The other is about a poet who was a teacher of mine--
John Berryman.
And the title of the poem is simply "Berryman."
He was a teacher when I was 19.
I have to tell you that.
"I will tell you what he told me in the years just
after the war, as we then called the Second World War.
Don't lose your arrogance yet, he said.
You can do that when you're older.
Lose it too soon and you may merely replace it with vanity.
Just one time he suggested changing
the usual order of the same words in a line of verse.
Why point out a thing twice?
He suggested I pray to the Muse, get down on my knees
and pray right there in the corner.
And he said he meant it literally.
It was in the days before the beard and the drink,
but he was deep in tides of his own
through which he sailed chin sideways
and head tilted like attacking sloop.
He was far older than the dates allowed for.
Much older than I was.
He was in his 30s.
He snapped down his nose with an accent
I think he had affected in England.
As for publishing, he advised me to paper my wall with rejection
slips.
His lips and the bones of his long fingers
trembled with the vehemence of his views about poetry.
He said the great presence that permitted
everything and transmuted it in poetry was passion.
Passion was genius, and he praised movement and invention.
I had hardly begun to read.
I asked, how can you ever be sure that what you write
is really any good at all.
And he said, you can't.
You can't.
You can never be sure.
You die without knowing whether anything you wrote
was any good.
If you have to be sure, don't write."