You can tell a lot about a poet by his or her first
loves as a reader of poetry, so by way of introduction I thought I’d recount my
first time reading a modern poet outside of Dr. Seuss, and describe my
subsequent obsession. I grew up in the
‘60s and ‘70s, in upstate New York, in a middle-class household devoid of
poetry. My father read Michener and
Ludlum, while my mother read Erma Bombeck and I’m OK, You’re OK. But, far
away, in the City (as we called New York), my great-aunt Leocadia adored poetry, as well as all the
arts. She had gone to Hunter College
just after the First World War and was what we called cultured; she even had,
my parents said, “real oil paintings” on her walls. Perusing the thin volumes lining her shelves when I was around
thirteen, I was drawn to the title Sea
Garden. I vaguely recalled from one
of my father’s out-loud New York Times
crossword sessions that H.D. was a poet’s abbreviated name. I opened to “Sea Rose”:
Rose, harsh
rose,
marred and with stint of petals,
meagre flower, thin,
sparse of leaf…
In
some inarticulate niche of my boy-brain, I knew that this was everything I
wanted in a poem, in a poet, in me. Of course I didn’t think of the stanzas as “Imagistic” or
“crystalline” (things one learns in college).
As hopelessly un-Modernist as it sounds, I dared for the first time to
feel fierce emotion and correspondence with another soul. In short, I
lusted. Her sounds, her rhythm and her
imagery made me want to run out to Jones Beach and roam the shore with her
voice in my head—or better, I wanted to run with this poet who could call a
rose “harsh,” wanted to be “flung on the sand” with that rose, with her. But the real question is this: How, in a world of Love Boat and Charlie’s
Angels, Saturday Night Fever and Last Tango in Paris, the Carpenters and
Janis Joplin, Jonathan Livingston Seagull
and Fear of Flying, did a teenage boy
get nailed by H.D.?