I'm Better Than You Because of Stuff I Like

I know how this feels - it used to be me.

The Selfishness of The Poetry Reader

Dick Allen

Sometimes I think I'm the only man in America
who reads poems
and who walks at night in the suburbs,
calling the moon names.


And I'm certain I'm the single man who owns
a house with bookshelves,
who drives to work without a CD player,
taking the long way, by the ocean breakers.


No one else, in all America,
Quotes William Meredith verbatim,
cites Lowell over ham and eggs, and Levertov;
keeps Antiworlds and Ariel beside his bed.


Sometimes I think no other man alive
is changed by poetry, has fought
as utterly as I have over "Sunday Morning"
and vowed to love those as difficult as Pound.


No one else has seen a luna moth
flutter over Iowa, or watched
a woman's hand lift rainbow trout from water,
and snow fall onto Minnesota farms.


This country wide, I'm the only man
who spends his money recklessly on thin
volumes unreviewed, enjoys
the long appraising look of check-out girls.


How could another in America know why
the laundry from a window laughs,
and how plums taste, and what an auto wreck
feels like-and craft?


I think I'm the only man who speaks
of fur and limestone in one clotted breath;
for whom Anne Sexton plunged in Grimm; who can't
stop quoting haikus at some weekend guest.


The only man, in all America, who feeds
on something darker than his politics,
who writes in margins and who earmarks pages-
in all America, I am the only man.




When you're growing up, planting the seeds of who you're turning to, it's hard to see how small your world is. Your family, friends, people you see at school or work or church, that's your entire society. When I didn't find anyone who devoured poetry like I did, I just assumed no-one else in the entire world would. (It's just you and me, T.S.!)


You can feed on that kind of solitude and solidarity with people long dead. You feel like you're their only true reader, nobody understands them like you, and that works the other way around, too. It's a secret shared, a ritual performed, a hidden society no-one can ever revoke your membership from.


But as usually happens, I got older. I found kindred spirits who wrote poetry but weren't dead. And eventually I lost most of the chip on my shoulder about poetry. Now I can appreciate that it's not something everyone reads or even likes, but quite a few do. Not a lot of people I know are into knitting or fly-fishing or mid-eighteenth-century harpsichord music. But some of them are, and that's great.


I found this editorial by former poet laureate Charles Simic, who made a shocking discovery: the state of poetry in America is as healthy or more so than it has ever been. So as much as I appreciate the loneliness of the long-distance poetry lover, I don't feel that way anymore. I love the things I love, and you don't have to, it doesn't make either of us any worse.


Now back to tasting plums from the icebox, mending walls and daring to disturb the universe.