John and Gil

On the onset of this blog, I swore I would mention no personal details of my life. And while what I am about to say is not terribly personal, I fear I am beginning to slide down the slipperiest of slopes. Ready for my revelation?  

I was once a college student. Shocking, no? I attended Furman University and delved in the humanities for four glorious years, learning a little of philosophy, film, theatre, music, history, and writing quite a bit about it along the way. Pages and pages and pages of words flew (and sometimes oozed) off my fingers during my time there.

 And when I was in my senior year, after all that structured writing, I took a poetry class thinking, "Oh I have this in the bag.  Anna Beth Bonney = Prose Champion of the East. I'll have 'em weeping." What a little schmuck I was.  However, pride always cometh before a fall, and upon my first day in class, I realized two things. 1. I was nowhere near as awe inspiring as my professor, whom I adored from the first moment I heard him speak of how much he loved poetry. 2. I had no real conception of what poetry actually was, much less how to write it. Unfortunately, this knowledge swiftly spiralled into a dehabilitating inferiority complex that I wrestled with throughout the course.

My professor, a wise man, surely had seen other students make the overwhelmed and shamed expression I did during a particular meeting in regards to my poetry. "Dr. Allen!" I exclaimed. "I never like anything I write! My thoughts feel beautiful and original as they swirl in my mind, but when I try to word them out on paper every word seems ugly and cliché."

In response, Dr. Allen wordlessly stood. Walked to his considerable bookshelf. Selected a slim volume which turned out to be M.S. Merwin's Flower and Hand: Poems 1977-1983. He said, this poem may help. Of course a poetry professor would know the correct poem for every occasion, especially an exasparated student. He read, in his soft voice, through his bushy white mustache:

Berryman

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 a tacking sloop



 

he was far older than the dates allowed for


much older than I was he was in his thirties


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



 

W. S. Merwin, Flower & Hand: Poems 1977-1983
Copper Canyon Press, Port Townsend, WA (1997) pp. 155-156]

Now, the writer and academic  who inspired Merwin's "Berryman" had a fascinating life, one I will address at a later date. But Gil Allen did not need to explain the history of John Berryman's life to me that day.  The lesson was learned. And while I still have not mastered or even begun to skate across the surface of the wide world of poetry, I am still writing.  Thank you, John and Gil.