#Owl diarie sign full
This has been an era full of contradiction, and one of the conflicting senses I have is of strange and unfamiliar loneliness, something having to do not just with being locked away from one another and our familiar lives and patterns so much in the last few years, but also with the deep divides in that “damp culture.” At the same time, the fact that everywhere in the world, we are experiencing this plague and its shape-shifting terrors as one species, has made me feel connected to everyone alive and/or who had ever lived (as James Baldwin once described feeling after reading Dickens and Dostoevsky). Once when I had to recite “The Fall of Rome” for Derek, I had gum in my mouth (I thought this wasn’t obvious! What?), and after I finished the poem, flush with the glory of not having missed a single syllable, Derek asked, “Were you auditioning for Guys and Dolls”? So take the risk, say the poem without any apology in your voice, without slouching, whispering, fluttering, or god forbid chewing gum. We are resuscitating what otherwise lies flat on the page when we bring it audibly into a room. Do you love a poem enough to commit every granular word and breath of it to your heart, and can you speak it with a depth of passion adequate to its life in the world? Are you apologizing for your work in the tone either of the work itself or your reading of it? We are keeping poems alive, both our own and those of others, when we speak or sing or shout them. But that investment, and that risk, were part of what Derek meant by love. We never wanted to be too wide-eyed, invested, or willing to sing poems, lest our emotional risks overwhelm or humiliate us. I remember, and can feel in the lines of both “Love After Love” and “Midsummer,” his belief that playwriting, too, was really just poetry on stage, and that poetry deserved to be read aloud, preferably without the sort of self-doubting irony that we thought essential to us as year-2000 poets.
He was not just funny and sometimes tyrannical, but also theatrical. Auden (“The Fall of Rome”), Thomas Hardy (“Neutral Tones”), and Edward Thomas (“The Owl”)? Terror inspired me so acutely that I still remember almost every line we had to stand in front of our desks like schoolkids and say the poems out loud with Derek stopping us over intonation, a missed word, a voice too quiet to honor its poet, an errant swallow. We memorized so many poems for Derek do you remember he would make us stand and recite Hart Crane (“The Bridge”), W.H. Poetry does this too, remains stable though changeable, designed as it is to articulate and accommodate irreconcilable contradictions, including exile, migration, and love. The shelving sense of home comes too fast, I think, for us to trust it, to think that home, even in the fleeting if lifelong container of the human body, is reliable. At the end, trundling tires will keep shaking and shaking the heart. Feast on your life,” there’s still embedded in that a disturbing suggestion of something other than wholeness. This floats up, too, as a record of what is lost, unstable, or coming apart: “the clouds will keep no record, nor the sea’s mirror, nor the coral busy with its own culture,” they “aren’t doors of dissolving stone,” leading to what is, but “pages in a damp culture that comes apart.” Even when we get a version of or gesture toward calm closure such as “sit. The very close rhymes in that poem-own, stone, Rome, known shadow and minnow regrets, minarets, and egrets-give a sense of landing, one if not of safety then at least of a pattern, something we recognize, expect, and come to want, only to land on a sharp, shaking, solo “heart,” at the section’s end. Sometimes rhyme feels like a salve, a lullaby gesture of order from the chaos of experience and language. Not to mention the (shared) almost pathological drive of writers to keep track, to make immortal what we know is begging to be broken or lost. His joking about identity and love also often took the shape of listing what things were not, delineating presence and absence, maybe a habit having to do with exile, the absence of a once-home, half-lost language, or the ephemera of all human lives. And humor was a sometimes funny, other times stormy force in his classroom and his work, too, for all its seriousness. The messiness seems to me a little about his sense of humor, which you capture in your letter, and which I haven’t seen noted that often in the world’s conversation about Derek. Derek loved an anapest, yes, an intentional yet surprising extra foot. That line from “ Midsummer ,” “the ooze and snarl of grumpiness embedded in a lovely line,” suddenly stands out to me in the context of your letter.
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