REED WHITTEMORE: Edgar Allan Poe said that long poems aren't
any good.
I mean, short poems--
he said that short poems aren't any good.
And then he turned around and said that long poems aren't
any good.
And long poems aren't any good, because they're
too long, and short poems, and so on.
So he settled on 100 lines as the perfect poem.
And he ended that all the time.
Well, I can't do that.
I don't think I have any poems 100 lines long.
But I'm going to change now, over
to a long poem, which he would disapprove of as much as the
short.
This poem is really a kind of an essay poem.
It's the kind of thing which I've gotten
pretty interested in lately.
I don't know quite why.
The lyric has its limits when you get older.
And I've always found the essay form on the one hand,
very congenial, and the lyric form on the other,
very congenial.
But what do you do when you want to do both?
So as I've experimented in the last year or two,
I've tended toward longer, more descriptive things,
which are kind of in between.
And here's the poem, which is in the form of a letter.
I think the letter form is very nice.
My little son wrote that letter to Dear Santa.
I really am interested in the letter form as a medium
to make verse more colloquial.
So this is a letter to God.
But don't let that scare you.
It's really not.
Well, yes it is.
Anyway, it's a letter to God.
And I wrote that at the MacDowell Colony too,
it's quite a good place to write a poem.
"Dear God, though I know you're a bad correspondent,
I've decided to write you.
Do with my words what you will.
Do you have a file?
Then don't imagine me sitting down here
pining away for an answer.
It's not that kind of letter, but a common poetic
trick you would know about if you kept up,
for talking at large to one's self, without feeling ill.
A number of other poets have tried such things, whose names I
won't mention, and not one of them
would have been happy with your reply, nor I. So don't worry.
I'll do the worrying about you, and art, and man, especially
man.
You fly your atoms.
Your sun is coming up now after a drab dawn.
My dog is out on the steps eating a soldier, plastic.
I feel headachy, constipated, mildly depressed, dull.
As usual, I'm at my desk, looking north at a blank wall
for art's sake.
Art being what many walls and other uninterrupted densities
are for: to turn the eyes back in boredom
to the more or less boring self, where the treasure-- if there's
a treasure-- lies, if it hasn't been stolen,
waiting for Tom Sawyer, who doesn't
exist, to come along with a chart with an x on it
and dig up.
Out past the wall is a pretty thick stand
of pine, which makes a good wall, too.
My acres are jammed with artists.
Most of them younger, armed with palettes and Steinways,
looking at walls.
I wish them good hunting.
I envy them some.
I suppose I'd trade walls or cells with any of them
in a minute, if asked, so I could
write a big lovely ode or sonata to treasurable me.
Not asked, I must sit here, self old,
and try to take solace from the knowledge
that at least my wall has little of me left behind it.
One can't make an easy living exploring
the self, that's for sure.
Which may be the reason such explorations enchant
us so much, too much.
We take a big healthy hunk of artist,
who likes to talk, drink, make love, play tennis, and so on.
What do we tell him?
We make him a patient.
We say, you need to be alone desperately.
You need privacy.
Take a month.
Take two, three.
Get away someplace.
New Hampshire's nice.
Get away, and get to it.
Write, paint, sculpt, create, create.
And of course, he does get to, like mad.
Who wouldn't?
The woods are lovely, dark, deep.
Just dandy in every respect, except for the life in them
becomes a kind of irrelevance, or a sigh.
The patient is well, perhaps even happy, but just barely
breathing.
These are all art, and his art is all art and shows it.
Sometimes, fed up, he thinks he'd be better off--
though he wouldn't be--
if he set up shop in the middle of some city sidewalk.
At least he'd be looking at people, other people.
The self gets so tiresome, as your son
and a number of other religious leaders have pointed out.
I should tell him, I should join with them, perhaps.
Sign on the dotted line, be part of a lump,
piously anonymous, selflessly sacrificial,
forgiving, and not writing.
For I wouldn't write then, not a bit.
Art, at least American art, and this is the curse of it,
derives its force mostly from those
who'd be gods on their own.
We're lucky, of course, terribly lucky to be so well fixed,
that playing at God isn't necessarily mad, paranoid.
That perhaps we'd be luckier less lucky.
I don't mean salt mines.
I don't mean schools of hard knocks, every poet boy a paper
route.
Though I must say that as I get older and they get younger,
they keep looking softer and softer to me, more parasitic.
What I mean is that if there had been no woods, no ready refuge
for our artists, if the chance for seclusion, separation,
removal had never been dangled, then we
wouldn't be stuck with our God myth.
Our art would be different.
We'd be happily adjusted little social slaves,
busily creating lovely works of engagement,
like a good slave should, rather than woods work.
So here I am chomping for slavery?
Well, poor thing, she's had a bad press lately.
The press is free, except when it's tied up.
So are students and dogs.
I'm free.
We're all free, except mostly.
Free not to go to church, free to vote for Johnson,
free to smoke, though they're working on that,
free to write naughty words, so we hate slavery.
But the rhythm of things is slave, good or bad, but slave.
An artist without the rhythm, trapped in his free woods,
is a fortunate lost soul in an absolutely
top-notch, first-class, free Siberia,
with the Constitution and the Supreme Courts slaving
over time to keep him there.
And the big foundation spending all sorts of money
to keep him there.
Keep him off the rhythmical beat for his own sweet sake, who
most needs to be, in the name of freedom.
Enough.
I can hear 47 congressmen asking me cuttingly
if I'd live in the real Siberia by choice.
Of course not.
I can't speak the language.
I don't know a soul there.
I couldn't get my car repaired.
And you know how cold it gets.
Cold, cold for the cell, slavery,
that many, many the slave places south of Siberia,
and many of the cold ways to those cold places, war,
for example.
There's a war bumbling near right now, as always, the war.
And can the self keep clear?
It can sit-in, sit down, lie in, lie down,
march in front of the White House, make speeches.
But when the war comes, if it comes, with the solemn
Pentagon faces crowding the papers like a locust plague,
and everyone climbing, cocky, to defend to the death of self
from its unredeemable enemies in our nearly-eternal horse opera,
then toodle, toodle, bang, pop.
The ships, troops, guns, bombs, savings bonds, and casualties
take over and darken the landscape.
And not the tiniest self in the smallest,
artiest, most New-Hampshirian hole can keep clear.
Self in a war?
There's vanity just thinking it.
And as to that breezy, happy, pastoral alternative, peace,
imagine a bright, blue day, a justice day, a right day,
a day when a bruised peach would go to court,
and the patrons of art are out on the streets
commissioning portraits for upstairs halls,
plays for long riviera yacht trips,
while Shakespeare pans out alarmingly from Central Park,
and General Motors buys a controlling
interest in the Association of Literary Magazines of America.
Imagine that blue, blue day and the self with its wall,
staring all day into blankness, then tearing up paper,
blackening canvases, fiendishly chopping up
granite in sheer impotence.
Imagine it grinding home in your loveliest sunset
to kick the dog in the yard and blow down the pretty home--
woof!
--with the children inside with TV and the wife in the kitchen.
Pow!
And have a quick 6 drinks and rage off to a bad movie
to return again, again to clamber all lonely into its bed
where it falls asleep reading a roadmap.
You're really quite lucky, you know, not to look like a king
anymore.
If you did, I would hold you responsible for these
ambiguities in what might have been a nice, clean,
well-lighted place, with the self competing trumpeting out
of the jukebox at 2:00.
And society's slavery, responsibility at 3:00,
'round the clock.
A pleasing alternation, peacefully handled, no factions,
disputes, everyone awfully polite,
ladies and anarchists dancing.
As things stand, when your moon goes over,
and your sun, and the shelf items click into position,
the sunflower, leaf, cloud, woodchuck,
the self, in its freedom, can slave
at its own absurdity at such depths
that in such imperial darkness, Liberty Hall,
as any old Egyptian slave master would gawk at,
or you, for that matter.
Enough.
I'll write you a book later.
It's too muggy now.
All the bits and pieces of nature,
that in a better world than this one would be yours,
are indefinite at the edges.
I can see no artists at all.
But I know that they're out there, struggling
against the heat in the walls to retain their integrity,
which some of them know, and some of them don't know,
that they can't possibly keep.
But going hard at it anyway, as I am.
I don't know what else to tell you.
I look all around me and inside, and I'm shamed, mostly.
Not by country, or freedom, not by congressmen--
them I'll put in the book--
but by the spectacle of the self.
The pompous self, the minuscule godlet,
strutting behind the wall, and with unmitigated gall,
surviving, thriving, bragging, beating his chest, despite all.
Dear God, could you bless him?"