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Five poems to make you swoon
For National Poetry Month, selections from new books by Anne Carson, Charles Wright and others.

[04/14/00]

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When Boland finally comes up with the reason she loved, and continues to love, Yeats, it's anything but erudite. In fact, it concerns the most fundamental of human instincts -- the need to belong. In Yeats' words, Boland writes, she "began to hear something different -- the sound, at last, of a place where I might no longer be an impostor. A place that could be made exact in language and therefore hospitable to the very degrees of estrangement I felt." She makes loving poetry, even becoming a poet, a matter of creating a home in the world.

First Loves: Poets Introduce the Essential Poems that Captivated and Inspired Them Edited by Carmela Ciuraru Scribner, 259 pages Nonfiction Also Today Five poems to make you swoon

Boland's numbers among the more serious entries here. There are also some wonderfully glib responses from people who gleefully chucked dignity out the door and simply told the truth. We get A.R. Ammons as a fifth-grader, memorizing a distinctly grade-schoolish poem called "In Flanders Fields" not because it stirred him but because he wanted the apple his teacher was giving away to the first person who could complete the task. "I don't know that I loved the poem then," he writes, "but I loved the apple and gradually, I suppose, associated that with poetry." (Incidentally, there are various English teachers mentioned in the anthology, all of them with fabulous names -- Ammons' was Viola Smith, and Philip Levine remembers a certain Miss Tarbox. Perhaps the real key to becoming a poet is having a teacher with the right kind of name.)

Even many of the writers who've selected serious poems as their official picks use their introductory essays to take us back in time to their earliest awareness of words. "My mother claimed that the first poem I adored was Vachel Lindsay's 'The Moon's the North-Wind's Cookie,' which she read me from an anthology called 'Silver Pennies,'" writes Donald Hall. By the time he was 14, he had discovered H.D., and he includes one of her poems as his selection, but it's hard to entirely forget his earlier, less glamorous love, which makes his entry here all the more valuable. Similarly, Daniel Halpern paints a boisterous and charming portrait of himself as a toddler bellowing song lyrics as he makes his way toward the Wallace Stevens poem he includes:

Before I acquainted myself with actual poems, I fell in love with song lyrics. At three, I played "That Old Black Magic" and "Cocktails for Two" by Spike Jones over and over on a "starter" record player at five in the morning ... And in the late afternoon I rode my tricycle back and forth outside the house in which I was born in Syracuse with a strange fierceness, singing the songs of our armed forces (my father was a B-52 navigator during World War II): "Anchors aweigh ...," "Off we go, into the wild blue yonder ..."

And speaking of lyrics, Eleanor Wilner has the guts to come right out and lay claim to "The Lady Is a Tramp" as her first favorite poem. "Not poetry, you say?" she jeers in her essay. "Back off. It was the Midwest, the middle class, mid-century America ... The great song lyricists were my first poets, and musical comedy was my text."

There are many choices here that wouldn't make it onto any fancy lists of poems. Carol Moldaw writes about slipping her first copy of e.e. cummings' "Collected Poems" into a box being packed up by a boy she liked when she was 17. "What better way to signal -- though I knew we might never see each other again -- the intensity of my unsung passion?" The relief I felt when I got to Moldaw's page is hard to describe. No one ever admits to loving cummings -- no poet wants to be caught appreciating hopelessly sentimental poetry that was in a Woody Allen movie -- and yet we've all loved it. I spent about a year obsessing over a group of cummings poems simply because I was madly infatuated with the person who read them to me over the telephone. (One of them, in fact, was about hearing the voice of your beloved over the telephone, which is a perfect illustration of why cummings poems lend themselves so well to romances of the Highly Dramatic Type.) I still like to read cummings sometimes, just to loll in the memories of being a teenager in reckless love. As Moldaw, who chose cummings' "i thank You God for this most amazing," finishes up her essay: "What poems could be more like first love itself than cummings', which vibrate in their certainty of every moment's and each emotion's uniqueness?"

Because the truth is that poets, just like everyone else, are fools when they fall in love. The essays in "First Love" that speak the most clearly about how one becomes a poet aren't really about poetry at all. They're about muddling through life and looking for people to help you figure out what the hell is going on in your heart. Some people just take the guidance, and others, as Marie Howe writes about reading Gwendolyn Brooks, think, "Oh I want to do that -- what this woman here has done."

Most important, "First Loves" demonstrates something that John Cheever wrote about in his brilliant, wrenching journals (which have as much claim to the title "poetry" as anything I've ever read). "There is some wonderful seriousness to the business of living," he jotted down in 1958, "and one is not exempted by being a poet. You have to take some precautions with your health. You have to manage your money intelligently and respect your emotional obligations. There is another world -- I see this -- there is chaos, and we are suspended above it by a thread. But the thread holds."

No matter how easy it is to believe that gifted poets do nothing but wander through the world accepting prizes and reading in sonorous voices, viewing everything through the sublime prism that produces their work, the truth is that they pay taxes and buy gas and groceries just like the rest of us. They bungle their "emotional obligations" -- often spectacularly -- and make mistakes and have to start over again, too. Perhaps what makes "First Loves" such a rare achievement is the way it slipped in behind the scenes and came back with the message that to be a poet is simply to be a person who never stops falling in love with the world, whose world is big enough to include even those things we love in spite of ourselves.
salon.com | April 14, 2000

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