And one morning in 1909, Marinetti's Futurist manifesto was published in Paris. The intellectuals opened the Figaro that morning, and there was this full page of authoritative promulgations. That said that the past was to be jettisoned. That Europe needed a new way of thinking. It was time to embrace steam and speed and power and war. The old ways were no good. Marinetti didn't use the word "fascism," but that's what it led to. Futurism led directly to Mussolini and Hitler. It also led to modern poetry. The two roads diverged, but not so much. There was in Marinetti's modernism a desire to stomp around heedlessly and a wish to sweep the counter clean. The ambitious guy poets really liked Marinetti.
And some of the girl poets liked the guy poets. Mina Loy, for example-that brilliant strange juxtaposer. She had her affair with Marinetti. As I've mentioned. And what happened then was that the gentleness, and the sharp eye, and the kind of lovely sexy anarchy of Mina Loy was conjoined with the machine-admiring bullying mechanistic destructiveness and manicness of Marinetti. And out of these two forces, Marinetti and Mina Loy, was begotten a young bully who talked loudly and sneered in public. His name was Ezra Pound. Sara Teasdale disliked Ezra Pound, and Ezra Pound disliked Sara Teasdale, so it was mutual.
And that's what I want to talk to you about. I want to clarify the sweep of it all. And the grandeur of it all. And the tragic waste of it all. The perversion of talents. The discouragement of gifts. The misapplication of energies. And even so, the flowering of some really nice poems along the way.
LITTLE INJURY TODAY, actually. I was carrying my computer downstairs in order to continue the cleanup of my office, which is progressing well, although slowly. I thought if I get my computer out of there-my big old computer, not my laptop-I'll be able to reach the next phase of cleaning. So I unhooked all the little machines that are connected to the big machine. I unhooked the power cord and the two external drives that I have, and the optical mouse with the little red eye in its belly, and the speakers, and the monitor, and the scanner, and the printer, and the keyboard, and I guess that's it. I looked at the USB cables dangling there, and I laughed pityingly at them, and I thought, Whoever designed the connector of the USB cable was a man who despised the human race, because you can't tell which way to turn it and you waste minutes of your tiny day, crouched, grunting, trying the half-blocked connector one way and the next.
So there I was. My computer was as if amputated-all of its ways of connecting to the world were gone, and it was just a black obelisk with a rich man's name on it. It couldn't reason, it couldn't speak, it was imprisoned in its frozen memories, its self was in a state of suspension. It could not add anything to what it had done, or remember anything that it had done.
I lifted it carefully and I said aloud in the room, "Man, this sucker's heavy." When you think that there are plenty of laptops for sale that do most of what this thing does. But it's still a good computer even now three years after I bought it.
So I carried it through various rooms, past various piles of books, and then I began walking down the stairs. And these stairs have something about them that makes me misjudge. Not for the first time I believed that my foot had reached the final stair when it hadn't. I thought I was stepping down onto the floor but really I had one step to go. So my foot came down twice as hard as it should have and eight inches lower than it should have, very heavily, and I was thrown forward by my out-of-balance, almost toppling, landing. I was really falling. If I dropped the computer I could catch my fall. But I didn't want to drop the computer. So I did a strange low dance of clutching the computer and running forward. I was like a mother chimp fleeing with her baby. I ran three forward-falling steps, and then my hand, holding the corner of the computer, collided with the edge of a doorjamb. I set the computer down hard. But I hadn't let it fall.
Immediately I thought I'd broken my finger, which was bleeding and had no sensation. I went into the kitchen and stood at the sink, and then I started to faint, so I went to the couch with some paper towels and lay down to bleed.
I held my hand in the air, and I kept testing my finger, wondering whether the bone in it was broken. I really didn't want to go to a doctor and have them say, Ah-hah, we'll X-ray it and give you a bone scan and a barium enema, just to be sure. No thank you. I have no health insurance. Death is my health insurance. So I lay there and breathed steadily, and after a while my finger stopped bleeding, and the feeling of mild shock passed, and my knuckle turned gray and then a bruised blue. And I knew that I was going to be fine, but that I might not be able to type for a while, which would give me a reprieve on writing my introduction. A great whimpery happiness passed through me like clear urine.
I COULDN'T THINK of who to call, so I called Roz's cellphone and told her I'd stumbled on the stairs, and she arrived amazingly quickly and pulled up a chair and took the bunched-up paper towels away and looked at my finger. She is very good at taking care of a person who has hurt his finger. She had brought some bandages, and she bandaged me up. She said, "You probably need stitches. I can take you to the hospital." I said no, no, I'll just let the skin do what skin does.
Then I said I thought I would take a nap. Roz patted my shoulder, which felt good. Then she walked Smack and left.
I lay there wondering why I had fallen. Why am I in such a rush? Why can't I just feel my way carefully down the last several steps? I've had problems with those steps before. You think the flat plane of the floor is there and your whole balance system has already compensated for the landing on the floor, and then it's not there, and you fall. It's a short fall, only eight inches, but it's a forward fall.
And what if I'd hit my head? I thought, Poor Edna. That was how Edna St. Vincent Millay died, falling down the stairs alone. She'd written that embarrassingly bad propaganda poetry during the war, and she knew her singing days were done. She was drunk, and I wasn't really. I'd just had two New-castles. Not drunk but not in a state of tip-top balance either. It's not good to live alone when you fall down the stairs.
Vachel Lindsay died on the stairs, too, more or less. After drinking poison, Vachel Lindsay staggered up the basement stairs. His wife called, Is everything all right? He said no. And when Vachel Lindsay died Sara Teasdale was heartsick, and she drugged herself one night in the bathtub.
I fell asleep for about an hour with my bloody finger on my chest. Fortunately it was my left index finger. There were some small cuts on my right hand, but they also had stopped bleeding. I looked at the cuts for a while before I went to sleep.
WHEN I FIRST started reading the Norton Anthology of Poetry in college, I thought, There's a problem here. There are too many poems about death. Death, churchyards, wormy cadavers. Death is really a small part of life, and it's not the part that you want to concentrate on, because life is life and it's full of untold particulars. For example, take my briefcase. Is there anything about death in my briefcase? Let me reach in, with my good hand, and I'll feel around. Ah: a raisin. Will you look at that dusty raisin? Actually it may be a dried cranberry.