Louise Bogan was a tall woman. She read in a very formal manner, with an exaggeratedly correct upper-class accent. She says, "This, is Louise Bogan, and I'm going to read a poem called-" whatever. And then she reads it slowly, with great pauses. And it's very very compressed, and that's what I like about it, it's packed, it's like a shoe in a shoe tree. A Ted Roethke poem is like an empty shoe you find at the side of the road that some manic person has cast aside on a walk, but Louise Bogan's poems are like cared-for shoes in a closet, tight and heavy around their clacking wooden trees.
TODAY THE CLOUDS have been sprayed on the sky with a number 63 narrow-gauge titanium sprayer tip. I don't want to sit in the barn just now, so I'm sitting out near the "thorny brambles," as I call them. I know very little about them except that they grow and grow and that they cover the hillside now, and when I pass by them with my lawnmower buzzing they catch at my shirt and my arm with their remarkably hooklike sharp thorns. Roz says they're a species of rose.
I've done nothing all week. Had a call from Victor and talked more about the reading series. Measured Nan's room. Drove to Portland listening to a CD of Elizabeth Bishop reading "The Fish." Cried, beating the steering wheel, because she was so good and she sounded so young. Booped the horn by mistake. Apologized with hand gestures to people around me on Route 95. Toured the Longfellow house in Portland while a group of kids from poetry camp chanted, in unison, "I shot an arrow into the air." Thought I saw John Green-leaf Whittier lurking in the shadows of the dark Longfellow kitchen, studying the gnarled blue tree in a large china tureen. Nodded at him. Opened a very unpleasant bill on my return. Ate a sandwich at a cafe with a nice short woman I met at the video store. Threw out my jaw because the bread was so crusty. Agreed to review two books to raise money: one a book of the art of Boris Artzybasheff, a surrealist illustrator who painted a lot of covers for Time, and one an interesting book about steam trains and poetry in the nineteenth century. Am I becoming a critic? Fine, I don't mind.
Then yesterday, another minor adventure in self-mutilation. I'd bought a big round loaf of bread from the bakery, and I cut off the nub end of it, and I did not put butter on it. I have something quite remarkable to tell you about butter, but maybe that's for another time. Oh, might as well tell you now. Unsalted butter is flavored. For instance, I buy unsalted Land O' Lakes butter-but this observation applies to all major brands of butter-and I didn't realize this until Roz pointed it out a few years ago. Roz has very keen tastebuds. All unsalted butter has so called "natural" flavoring. Real butter is flavored with butter flavor. Just think about that. I didn't believe it till I read the ingredients. Butter-flavored butter. When you know that fact, you'll taste it and it'll drive you nuts. How long has this outrage been going on?
So I had a slice of bread, and a few calamata olives, and I started singing "Saved by a woman," by Ray LaMontagne, at the top of my lungs, while cutting a second slice, and I got a little jiggy with the bread knife, which is new and sharp with squared-off serrations, and I cut off a small dome of my fingermeat. It was very similar to cutting off the end of the loaf of bread, except that it hurt. I said some bad words and bled on the bread, and then I went upstairs to the bathroom and did my best to reposition the sliced-off part where it was supposed to go, and although the blood continued I was able to encircle the fingertip-my left hand's index fingertip- with two Band-Aids. It was the same finger that had crashed into the doorjamb, if you can believe it. I didn't call Roz because two cuts on the same finger is an embarrassment, and I've gotten quite good at self-Band-Aiding. I hope the skin is going to graft itself back on. I lay on my bed and stared at the ceiling, worrying about my credit-card debt and eating calamata olives. And now it's Thursday.
THURSDAY IS THE DAY of fear. On Monday you're in great shape because you've got the whole week. Then Tuesday, still pretty good, still at the beginning more or less. Then Wednesday, and you're poised, and you can accomplish much if you just apply yourself vigorously and catch up. And then suddenly, you're driving under that huge tattered banner, with that T and that H and that U and that frightening R and the appalling S-THURSDAY-and you slide down the steep slope toward the clacking shredder blades that wait on Sunday afternoon. Another whole week of your one life. Your one "precious life," as Mary Oliver says. You don't have too many Thursdays left. There are after all only fifty-two of them in the year. Fifty-two may sound like a lot, but when Thursdays come around, fifty-two doesn't seem like a lot at all. I just wish I had more money.
Karl Shapiro taught. Ted Roethke taught. Money is a problem. I think I'm going to have to start teaching again.
No, no, no, no, no. I can't. I can't teach. It killed me. Those nice kids stunned my brain. I'll never recover from that year. I can't do it again. Any fate is preferable. It was death on toast.
The first week I told them to memorize a couple of poems, and I said, Here's what a poem is. See this glass of water? This glass of water is an essay. Perfectly fine thing for it to be. A literary essay-a piece of "creative nonfiction." But dip a spoon in that glass of water and scoop some of it out and hold it over a hot fry pan so that a few drops fall and sizzle and quickly disappear. That's a poem. And they nodded. They got it. And while they nodded I remembered when my mother would lick her finger and then touch the iron and I'd smell the tiny innocent smell of her fried spit. I remembered how I really liked that smell. But I didn't tell them that. Because there are limits to what you can tell students. I just made a little drumroll on the table with my fists, and I said, So guys, I want you to get some poems by heart and I want you to rhyme me up some nice little sizzlers.
And they tried. They were eager kids. They worked at it. But they weren't rhymers. And this is what everyone who teaches poetry discovers. If you ask grade-school kids to rhyme, it may sound jingly, but it's an appealingly artless jingle. If you ask college kids to rhyme, however, they're going to sound awful. Because the percentage of genuine rhymers is tiny. If you ask them to write a poem that doesn't rhyme, on the other hand, it's not so clear that they lack the basal gift. They may come up with something that has a rawness and a quick quiet stab of honesty and even wit sometimes-if you don't ask them to rhyme. And so there you are, a person who has loved rhyme all your life, and what are you saying to the impressionable people you are teaching? You're saying, And remember-it doesn't have to rhyme.
So I learned that lesson first, and it was a painful one. But there was a larger unhappiness, too-a darker kind of knowledge that sprouted and blossomed and uncoiled its thorns in me over the semester. Which was that I was being paid to lie. My job was to lie very gently to these trusting, sleepy, easily wounded students, over and over again, by saying in all sorts of different ways that their poems were interesting and powerful and sharply etched and nicely turned and worth giving collective thought to. Which they were unfortunately not. One student wrote some good poems. And maybe she would go on to something, who knows? But most of them-no way. I remember one of her poems used the phrase "his goldfish hair."
So I was a professional teller of lies. And if I kept teaching, I would be telling more and more lies to more and more of these students, year after year. Soon they and their poems would merge. I pictured one of those pale inhuman computer-generated faces that you get if you superimpose a thousand real faces. All the individual voices in all of their individual poems would blend into one ghostly student megapoem-and it would float there, hovering, staring at me, waiting for me to tell it that it was good work. And I knew what the very first word of the megapoem would be. The first word would be: "I."