I disbelieve in its necessity, or disbelieve in her illness, or disbelieve in the illness and distress of many people, writers and otherwise, myself and otherwise.

But somehow, that wasn't what I was searching for when I took the book off the shelf. Somehow, I wanted a vision of the ignited spark that isn't illness, that isn't therapy, that isn't erudition.

I suppose I wanted, in twentieth-century female form, what Keats knew how to say, but I look everywhere, and I don't know where to find it.

As to the poetical Character itself, . . . it is not itself--it has no self--it is everything and nothing--It has no character--it enjoys light and shade; it lives in gusto, be it foul or fair, high or low, rich or poor, mean or elevated--It has as much delight in conceiving an Iago as an Imogen. What shocks the virtuous philosop[h]er, delights the camelion Poet. It does no harm from its relish of the dark side of things any more than from its taste for the bright one; because they both end in speculation. A Poet is the most unpoetical of any thing in existence; because he has no Identity--he is continually in for--and filling some other Body--The Sun, the Moon, the Sea and Men and Women who are creatures of impulse are poetical and have about them an unchangeable attribute--the poet has none; no identity--he is certainly the most unpoetical of all God's Creatures. . . . When I am in a room with People if I ever an free from speculating on creations of my own brain, then not myself goes home to myself: but the identity of every one in the room begins to press upon me [so] that I am in a very little time annihilated--not only among Men; it would be the same in a Nursery of children.

[letter to Richard Woodhouse, October 27, 1818]

The weather here is like July in New York City--scorching days, sticky nights. My spinach plants are horrified, but the tomato seedlings are already in blossom.

Yesterday, for dinner, I invented cold carrot soup, topped with a salsa of hot pepper, cilantro, parsley, scallion, and lime. It was outstanding, should you ever want to try it yourself. The soup base contained peeled chunks of potato and carrot, plus some small chopped leeks, cooked in a light chicken broth (I'd poached chicken the night before, in water with bay leaf, thyme, and dried hot pepper) and seasoned with about a tablespoon of salt. Then I ran the cooked soup through a food mill and stuck it in the refrigerator for 6 hours or so. Just before serving I dropped a dollop of salsa into each soup plate. It was beautiful as well as delicious, and I was very pleased with myself.

Cooking has always been something I've taken to heart, though I have not always been a good cook and I still make notable mistakes--as with Saturday night's way-too-salty Asian noodles. It's interesting, though, how rarely I mention cooking in my poems and essays. Laundry tends to come up far more often. I wonder why.

After consulting my old 1937 Bartlett's, however, I discovered that other writers have not been averse to inventing epigrammatic opinions about cooks and cookery. According to Robert Burton (1577-1640), author of that gloomy tome The Anatomy of Melancholy, "Cookery is become an art, a noble science; cooks are gentlemen." But John Taylor (1580-1625), known for some reason as "The Water Poet," disagrees. He claims that "God sends meat, and the Devil sends cooks." Two centuries later, Edward Robert Bulwer Lytton (1831-1891), Earl of Lytton and Pal of Dickens, composed a remarkably wretched lyric on the matter:

We may live without poetry, music and art;

We may live without conscience and live without heart;

We may live without friends; we may live without books;

But civilized man can not live without cooks.

He may live without books,--what is knowledge but grieving?

He may live without hope,--what is hope but deceiving?

He may live without love,--what is passion but pining?

But where is the man that can live without dining?

Oy. I feel a certain Alexander Pope-style virulence coming over me, but I'll attempt to quell it. No one needs a thousand lines' worth of "The Cook's Rebuttal."

A Winter's Tale, Act 4, Lines 594-the End

Finally Paul and I have finished Act 4. It seemed to go on forever. Oh, those rude mechanicals, and how I hate that Clown (though possibly that's because Paul insists on reading his lines in a horrible loud flat nasal voice that makes him sound like Jerry Lewis). Autolycus, on the other hand, I do rather like. His speeches are fun to read and, interestingly, are among the few in this play (maybe the only?) that are set as prose rather than poetry. His tricky snideness is very enjoyable, as in this snappy comeback:

Clown: We are but plain fellows, sir.

Aut.: A lie: you are rough and hairy. Let me have no lying. It becomes none but tradesmen.

Also, he dearly loves flaunting his classy Florizel disguise: "Whether it like me or no, I am a courtier. Seest not the air of the court in these enfoldings? Hath not my gait in it the measure of the court? Receives not thy nose court-odor from me?"

Nonetheless, it will be a relief to escape from this shepherding and get ourselves back to Leontes' house in act 5.