Only one order came from a poet whose name I knew. Her tone was aggressively interrogative, wondering just exactly who was selling the books. “It’s only me!” I wrote back — though she had a right to be indignant, being a midcareer sort of poet, like me, a member of the tribe with whom my trade ought to have been as gift. And my husband asked if I worried about cheapening myself. (Exactly what does it mean, “cheapen myself”? We do not want to be our mere Ford Pinto versions. But I’m already a Ford Pinto sort of person, given to breakdowns and liable to explode.)
Poets generally delude themselves into thinking they are not selling anything, though books are objects to be sold, no escaping this base fact unless we throw our pages into brooks, as the great haiku writers of ancient Japan supposedly did. There’s also a blind spot in thinking about poems as being offered completely free, and that blind spot is—oh, right—posterity. Though the two poets singled out in The Gift—Ezra Pound and Walt Whitman — never made much money, both did obsess about the long haul and massaged their legacies in the most P. T. Barnum-esque ways. For one’s poem to catch enough wind to get blown into the future: this is the biggest of the bucks, the ultimate payoff.
Yet the boundary between gift and commerce can sometimes be wiggly, like when I gave more copies of my book to the used bookstore (because they’re sold out, success making commerce a smidgen less awkward) in exchange for store credit. And my encounter with the yard sale — hosting poetry reader also gives me the idea that I might have to rearrange my thinking about who comes from my tribe and who is a stranger. Indeed, various efforts have been made recently to pound a few holes through poetry’s garden wall. One was undertaken by the former laureate Robert Pinsky: nonpoets were videotaped reading their favorite poems. These videos were then digitally archived and broadcast on public television (although public TV itself is an insular, some might say hoity-toity, world).
And here Lyndon Johnson returns to haunt us, in the form of his boyish press secretary, Bill Moyers, who has produced documentaries about contemporary poetry, again for the viewers of public TV. I taught for the first time at a summer writing conference shortly after the first of these shows were broadcast, and the other (more famous) poets dismissed the way they thought their art was being milled to pabulum for the public. Using The Gift to analyze their response to Moyers’s efforts, I might say they felt threatened by the way that tribal membership was being opened up to outsiders.
Other wall-holes have been punched by the American Poetry and Literacy Project, which has left thousands of free poetry books in public settings. Its catalyst was Joseph Brodsky, another former laureate, who wrote an essay that was delivered before the Library of Congress and later reprinted in the New Republic, in which he chastised America for letting its great poetry languish. “At the very least,” he wrote, “an anthology of American poetry should be found in the drawer in every room in every motel in the land, next to the Bible, which will not object to this proximity, since it does not object to the proximity of the phone book.” Later, this intimacy took a dimensional leap when the APLP caused poems to appear in the phone book itself.
Just as the human brain evolved with the talent of memory, it evolved with the capacity to forget as another survival trick. So I am quickly forgetting my vulgar attempt at sales, and I thought I would write about it before it slips from my head completely. All in all, I figure I sold forty books, and those I have left seem ripe for some sort of ecological building technique, as old tires have been used to make houses (once I rode on a plane next to a couple returning from a class about how to build these “earth arks,” whose design had been pioneered by a forgotten TV star). I’ve also thought of giving the books away to try to rehabilitate the spirit of the gift, but I don’t want to irritate the people who’ve already sent me twelve dollars. Plus, I have the sneaky and heart-crushing suspicion that I might have a hard time even giving away a poetry book.
Money is like sex in this particular American eddy in which we swirl. We post its icons everywhere, yet we do not consider it good form to talk about either subject in specific terms (as in the matter of tampons, our ads will never utilize the fine word blood).
As far as cheerleading goes, by my junior year I’d quit, because my “consciousness had been raised,” as we said back then, and cheerleading had come to seem frivolous when so many pages of history were being written and college students were being gunned down by the National Guard on their baseball diamonds. Also, in those days it was not good form for cheerleaders to have hair on their legs, and I was letting mine grow in protest of the razor’s tyranny.
KNOWLEDGE GAME: Bats
1
The bats slice through the neighborhood, over the food coop on Rogers Street, navigating by the tallest trees. The sky has to have reached a certain color, all the egg-blue drained but the indigo not yet lit up: the bats emerge during the silver tones. They come from chimneys farther west, or from the cracks underneath loose shingles of the few old bungalows that remain unbulldozed up on Cooper Point. Most of them bypass the forest belt that drops eastward down the ravine, the trail there stair-stepped and impassable to me. Instead, the bats take the straight shot of the road, heading south, steering around the corner where Rogers makes a jog. They aim for the giant Douglas fir by the park bench that isn’t there anymore because it was stolen.
That’s where we wait, Sandra and I, a bit uphill, so we can see a big wide sweep of sky. But when they come — on schedule — the bats do not take this path of open air. Instead, they cut across a laundry line in the backyard of the stucco house with the roof curved like a saddle.
The big brown bats come first, flopping like large awkward moths. Then the little brown bats arrive in greater numbers, flying faster and with more grace. They turn ninety degrees into the alley as if they were traveling by map, sometimes at the level of our knees or heads. In the dim light, their bodies blur as they jerk up and down with each wing stroke — that’s how you tell them from birds. Then they vanish down the alley like a gust of wind that came from a fire, specked with ash.
Sandra lies on someone’s lawn, and I’m trying to figure out a comfortable way to use my elbow as a pillow as I look up from the wheelchair. I’m thinking about climbing down from it, so that I too can luxuriate as the stars sift their dust down. But I notice that she hasn’t volunteered to help me up. The problem is that we met when I was young and she was middle-aged, and now I’m middle-aged and she is too old for such lifting. Time shuttles us from station to station like a train, and I wonder how it does the job so quietly, without the start-up moan and the screech of brakes.
In between corkscrewing my head up like a parrot, I look at the ground wistfully. Still no offer from my friend, whose getting old irks me, though she did identify every flower along Rogers Street to make sure I noticed it. How I irk her in turn is by never being able to accept what’s presented as good enough. Rogers Street has thrown itself into one last gasp of blossoming, and Sandra’s been trying to teach me the scientific names of ornamental flowers. The point of these knowledge games is: to have the now get large.