A primal scene: I’m set up in McDonald’s, age 10 or 11, too old for the Happy Meal unpacked in front of me. Dad says the price is not to be passed up. The blue swirl of evening settles over the office park across the street––in its inner courtyard a koi pond with a mixed record of keeping its fish alive. My brother is shaking the gumball machine to free a stuck quarter and somehow comes back with a stack of them. Later he’s hashing Metal Gear strategy with a cashier. Dad slips liquor in his soda and absconds to the bathroom for what would’ve registered as a long time had I been paying attention. The three of us are like distant plants tethered in loose orbit. We seem to be on the lam from something unnamed––a more upright mode of life, maybe from my mom. An R&B song is piped in alongside the conditioned air. I’m in the grip of an agenda I don’t understand. What gets me about the song is how weird it sounds, as though totally foreign. The words are basic English but they mean nothing I can make out. I wondered about the name for its mood, wondered what would make someone feel it. The mechanical light was clean and even and you could see everything in it. You could keep receiving it and it wasn’t depleted.
There was a stuffed boar we had to deliver to a ranch house on the edge of town by day’s end (dad was a taxidermist in his own employ). The tusks were such that the trunk wouldn’t shut so he fastened it with a strap, stuck a caution flag out the back, and chose a booth from which the car was in view. But this is immaterial to my concern here. I want to stay with first things, with the eye working on the world of objects, with my mere inhabiting of space and time. Through the window the late sun ebbs out of the cloudbanks, monumental and amorphous, lucent as though coated in gloss. (I’ve been told to keep eyes on the open trunk.) Something lifts me from the vapid baseline. In whatever feral diction I formulate that the sky is alive. The customers had become marionettes, animated by distant and impersonal forces. It’s clear now the song is just sentimental propaganda. But the people and background sound no longer interest me. I have no idea what’s happening in my heart except that the glittering light is its outward image. I’m doing what? I’m doing nothing. I’m watching and thinking (though I recall no thoughts, though I see only what’s there, which isn’t much).
But that’s not true. Because I’m holding a line of words in my head, a little resonant thread, just something I’d made up––I won’t bear the embarrassment of sharing it. This is only an ordinary evening in the twilight of empire, in that listless interval before the end of history was swapped out for its classic form, the end of the world. (You see how my educated voice ventriloquizes my earlier selves, as though it knew the truth of their experience.) Here’s the part I don’t know how to say: that something radiant was woven in the boredom, that even this dumb place was riven with dull magic. I felt maybe I could work the glowing strand if somehow it landed in my hand. Everything in this tangle of light and trash called the world waited to be set into order, order in which the mind or soul or whole self would find rest. I would’ve said it some basic way. It seems insane now, the hope that the whole scene might be healed by a form of attention, by a phrase turning over on the tongue, not yet even passed between persons, just a latent power posed on the lips. The leap––intuitive, untutored––was to believe I knew the name for this wish: poetry, a category about which I then knew almost literally nothing.
We walked out to the car and I fingered my plastic trinket. My bro had a wad of gum in his cheek and cheat codes scrawled on a napkin. Dad reached for his keys and a small pipe fell out of his pocket––the bright green plastic of a toy. But already I was somewhere else, in some inner empire, speaking above my station, throwing my voice beyond what I knew, as though the words had been lent to me, and not for the last time.
I harbored my idea unspoken for some years before I saw the chance to act on it directly. The school librarian was nice and seemed to like me. I checked out the collected poems of the woman I’d come to call the Beautiful Suicide and returned it the next day. The book left no apparent impression but the next week (for reasons I can’t recapture) it was back in my hands, a fresh due date stamped on the gatefold. I read it two and then two dozen times. The initial inspiration had been the librarian’s rather than my own, but despite the delay the medicine had its intended effect. (I later realized that in her eyes I was already a type, or aspiring to one, and maybe she wasn’t wrong.) In any case I now possessed a map of savage and extravagant emotion derived from apparently banal circumstances, as my life was banal.
On my second or third pass through the book I noticed something curious: handwriting on a blank back page. Tact forbids me from reproducing it here. It was a lineated thing just short of a sonnet, flitting between the discursive aims of a suicide note and a poem. I showed it to a friend who offered a single word (“intense”) before her interest moved immediately on and I was left to process my oddly charged reaction alone. The brief voyeuristic novelty gave way to simmering revulsion. Unlovely as it is to admit I hated the poem, both for its jejune effects and the property damage to which it owed its existence. The hatred served to counteract a submerged worry: how could I be sure I wasn’t her––aestheticizing my pain in a ploy for attention or dignity, asking an audience to suffer my problems second-hand, to be impressed at how well I’d decorated my wounds? And if so, the honesty of my intentions, my meaning it––what good were these? The represented pain’s basis in real pain––so what? If the note’s writer were so interested in her own erasure she might begin by not spilling her complaint into the books of others, defacing what was to me a totem of alienated dignity. If she felt the need to end herself at least she could refrain from doing so in the direct path of my poetic apprenticeship.
I felt hellfire might descend for my disparaging of female feeling. I mean maybe this girl was a suicide and not just someone trying on a dire look. But if so my solemnity wouldn’t save her. Moreover, writing in a library book amounted to a mode of publication, a play for an audience at once imagined and real. The project was therapeutic, of course, but the implicit cure was publicity as much as expressive catharsis. The poet didn’t wish for the cup to be taken from her hand but lifted to the light. I suspected that secretly she liked the taste of this abasement, that she hoped her harshest ideas about herself were true. Obviously I knew the lure of self-laceration, the wish to be made real by the gaze of others, to advertise my privacy, but in the moment my fledgling identity as a poetry person depended on establishing a narcissistic difference from the sad girl and her shit poem.
The issue at hand was the failure of influence. The Beautiful Suicide is what my rival had read and the handwritten verse what she’d produced in imitation or reply. The influence, in an inverse way, was also mine: I committed the poem to memory and carried it with me as a contraindication of the true path, humming it like an anthem of failed feeling as I wended the tame gauntlet of the my late girlhood. I sought criteria by which to discern the thing I was after from its false replicas. I ripped the handwritten page from the book and set it next to the first “real” poem in the collection so as to compare. I copied the words from both and laid them side by side in lists: nouns, adjectives, verbs. An instructive undertaking, it turned out, offering an insight so basic as to be rarely spoken aloud, that some words are better than others.
In hopes that her secret would be released to me I read every book I could find about the Beautiful Suicide, among them a collection of essays sent over from a satellite branch of the public library. It was on the inner flap of the dust jacket that I first glimpsed the Venerable Owl, the book’s editor, staring out of his photo into the fathomless distance. Though the image was a decade or two out of date, death had already made inroads on him. He was soft-eyed and slumped, his face a screen on which what was lapsed and alive coexisted in shifting patterns. In the photo he looked morose, but the first feeling that emerged from his writing was meanness. In a two-page introduction he wrote that the Beautiful Suicide was “scarcely to be described as more than sincere”; her mass appeal was undeniable but her accomplishment had the depth of celebrity; “these [were] poems for people who don’t read poems,” adored because they supplied a dazzling martyr to the dominion of men; they were “bad for the soul….giving literary respectability to voyeurist passions: no gain for poetry, nor for her.” Turns out the Beautiful Suicide’s beloved last book, the one assembled after her death by the bad man she’d married, was just a buffet of vain identifications, beginning with a famous poem in which the speaker seems to fathom the holocaust had happened to her because her daddy was mean.
As I absorbed the Owl’s judgements my body’s instinctual response was stuck between a shudder and a laugh. Who was the pompous monster, this scourge of girls who didn’t know better? Was I supposed to let him talk me out of my pleasure? The implicit advice to the impressionable reader was to put away childish things and inquire no further, not even into the book in hand, the one which, despite his barely concealed contempt, bore his name in large font. (I later learned he’d cranked out these editions for cash at the height of his fame, with a staff of grad students working assembly line style, the result being that his name literally wrapped the western canon.)
I had reason enough right then to write off Venerable Owl and let him drift into the dust-caked past he seemed to prefer to his own moment. And yet I’d finally heard someone say what everyone––even harmless librarians and creative writing teachers––knew to be true: that most poems were trash. Even if it was unlikely I’d ever think he was right about the Beautiful Suicide, the bell he’d rung was slow to decay, disturbing the peace of my nascent vocation. Because what I’d found corrupt in the book vandal’s pleading lines the Owl had found in the poems I loved most. The judgement pressed on a preexisting fear: that my apprehension of the form was rotted by something wide-eyed, self-dealing, soft. The promise held out to me by poetic gesture floated in the lukewarm middle latitudes between local emotional needs and the purgation required by real art. But perhaps I was being invited to learn my error, if error it was. From the beginning my engagement with the Owl was edged in aggression, as though I might resist him by appropriating his positions.
The library had VHS tapes––Charlie Rose, Bill Moyers, PBS, BBC. In one of these he was hocking a book called How to Read. The producers propped him up at a nondescript table set against the depthless black of a soundstage. He had trouble lifting the water to his lips but the words came easily. He’d committed vast quantities of high-class writing to memory and when he broke into sudden recitation the words bloomed from his mouth and the force of former conviction briefly flashed in his burnt-out eyes. He’d been flattered by the public and spent much of his airtime casually assessing worth (Stephen King: literature or trash? Maya Angelou: nice lady overrated), a fat pundit huffing the fumes of the past and seeming to believe, as the old sometimes do, that all was almost now lost. I watched the tapes repeatedly, bringing my lunch into the library’s little AV room and riding a euphoria understandable by exactly no one I knew.
It was only when I finally read the Owl’s early books that I began to fathom the contour of his project, which bore little relation to the feats of memory and opinion on display in his TV spots.
In the meantime I’d measured my theoretical future income against the lure of humanistic experience and took out loans to attend a vaguely stately college. I read the Owl there, I now realize, almost in secret. My literature professors knew of him, of course, though it occurred to none to put him on a syllabus. The curriculum had moved on to other things, what in dismissive moods I thought of as the thin shadows of former monuments (already the old man was speaking through me). I picked up Misreading first, skimming a few pages of gnomic and incomprehensible writing. I flipped to a kind of flowchart filled with Latin terms. I learned the book was the sequel to an earlier, famous book about writing and anxiety (these, by fortuitous coincidence, being my favored avocations).
The sentences were vatic and deranged: Milton is “the Sphinx who strangles even strong imaginations in their cradle”; “To be judicious is to be weak, and to compare, exactly and fairly, is not to be elect”; “A poet...is not so much a man speaking to men as a man rebelling against being spoken to by a dead man...outrageously more alive than himself.” They are ridiculous–– and then you begin to recognize your own mind in them, whether as it is or as it might be with a repression lifted, if you could gaze unveiled at the thing toward which your heart or imagination or ego throbbed.
Let’s say it the most embarrassing way first: you could populate a version of Joseph Campbell or Iron John with mythic and fantastical names culled from the Owl’s books. But so too the names of actual men (men and maybe Emily Dickinson). There are ephebes and fearsome precursors, Satans and Adams, the Godhead Shakespeare, something called a Covering Cherub. It was a superhero story about the eloquent dead, about how, by battling literary father figures, that eloquence came into their possession. It was a story, therefore, for boys.
The esoteric register couldn’t hide that the electrical charge came from rawer stuff: melancholia, the violence of self-creation. The quest’s aim wasn’t wholeness or health or actualization (often as not these were obstacles) but filching the tools necessary to write something good. For critics, the lesson was about gleaning the hidden links––less allusive than psychic––between poems. For the young poet (the Owl liked the ancient Greek word ephebe––literally a “young man” apprenticed to rhetoric and war), it was an inducement to try to intuit and even repeat what the person who wrote them (no: the poetic incarnation nested in the person) had to learn in order to write them. You read for clues to the operations of consciousness that brought about the kind of vision that mattered. You wanted what the Owl called “techniques of opening.”
It’s hard to recover my unformed, wish-drunk conception of the art in those first years, the ones before I’d read him. The basic terms of my inspiration were the usual ones. I’d been amazed by a handful of poems and wanted to write poems like them––like them but nevertheless, of course, my own. As to the ideal ratio of likeness to difference, as to whether these aims stood in contradiction or in more dynamic relationship, I didn’t manage to ask, much less theorize. My resistance to the Owl––already unfashionable, assumed to be an enemy of progress––was slow to dissipate, even as his ideas became my own. His books gave me a way to think about what I was doing, and for some reason I’d wanted this, even as my relative facility thinking about poetry as compared to actually writing it was already emerging as an ambivalent feature of my vocation. Still, there was always the hope that theory would impel practice.
It was obvious the knowledge the Owl dealt in was different from the usual objects of literary study. It wasn’t much related to a given poem’s apparent meaning or context, nor a matter of style or form. The locus of the search was the “poet-in-the-poet,” an entity that for the Owl was decidedly not the person in the world (he seemed to backslide on the distinction in his later celebrity, as though it were finally easier to just celebrate authors, this being what the audience had wanted all along). This inner character was acquisitive, ravenous, at once fearful and grand in its desire. The Owl spoke of “imaginations” as though they were actors independent of their human hosts. In his talk of “triumphant solipsism,” the endless riffing on weakness and strength, it was clear this wasn’t a discourse desperate to be seen as moral. In my case I found it hard to reconcile the instinct to scan a suicide note for lax craft with the conventional demands of human sympathy. But maybe it was better to face the amoral nature of art from the outset and renounce the cheap idea that wanting to write was aligned with wanting to be good.
His voice droned on in my skull. It was oracular, arrogant, in mourning; the mind from which it issued prone to mania and depression. He thought his own insights to be distasteful. He merged his chosen ancestors until the composite image began to resemble himself: in Emerson he found humanism in a prophetic register, and in Freud an unpalatable, de-idealizing conception of the human dispensation. If man was not the master of his own house, the poet was not master of her poem. Even when she felt most herself, other voices were stowed within her own. It was a gift to be inhabited like this, though the gift cost something, though it “famished the taker.” The imagination, like the child, was born into love and debt.
He proposed a universalism that narrowed the share of creation worthy of reverence. He’d unfurl a moving description of the poetic task, its essence almost stable across history, then list the five or six people he judged to have actually accomplished that task. Your own name was not going to be next in the line. The young reader had therefore either to reject the Owl’s litany as narrow and blinkered and male (it was all of these), or to admit the wound of certain exclusion. If self-respect required taking the former position maybe you still felt the vertigo of throwing yourself into a game in which it was so hard to get points on the board. In my own protest I was more reformist than radical: if the real number of poets doing the real and lasting thing was more than five was it also more than 50? 500? Which side of the debate stood to benefit by submitting the heap of literary journals into evidence?
Though becoming a poet meant pursuing apparently advanced postures and moods, I suspected a basic connection between childhood imaginative life and the operations of mind that made a poem (I later learned this too was a Romantic trope). The sources I instinctively reached for were all things I’d felt or known growing up in the Southwest: endless sunlight, barren desert, depressive tendency. When the Owl wrote that poetic character was composed of “desiccation combined with an unusually strong oceanic sense” I couldn’t figure what he meant except that I knew it to be true. You felt the inward flooding of vision and feeling; you looked out on the world you’d been offered and felt there was almost nothing there.
In my mind I often returned to a private metaphor––possibly corny––about a river. The idea was to wade out to its deep middle, where your feet no longer found bottom, where forces, forms, and bodies were absorbed in the pressured density, where water had flowed since forever, its line through the land holding irrespective of flood and drought. That was the place from which I wanted to work. (That one might drown there was the risk and perhaps the point.) This became my figure for how the lone voice might relate to the voices in which it had found a model. The individual talent should operate not traditionally, but within the stakes of a tradition, where the kind of originality that surpassed mere newness might be possible. Eventually it was clear that to think of the aim as “originality” was to misread the metaphor’s logic.
Fittingly, it was impossible to say how much this conception of the art was “my own” and how much was made of ideas I’d learned from the Owl willing themselves to expression by different terms. In any case, the actual conditions of my endeavor were far more arid than my imagined river.
The first overt consequence of the Owl’s influence was that my writing slowed to a drip. The exact cause is unknowable but the timing is suspect. I meant to learn to write; for long stretches I was mostly learning to wait. There were whole years I eked out two or three short poems. Was this the difficulty inherent in reaching the river’s rushing middle or just evidence I was doing it wrong? I wasn’t sure if poetry was repression, as the man had written, but no doubt repression was at work. I rarely had any idea what I was doing, what I actually wanted to say, my desire to write so overwhelming any definable object or aim.
The poet knows that her voice is tremulous and thin, that the potential honesty and authenticity of its speech don’t mitigate this. But the leaps, the inhabitations, the discoveries––these could happen. The poems you loved were proof. The voice could be thrown, and if it traveled far enough maybe it would return bearing a new capacity. The Owl quoted Kierkegaard: “He who is willing to work gives birth to his own father.” I couldn’t imagine why you’d want to birth a father, exactly, but I thrilled to the ambition, the absurd conception of what was possible. Now I only had to figure out what “the work” was and whether I was doing it or merely waiting for those rare moments when it was ready to happen on its own. I returned to the old rabbinic injunction underlined in my faded copy of Misreading: “You are not required to complete the work, but neither are you free to desist from it.”
Part of the problem was that I no longer believed in “aboutness.” I mean that poems weren’t really about their apparent subjects, at least not the poems I liked. Subjects were only opportunities, variously useful to the mind’s desire to fathom sudden and unforeseen orders. At the heart of the poem was the attempt to grapple with the base conditions of poetic work itself, and the work, I came slowly to understand, was the same as it ever was: to salvage a repertoire–– therefore a self, a world––among worn-out materials.
Here and there I remembered the anonymous girl and her note, my feelings riven by a split identification. However far I’d come the poet-in-me, to follow the Owl in his inner cosmology, remained a girl like her. I was still the naïf desperate to turn desire and pain into jeweled speech.
And I’d become the critic for whom this ambition was pathetic. I was the judgement's bloodless issuer and its hapless target. Between the Suicide and the Owl, between the salves of oblivion and aggrandizement, between dead girls and undying men it was hard to say who owned the harder truth.
My imagination lived between opposed images: open desert and the enclosure of the boudoir (forgive the poet her taste for an ornate word). I aspired to evocative reticence. I meant to be a slayer of sentiment and men, trafficking in dispassionate emotion––if I could conjure this contradictory product. Hadn’t the world taught me to withdraw, to fashion a screen that invited projection and suggested aura? Did a poem work the same way? I imagined inhabiting the voice of some domestic half-god, dreaming of house fire and wielding a precarious glamour against the limits of her condition. Some of this overlapped with obvious stereotype: the allure of the female mind undone, the incurable languor and sad dazzling. My speakers more than once issued their missives from within a full bathtub. Sometimes I played a character grafted from life: the taxidermist’s daughter. (A father, alas, born into every aporia.) If my dramatic postures overshot the objective conditions of my life I fooled myself into thinking it wasn’t by much, and if I borrowed from female typecasting I also raided all sorts of stock poetic gesture. Flowers were always sprouting from someone’s mouth. A dead animal could be a metaphor for almost anything. But whatever the poem was about it was about poetry; whatever my personae were saying they were saying it about writing or failing to write poems; whoever the personae seemed to be Her Majesty the Ego remained sovereign of the poem, in every imaginative act her revenge plot on the implacability of the form.
What’s therefore odd to admit is how rarely my drama of apprenticeship played out in the space of actual poems, much less in outward life. It was more like an obscure, subterranean shifting, happening here and there in flashes of intellect and imagination, the way that over many years one might find faith in God to have slowly solidified or eroded, without particular regard to one’s intentions or efforts. But in my case it’s hard to distinguish gain from loss. Sometimes, when the poems came, it felt like grace alighting, wholly unearned. But they came infrequently, and when they did it seemed some price was paid for them, as though every door passed through was no less a door shut, as though every poem were the end of some innocence. There was the Emerson sentence the Owl repeated like a mantra: “Nothing is got for nothing.” Criticism’s proper subject was “the problematics of loss.”
There was a particular species of loss the Owl worried over constantly, the one he called lateness. You found it in the feeling that perfectly fine poets like Jack Gilbert or Louise Glück (or, I eventually had to admit, the Beautiful Suicide) weren’t Wordsworth or Dickinson, not even close. It might be bad form to state it so directly, but hasn’t everyone who’s made a go at reading or writing poetry wondered something like this? Poems would catch the enormous shadows of futurity, so said Shelley. Mostly I found the past’s pale echo mixed with the desideratum of our own broken moment. As if in an ongoing, industry-wide repression, it seemed no one ever spoke of lateness as an obvious condition of the undertaking. Not in the workshops I hustled my way into, not at the occasional reading held downtown, not in the ad copy that passed for book reviewing. Never.
“In ancient times only an individual here and there knew the truth; now we all know it, but the inwardness of its appropriation stands in inverse relationship to the extent of its dissemination.” I read the sentence about eight times and in my derangement I imagined Kierkegaard casting these words into the future, where they would one day find their ultimate application as a quip about the proliferation of MFA programs (I’d been too embarrassed to apply to one). I wondered whether poetic incarnation in our time was just more widely disbursed and therefore less pure in any one individual. And if so should I think of this as entropy or an iteration of the equality I’d support in any other domain of life? Would this be a democratic good or a poverty of culture?
Could it be both?
I was never sure to what degree my condition was historical and to what extent I was merely experiencing the problems of writing, more or less constant across the eras. It took me years to formulate my inchoate fear that liberal individuality was exhausted as an aesthetic project, that its appeal to the injuries of identity and the moral authority of minor grievance were rearguard spiritual tactics. The Owl quoted Thomas Mann conjuring the before times: “the ego of antiquity and its consciousness of itself were different from our own, less exclusive, less sharply defined.” I wondered if the residue of this kind of consciousness was at work even as late as Shakespeare, of whose wildly appropriative practice Emerson would say that originality was not even an aim.
But if this was the consciousness of the deep past, perhaps it was also the consciousness to come. Was this the horizon, at once ancient and unrealized, toward which to dream? Was an alternative psychic life of literary labor possible, one that was enabling, non-neurotic, less slavish to the self? Was it wrong to want one? The Owl’s metaphors pointed in more than one direction.
There’s an ambiguity and an opening that might be reclaimed if the theory isn’t allowed to calcify into a grand individualism (a calcification the Owl greatly aided). Because when you went to grasp for those great names, did you expect to contact something solid?
Here’s the thing about poem space: the ways of being a person respected by the rest of life don’t hold there. A logic living in the material begins to suggest itself: the component parts of soul and mind are already common property, the truth of one’s life is a tangle of known tropes. The terrain of imagination is hatched with backroads between private drives and collective form. In practice the poet toggles constantly between resisting and admitting the voices of others. Perhaps it becomes hard to know the difference. Extreme and contradictory instincts live in proximity: compared with what I love I am almost nothing; there is nothing that has ever been thought or said which does not in some respect belong to me, or I to it. For years I felt I was speaking in the voice of men and not myself. I came to realize there are no selves, not of the kind we’d been advertised.
All this is not quite the Owl’s program, though it’s what he helped me to learn. But enough of famous names and fingering the rosary of visionary men. It’s up to us to finish our own moment, to cull from the air a live tradition, to learn, always as though anew, how to do things with words. The voice the dead have is one’s own.
❂
This essay is a work of ECHO ASSOCIATION, an American producer of literature and commentary operating at the intersection of originality and appropriation.