Pulled from a Drawer

"What's your favorite poem?"

A friend, himself a poet, asked me that not long ago. No one's ever asked me the question before. To be honest, I'd never thought. Still couldn't say, which is odd, now I come to thinking about it.

I don't even know how many poems I know, you know?

Think about it, how much poetry do you "have by heart", as used to be said, and how much of that because you loved it? Portia's "The quality of mercy is not strain'd", is in me somewhere, and two sonnets besides, with how many other scraps and quotes of the Bard, but none of it there for love, but for school. When I remember so much as a line, even of Shakespeare, I wonder from where and when it came. Couldn't tell you now.

Other bits of poetry from childhood and youth surface now and then, most often unbidden. In addition to the nursery rhymes of my earliest recollection, I am surprised now to find all sorts of barely remembered children's verse come up, and not just Seuss. Most of it, I should think, is otherwise forgotten or unknown now to children under forty. Why, for example, Eugene Field?

"In an ocean, 'way out yonder,
(As all sapient people know)
Is the land of Wonder-Wander,
Whither children love to go..."

Anybody? No? I can't be the only one who still remembers "Where the Dinkey-Bird is singing / In the amfalula tree!" Just as well perhaps if I am. Still, all those years of selling Maxfield Parrish calendars, every year there would be the naked boy on the swing... and the painting titled? That's right, so maybe that explains that.

Eugene Field is very much to the point. Nobody much reads him now, kids or otherwise, but he was a very popular fellow once, "the children's poet." Couldn't sell a set of his books for the money I'd waste in cleaning and shelving them. But I grew up with old people all around me; grandmothers and the friends of my grandmothers, old neighbors, old ladies who lived in old houses in which, now and again, I found old books. (I first traveled to OZ via books in a neighbor's house.) Outside the elementary school library, I read what I found. In my grandma's house, I read my uncle's copy of Treasure Island, left behind when he went off to fight and die in the Second World War. Somewhere, off some dusty and neglected shelf, I know I read Stevenson's A Child's Garden of Verse, because when I did again, not all so long ago, I knew it, backwards and forwards. Eugene Field, while already largely forgotten by the nineteen sixties, when I would have encountered him, was still a feature of Sunday School libraries, grandmothers' parlors and the like.

We most of us don't know where the poetry in us came from anymore, I should think. School mostly, but not exclusively.

I grew up in a fairly rural setting, where the poetry tended to the declamatory: a Psalm in church, a patriotic ode for the 4th of July. The bits I remember best, other than Shakespeare, and things learned for school, are all of them from recitations: John Greenleaf Whittier, Kipling, Whitman and Wordsworth and Longfellow. The verses of the King James Bible, I heard from the pulpit, the rest recited on the stage of a Grange hall, or in a civic auditorium. Not a bad tradition, looking back, nor entirely out of keeping with how most poetry was meant to be heard. But, from those drafty halls and dull, solemn places, I never thought to keep a favorite poem, or poet. Nonetheless, long after I last set foot in any like meeting, I cannot now see the Gilbert Stuart portrait that dear Dolly Madison saved from burning -- Washington at full length, in black -- without thinking of Lowell's "Soldier and statesman, rarest unison," or see Lincoln dead without starting "O CAPTAIN! my Captain! our fearful trip is done..." That's something to be said for those poems, and poets then, isn't it?

Poetry, at least as it was taught to me after elementary school, was more a matter of cryptography than pleasure. (Do they still ruin the music in poetry this way, I wonder? Or has the popularity of rap corrected that particular educational misdirection?) Poems -- long and short -- were just so much prose done up in a jumble, to be sorted by symbols, metaphors and the like: William Carlos Williams' plums not plums, but pleasures forbidden but tasted, all the way up to the Saturday New York Times crossword of modern poetry for high-schoolers, Eliot's endless Wasteland. Is it any wonder that there's less of that stuff in me than what may not have been nearly so good, the stuff I probably heard read, however badly at a picnic or at the PTA?

I read poetry now. I read more of it than I might ever have been expected to do, considering my background and education. What's more, I read more kinds of poetry, meaning form, length, period and poet, what have you, than I ever thought I might. If anything, I am likelier now to read a new poet than I am a new novelist, and to read poetry because it is new. Imagine that. This is almost all to do with my dearest friend, R. Twenty some years ago, when we met, I was nearly as proud of my ignorance of contemporary poetry as I was of my contempt for contemporary music. Proper little snob I was, and not a clue where to start, besides. As R. is himself a poet, he could not help but see poetry as a natural part of conversation. I liked him very much, so I tried my best to catch up. I worked in bookstores even then, so I had an advantage. I studied his bookshelves as well. To him I owe, just off the top of my head, Louise Glück, and Merwin, and Frank O'Hara. Not everything he taught me took, of course. He still thinks more of John Ashbery than I am ever likely to, and Louis Zukofsky remains for me a dead letter, despite my friend's enthusiasm and The American Poets Project. Others we found together, back in the day, like Mark Doty, read together on vacation at the River, sitting on the floor of a little bookstore that probably isn't there anymore. He's kind enough, my friend, to even suggest that I've introduced him to more poets now than he introduced to me. What he may not appreciate is how unlikely it would have been had I not wanted to please him by taking up poetry again. I would not have so many favorites otherwise, books I mean.

(My favorite book of poetry at the moment? The Best of It: New & Selected Poems, by Kay Ryan. Yet another poet I have in common now with my friend R.)

All that said, I do not yet know that I have a favorite poem, as the other poet asked me. The explanation I think may be that unlike either of those poetical gentlemen, I still think and write and read primarily in prose, not to say that they and we all don't anyway, except for the few who needn't always. What I mean is that poetry tends to illustrate some point I might feel the need to make, or express better some emotion, but, like most prosaic persons, poetry tends to come to my mind in lines, quotations pulled from a drawer, all tangled up and twisted around other bits of verse and whatnot. With all that I read of the stuff, I seldom think to write about it here, or at all, because I still feel unqualified to comment. I've never studied poetry properly, and I'll never write it. Doggerel I make to entertain myself and fill this space, now and then, but a poet I will never be. Prose is anybody's business, but poetry needs talents I do not have.

So I don't know that I'll ever have an easy answer to that question. I certainly can't think of a list. Chrisstina Rossetti's Goblin Market? I've loved that since I first read it. Mark Doty's Lament, since I've mentioned his My Alexandria? Something of Thom Gunn's that I've read and posted here? The Whitman I used to shout at people when I was in college? No. Won't do.

I might say Charles Lamb's The Old Familiar Faces, and mean it.

It's better though to just admit my failure to find an answer. Let the poets tell me theirs. I'll read them. Add them to the shelf. Who knows but years from now, I'll find a line when I need it. Not the worst thing, is it? Taking stock, there's more there than I might have imagined, and much of it quite useful. No point trying to organize it now. It is what it is. That will have to do.