If you’ve had a chance to read Low Parish let me know what you think. Leave a comment on this post, and I’ll put it up on the blog, twitter, and on Facebook. Post a short review of the book, favorite lines or poems, or just your general thoughts on the experience of the poems. Thanks for all the support.
I owe a debt. Coming to writing and poetry late in my college experience, I entered the field much the way an adult learns to swim: flaying, aimless bobbing, an accidently successful stroke. My best friend during that time, and consequently he persists in that role, shifted his major from theater to creative writing, and as way of deflecting my protest, I was a theater major as well, he gave me a copy of Whitman’s selected poems. Birthday gift if I recall correctly. Demarcation line drawn; it was the beginning of the end.
Our friendship had followed a kind of maturation with out fertilization. As the story goes, but there isn’t much story to tell, we became friends on a late night raid to the campus food court called The Eagle’s Nest. Both dressed in all black—techie clothes, as we’d landed the illustrious jobs of “crew” for a production of Steel Magnolias—we raced out of the theater, through the music building, and across the courtyard, until we finally ducked in the subbasement location of the Eagle’s Nest. Why the hell were we running? Armed with chicken tenders, and a slapdash mini-burger (couldn’t afford drinks at time), we ran the whole way back to theater. And then we friends. I don’t remember saying two words to him on that run, but it was a kind introduction and more than adequate it seems.
So when I unwrapped that copy of Whitman two years later, there wasn’t much conversation to accompany the sea change. He was doing this whole-heartedly and was well beyond convincing otherwise, so I was doing it too. I admired him and still do and thought this was the best way to support his decision. Then I began writing the dumbest poems ever. Titles such as “Afro-King”, “Tub Ship”, and “Coffee House Harbor” were mainstays. I’ll let you guess at the content. I should have been writing prose poems about the insanity of roll stating a silver hatchback in a parking lot, him kicking the passenger door open while I ran to jump in. We had to get to the comic shop. Or poems of how his girlfriend, starved for attention, kicked the radio in his ’88 Dodge Caravan, and broke the damn thing but good. Later and married, the two of them would give that van to me as graduation gift. I cursed that girl up and down the silent highway.
Still we grew as friends and writers, and moved away from Oklahoma. I carried what began as an imitation project with me and continued to write poems. And some ten years of friendship later I open my first collection of poems, Low Parish, and there is his name under the introduction. Not sure if I even covered the vigorish yet.
Much of my undergraduate experience was an exercise in speaking confidently about things I knew nothing about. Mostly manifesting in arguments about acting and theater, my undergraduate major, that faux bravado found a stronger taproot when I began exploring poetry. I could easily blame my father, who undoubtedly is the genetic source of any predisposition toward that kind of crowd talk, but that would be too easy. I could simply accept as John Berryman suggests in Dream Song 14, “Life, friends, is boring. We must not say so.” And what would be easier than blaming life. I believe, though I tend to agree with Berryman, it came from the beginning of what I’ll call the good jealousy.
Recently, before reading Derek Walcott for the first time, I thought I understood Dickinson’s way to recognize poetry as the physical feeling of having the top of your head taken off. Then I read Walcott’s poem “Origins”. Took me days to find my head after that. Along with the mind’s-been-blown experience there came that overwhelming desire to go and write, to somehow best Walcott, or pay him back, or something to help heal the wound his writing left in my being. Of course, I’m aware that in order to best Walcott I would have to erase him, write work so compelling that the reader forgets Walcott. Impossible. The poet of St. Lucia has already done that, hence the jealousy. And healthy as that feeling may be, sparking a generative process and birthing new poems, what else could I call it but jealousy. As Borges said about the first novelist, “I don’t want to write like Cervantes, I want to be Cervantes. But I can’t. All I can be is boring Borges.”
Anyway here are some books I recently have a healthy jealousy toward:
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In my first graduate poetry workshop, while reading Patricia Smith’s Blood Dazzler, the class was introduced to the Ghazal, a poetic form written in couplets where the last word of the first line repeats as an end line throughout the poem. I chose the word “doubt”. At that time, my day job was fighting with apathetic, overage middle school students at an alternative high school, and my night job was stretching out time to attend the University of Baltimore. For the poems, there were so many missed opportunities. I’d hardly learned how to have a habit of writing, and my reading was so poor that I couldn’t recognize a good draft from a weak one (speaking of my own work of course).
I remember envying my friend and fellow poet, Evan Lesavoy, after a night of drinking. In a frenzy of emotion and high talk, I blurted through my haze of bourbon and beer, “Let’s spread all my books of poetry on floor, and pick books at random, and just fucking read aloud all night.” So we threw the books to the floor, and stepped back proud to eye the options. Evan’s response, “This is it?” I was shamed. Weeks later when I would visit his apartment for the first time, I understood why he reacted that way. The meager ten or so books of poetry in my library were dwarfed by his dedicated bookcase full of verse. God dammit. A feeling of ignorance and embarrassment rose so quickly over my whole being that had I been a lighter skinned person, you’d have seen me blush. But despite all that we did read, and drink, and wax ineloquently about our futures.
These three years later, I’ve filled a bookcase of my own, and among the stacks of the Canon, between Li-Young Lee and Milosz, there is my own book Low Parish. To borrow a line from Thomas Sayers Ellis that is the banging noisy tuning of growth.
Picked up the books yesterday, and I was really pleased with how they came out. House of Printing, however, really messed up the books of two fellow classmates. Mixed emotions there, but on this end, exciting things afoot this week. Books will be available to purchase online through this blog, and the MFA reading happens on Friday. Hard to contain the I-want-to-enter-a-time-warp feeling, but no since jumping ahead. Plenty to do this week. If you are in the Baltimore area on May 4th, come out to the reading at University of Baltimore, Student Center, 5th Floor Theater.
Special thanks to Casey Odean Hegarty for her wonderful painting and for allowing me to use it.
Here is the illustrated poem Hermits by Steven Leyva and read by Casey Leyva
Kendra,
Cover Art by Casey Odean Hegarty
