The Millennial Pedestrian

Why do a poetry blog, anyway?

 
It seems so pointless. I’m not known in the wider literary world so people will not be seeking the John Schenck poetry blog just to find out what the master has penned this week. It’s really just for me, I think – to provide a nice-looking setting for old and new poems that I can let friends know about. Along the way I want to share my enthusiasm for poets whose work I admire, or for poems I’ve read recently that have excited and/or moved me.

Here’s a fragment from a poem by W.S. Merwin, “Berryman.” John Berryman was a mentor of Merwin’s at Princeton, and this is his advice to Merwin:

“you can’t you can never be sure
you can die without knowing
whether anything you wrote was
    any good
if you have to be sure don’t write.”

So there it is. It’s not because I have to be sure. I guess the reason why I do this is because even though I have NO IDEA if my poems have any real merit, writing them is something I need to do, and I need to have someone other than myself see them.

And it’ll be OK if I die without knowing.

    *****************

On the subject of dying, and knowing, here’s a poem by Stephen Dunn, about both subjects, and about telling the truth about what you know.

On the Death of a Colleague

She taught theater, so we gathered
in the theater.
We praised her voice, her knowledge,
how good she was
with Godot and just four months later
with Gigi.
She was fifty. The problem in the liver.
Each of us recalled
an incident in which she’d been kind
or witty.
I told about being unable to speak
from my diaphragm
and how she made me lie down, placed her hand
where the failure was
and showed me how to breathe.
But afterwards
I could only do it when I lay down
and that became a joke
between us, and I told it as my offering
to the audience.
I was onstage and I heard myself
wishing to be impressive.
Someone else spoke of her cats
and no one spoke
of her face or the last few parties.
The fact was
I had avoided her for months.

It was a student’s turn to speak, a sophomore,
one of her actors.
She was a drunk, he said, often came to class
reeking.
Sometimes he couldn’t look at her, the blotches,
the awful puffiness.
And yet she was a great teacher,
he loved her,
but thought someone should say
what everyone knew
because she didn’t die by accident.

Everyone was crying. Everyone was crying and it
was almost over now.
The remaining speaker, an historian, said he’d cut
his speech short.
And the Chairman stood up as if by habit,
said something about loss
and thanked us for coming. None of us moved
except some students
to the student who’d spoken, and then others
moved to him, across dividers,
down aisles, to his side of the stage.

 

 

 

 

This entry was posted on Thursday, February 9th, 2006.
It's part of the Prose category.
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