I have spent more than three decades immersed in poetry, always that of others. I can’t write my way out of a paper bag as far as poetry goes. I know a few poets, and read of many more, and I think that what separates me from them is that they swim in, cavort in the cauldron of poetry and emerge to put it into words for people like me. I look down into that same cauldron but am not “man enough” to “dive into the wreck,” hoping that I will arise with poetry in my mouth and hand. I’m not complaining or bemoaning any fate of mine. I love poetry and deeply appreciate the gift it has been to my life.

Here is a poem by Susan Howe which came to me via a poet friend of mine this year. Susan and her sister Fanny are two wonderful poets of our day though Fanny departed not long ago. This poem of hers is entitled, “from My Emily Dickinson” and I think it would be described as a “narrative poem”:

     When I love a thing I want it and I try to get it. Abstraction of the particular from
the universal is the entrance into evil. Love, a binding force, is both envy and
emulation. HE (the Puritan God) is a realm of mystery and will always remain
unknowable, authoritarian, unpredictable. Between revealed will and secret will
Love has been torn in two.

     DUALISM: Pythagoras said that all things were divisible into two genera,
     good and evil; in the genus of good things he classified all perfect things
     such as light, males, repose, and so forth, whereas in the genus of evil
     he classified darkness, females, and so forth.
                              (Thomas Aquinas, “On the Power of God,” p. 84)

     Promethean aspiration: To be a woman and a Pythagorean. What is the communal
vision of poetry if you are curved, odd, indefinite, irregular, feminine. I go in
disguise. Soul under stress, thread of connection broken, fusion of love and
knowledge broken, visionary energy lost, Dickinson means this to be an ugly verse.
First I find myself a Slave, next I understand my slavery, finally I re-discover
myself at liberty inside the confines of known necessity. Gun goes on thinking of
the violence done to meaning. Gun watches herself watching.