Lately I’ve been in a frenzy of contest-entering and
publisher-nudging, having completed a second manuscript of poems. But the sense
of pride and relief that comes with finishing a project knowing you’ve done
your best is fretfully short-lived. All the focus on the work itself, on its
integrity as a little universe of logic and emotion, now changes direction. It
shifts to the larger world. Which
contests are open now? Which presses are accepting manuscripts? Do I have a
chance with this press? Can I afford the entry fees? Has my writing evolved?
Will I make a fool of myself?
All this planning and plotting and talking up my work has
left me feeling a wee bit dirty. If I were more talented or more well read—maybe
more thoughtful—I’d be rolling up my sleeves and starting a new project.
Instead I feel creatively bankrupt.
As luck would have it, I took part in tributes to two poets
last week: James Merrill and Adrienne Rich. An odd couple to be sure. These
were separate and very different events, yet they both brought me out of myself
and reminded me of the importance of a gyroscopic view. By this I mean that I’m
not just of this current time and place in history, writing for (and sometimes
in reaction to) my peers. I’m also a single link in a long chain of poets, some
of whom I recognize as having influenced my work, others whom I’ve read and
passed by, still others whose poems I’ll never know because they’re no longer
being read. All of this seems so beyond my control, and yet I realize that by
reading another poet’s work, by speaking of it– or better, speaking the work
itself, my little link in the chain does the job it’s there to do.
What better way to step away from myself and my times than
to pay tribute to another poet?
The tribute to
Merrill came about when Spencer Reece, who has been living in Spain for a
couple of years as a newly ordained Episcopal priest, contacted me with a
proposal that he give a reading in Merrill’s apartment, now a writer’s
residency. Spencer asked to read not from his forthcoming collection of poetry,
but from a draft of a short piece of prose he’s been writing about the four
poets he believes have been most important to him. Reece calls the pieces “devotionals.”
In his devotional to James Merrill, who he met toward the end of Merrill’s
life, Reece recounted Merrill’s encouragement even as he approached a painful
death from AIDS, which was kept secret at the time. Merrill’s willingness to engage
with a young writer in the face of his own end, said Reece, has had a profound
effect on Spencer Reece’s work and life.
The other tribute was organized by my friend, the
poet-journalist-activist-fireball Bessy Reyna. Bessy put out an appeal to a
broad group of poets in CT and MA, asking if anyone was interested in reading
Rich’s work for a group tribute at the Charter Oak Cultural Center in Hartford.
Seventeen of us read—women and men, gay and straight, varying races, varying
politics—and Rich’s son Pablo drove up from Brooklyn to join us. I’d never
counted her among my favorite poets or my influences, but I realized that night
how much of Adrienne Rich’s work is present in so many poems written by
American poets over the last few decades. Her images and cadences have been
sifting onto our common ground. It felt good to learn once again that influence
is more complicated, more mysterious, than I’d let myself think.
Photo credit goes to Doug Anderson for the shot of Spencer
Reece and his parents in the Merrill House. Photo credit of the group tribute
to Adrienne Rich goes to Pit Pinegar. Organizer Bessy Reyna is in the front row
center. Rich’s son Pablo Conrad kneels at the end of the first row.