On Reading These Pages

I have placed the poems and the essays about them in the chronological order in which they were written and in which I sent them out.

There is no reason for you to read the pages chronologically.  Read any poem and its accompanying essay any time you want to.

I would suggest you don’t skip over, forever, poets you may never heard about.    For a similar reason, I would suggest you don’t skip over poets you may have encountered before and whom you believe you understand.  If we want to grow, and I profoundly believe poems can help us grow, we must be prepared to encounter not only the new, but also to reconsider things we take for granted. One of my favorite lines of literary criticism comes from a dense book by the French critic Roland Barthes: “Those who refuse to reread are doomed to read the same text everywhere.”  Barthes understood that whenever we think we know things, we close off our minds.  Daniel Kahneman, a Nobel laureate in economics, in his Thinking Fast and Thinking Slow shows us, time and again, how profoundly true this can be.

In a majority of instances, I have not addressed the most famous or even the very most accomplished poems by a poet.  I’ve looked for works that are interesting, and most specifically for poems that provide a ‘way in’ to a poet who might otherwise seem strange or even unapproachable.  In very few cases – William Wordsworth, Gwendolyn Brooks, Elizabeth Bishop – I have taken on poems that are among their most well-known.  In some cases of lesser-known poets, such as Mayakovsky, Ammons, Cavafy, Hayden, I have addressed what I think are among their best poems, but then, I imagine some of those poets are going to be entirely new to you. 

And in still other cases, like Williams and Neruda and Dickinson and Baudelaire and Heaney and Dickey, the poems are not their most famous or even their very best: well, I think they are among their best, but if you look at critics and professors and even lovers of poems, the poems I have chosen are not on their list of all-time hits.

So read around in any fashion you want.  Don’t feel compelled to start with Eugenio Montale and work your way through to the last poet in these pages.   Maybe you want to read one letter one week, another letter the next day or next week or next montht?  Whichever letter appeals to you at the moment. 

If I were reading these pages  instead of writing them, I would probably, it being my leaning, start with poems that are shorter.  Or essays that are shorter.  Edgar Allen Poe wrote, famously,

If any literary work is too long to be read at one sitting, we must be content to dispense with the immensely important effect derivable from unity of impression. . . . What we term a long poem is, in fact, merely a succession of brief ones . . .

Like Poe, I go for short.  In his essay purporting to be about how he wrote his poem, “The Raven” he says he intended to write a poem of 100 lines.  For me, that is way too long.  Though, of course, you will find some poems in this book that are a good bit longer.  As they say, rules are meant to be broken.  (As I kept writing, often longer poems appealed to me.  Hmmmm.  Maybe not the best strategy.)

My son David told me I had too many parentheses and that I should use footnotes.  He said that the parentheses were interesting but they were not always to the point.   I suppose he is right, so I have decided to use footnotes.  To my mind, the greatest footnote ever is the one Walt Whitman’s appended to his first page when he published his diaries, in a book called Specimen Days[1].

All of this is meant to say: ramble through these pages in any fashion you want.  You knew that already, although most authors seem to indicate without ever saying so that rambling is not permissible.  They seem to quietly urge us to follow this directive, ‘I wrote this and want you to read it, every word, from start to finish.’ 

Not here.  Let me close with the wonderfully quotable Yogi Berra, a baseball ballplayer who became a source of folk wisdom.  He once said: “If you don't know where you are going, you might wind up someplace else.” 

So go ahead without knowing where you are going.  The ‘someplace else’ will be, I hope, both marvelous and delightful.

Footnotes

[1] Here is how it ends: “ I suppose I publish and leave the whole gathering….to symbolize two or three specimen interiors, personal and other, out of the myriads of my time, the middle range of the Nineteenth century in the New World; a strange, unloosen’d, wondrous time.”  Wow. “A strange unloosen’d, wondrous time.”  Writing doesn’t get any better than that.  What I am saying is that footnotes can be great but can also be skipped.  A nice combination for the reader.