Description
These works (they're not all really poems) are offered in chronological order – all except the first.
The first was my first published work; it was accepted and published in 1969 by Assay Magazine, the poetry magazine of the University of Washington. Several others follow it that were written in the heady days when I was writing but didn't have any idea what poetry really was, and when my experience, however meaningful it seemed to me at the time, was limited by my youth and frivolity. Anything that was important about it I didn't have the words to express.
The first in this collection, A Becoming, inspired by a sonnet by Stéphane Mallarmé called The Swan, was written after a summer in France learning to speak French, after a couple more years of college, and after some pretty in-depth work in comparative literature, and it is offered first so the reader won't toss this modest collection in a nearby circular file or a fireplace after reading the very early works.
A Becoming's greatest claim to fame was the rejection letter it occasioned from The New Yorker, in 1969; it was a form letter on a small page of modest paper with letterhead saying all the usual things, but scrawled in ink at the bottom right by a real person were the words, "Sustains a really nice tone." It was then that I knew I was a poet.
There is another poem here from that period, a translation of The Albatross, by Charles Baudelaire, done as was the original in rhyming quatrains. I worked hard on it, and I was surprised, unsettled, and a little embarrassed, for reasons I didn't understand, because I was too young, when my professor, not young, cranky, brilliant, etc., read it out loud to the class. He got to the phrase "fellow traveler" and, to my amazement, went on a tirade asking how I could possibly use that phrase to describe an albatross that was flying across the ocean maintaining close contact with a 19th century sailing ship? It certainly seemed like a reasonable description to me. Yet I, who grew up with the name Joe McCarthy, had no idea that undeclared followers of the Communist party were known in the '50's as "fellow travelers."
Thus went my poetry career. Looking back, the poem is rough, and I was tempted to include Richard Wilbur's translation for comparison's sake, but instead I've included Baudelaire's original, for French speakers, as well as Mallarmé's in the appendix of favorites.
All this formalism doesn't sound like the guitar-playing beatnik I was. But all the bad poems do.
It was about that time that I discovered film, and I found that I understood the language of film as easily and well as poetry. Film was like poetry with pictures. My mother was a painter, and images from a camera work just as well for me as they did from a typewriter. Film turned into my life's work, and I loved it.
But poems kept popping out. A few were serious. While many were occasional, I worked on them, and I thought they would be fun to share.