1.

all through this melting world

love thoughts, like cuttings,

have begun to take

I read all the poems at once, breaking only to eat and dip into St. Augustine. Then again, slower, looking up the words I don’t know — lambent, lache, scatback. “Read him slowly: study the details: every phrase is an event” warns the blurb and I want to be there rubbernecking and gossiping until my neck is sore. At some point on Saturday, I drive up to Evanston to see my friend box, and while I’m watching these young men, too trim to be feral, beating the shit out of each other, I realize: I am his, I am Kleinzahler’s. My whole world is, for this short week, moving to the rhythm of his music, “jerk[ing] and snap[ping] [its] fingers” (blurb again). He’s written all my poems, he’s left his sweat marks right on the place where I want to sit, halfway between Robert Hass and John Berryman (“Lowell’s down below, which is right where we want him.”)

So here I am, burning, briefly, in another’s light. I’ve been here before, duh, and I know the teleology of this passion: senescence. Tomorrow, perhaps, or the next day, I’ll go back to Baudelaire or Louise Gluck, and Kleinzahler’s music will turn on itself, like a wave between breakwaters.  “Everything has rhythm, everything dances,” says Maya Angelou in a typically trite aphorism: trite because the music of things is always broken, swelling against itself. Not even heteroglot: it’s too multiple, too incoherent.  Only these moments, these rare moments, when someone’s language rushes in, when I am a city ruined by flood: only then, rhythm takes hold and will not let go.

I  am saying–to put it plainly–that there is no solemn, steady music that lies beneath all things. No first sound, which descends from the good, and binds together our pencils and coffee cups and cash. Kleinzahler’s music is the last music on earth, the sound you hear after everything is finished, after everything has been made. It is in this sense that poetry is a kind of a metaphysics: it always comes after-making, it coordinates and orchestrates the cacophony of things-being-themselves. In one of his last essays, Richard Rorty writes:

I now wish that I had spent somewhat more of my life with verse. This is not because I fear having missed out on truths that are incapable of statement in prose. There are no such truths; there is nothing about death that Swinburne and Landor knew but Epicurus and Heidegger failed to grasp.

He’s right–hard as it is to say–he’s right. Poetry doesn’t tell us anything new–it gives us the world again and again, bound together by some derivative music. Which is enough, right? Let philosophers make the world comfortably comprehensible, systematic; what I want is the wild, unintelligible music of things, orchestrated just so by some higher hand.

2.

Last night at dinner, with my mother, my grandfather, and Nancy Breckel–an old friend of the family, shriveled and hoarse from years of smoking–we talked about poetry for a while. How I have my book, here and there; how poems are in the end irretrievable, fretted with the quiet circumstances of the poet’s life; how my grandfather, when he was younger loved and lived in ee cummings. He had a bit of butter on his shirt; his voice was small in the noisy restaurant, and a bit sad. How he read cummings to his wife and her cousin, one day over a game of bridge: there is so much more he wants to say, I can tell, so much he wants to convey by the mere force of his admiration. It’s like pulling grass: he breaks the stem and leaves the roots. I sense the force of his feeling but I do not feel it.

It’s not his fault: what could he say to make me read cummings with his wonder and admiration? When I look at cummings’ poems they seem like bad soup: too easy, too weak, too watery. “When he died,” he says facetiously at dinner, “I died too”–and we laugh a long time at the hyperbole of his feeling (comical because unintelligible.) I want to know, I want to sympathize with his passion, but ecstasy doesn’t travel well. Not like Chilean oranges: even in language, it doesn’t keep. When his passion reaches me, it’s already mushy and brown, ready to slide out of its skin. This is the trouble with poetry: its ecstasy is so private as to be almost unintelligible, outside the economy of thought and feeling. (I remember my friend begging me in high school to tell him how to read, how to enjoy poetry. What could I say?) And yet, I know, I feel that a common music must be possible — I feel it and I cannot say why. Kleinzahler:

when what has become dormant

meager or hardened

passes through the electric

of you, the fugitive scattered pieces

are called back to their nature–

I have not known him well; now in these last fading years of his life, I want to sit in his thought and his pleasure: call me back to my nature, sew up my scattered pieces, keep me safe and whole in some shared music!