Reading my Old Poems

It is at once humbling, startling, and puzzling. Every so often, I have to do a cleaning out of my office. This means going into files spilling with slips of paper, old manuscripts, unpublished poems, letters, posters, galley proofs, students’ papers and more of the detritus of a life spent collecting papers, filling pages with words and negotiating the written word. Invariably, I will come across an old note pad or a yellowing pile of sheets with typewritten text on them. Inevitably, I come across some of my writing of the past. Today, I ran across poems I had compiled and typed out in 1984. I would have been twenty-two then. It occurs to me that I was about the same age as some of the first year MFA students I sometimes teach. The same age as many of the poets I work with who are trying to shape their craft. I wish I could say that I see tremendous promise in these poems. What I see are poems that would make me think hard about what to say, think hard about what is working here, think hard about how to understand what is making this person want to write poems. I would have a lot of questions to ask this young writer about what he is reading and what he admires in poets. It is hard to see in these poems the trace elements of what I now see in my own writing. That is the puzzling part: how did I get from one place to the other?

The humbling part is the reminder that I probably came by my art through a lot of hard work and a constant disappointment at my failure to reconcile what I imagined in my head and what I managed to put down on paper. Humbling because I have been wondering whether I should keep these poems or jettison them entirely. To keep them would be to risk people looking at poems that do not show me in a flattering light. To jettison them, then, would be an act of pride, an effort to sustain a myth of quality that I allow to be an assumed idea in the telling of my story of being a writer. The greater truth is that I still remember never being satisfied with the work. In fact, I was deeply uncomfortable with the quality of the work and the fact that I saw a huge chasm between the poetry I was reading and admired and what I was producing. The chasm startles me even now. And given what I looked at today, I realize where some of my persistent self-doubt as a writer comes from. I have a line in my poem “Inheritance” that suggests that my constant anxiety is that one day I would be found out to be something of fake, a pretender to this art. I am dead serious about that impulse, even as it is countered by a calmer assessment of the value of my work. But, yes, that anxiety comes out of the time when I was writing and wondering whether I would write a poem that I could be genuinely proud of, genuinely confident about. I wish I could say that I just had really high standards. The truer statement would be that the work was genuinely needy. So we do grow. As writers we can grow. I am struck sometimes by how quickly and dramatically someone’s art can change, can mature and shock by the shift, the expansion of vocabulary, the mastery of form, and most of all, the sense of what is genuinely interesting as poetry. It can happen. It happens all the time. I do think that for this to happen, a poet may sometimes need help in dissecting what is fundamentally flawed in their poetic practice, and how to move from this awareness to creating art that manages to move the poetry from one plain to the next. As a teacher and a reader of the work of some many poets, I have given myself to trying to understand what it is that might make the shift for each poet. I don’t know what it is that made a difference for me, but I do know that it took work, and it took something that was invariably sudden and dramatic to move my work from that stage to the next. I have found evidence of the progression, though. And the most telling thing I can say is that the shift took place while I was completely engrossed in the self-effacing art of imitation. Somehow, in the middle of the act of imitation, I began to make poems that looked sensible, that looked like poems, even if they looked like poor imitations of the work of far better poets. Then, without my realizing it, I began to find a voice and a purpose for my art that was my own. One day I did write a poem that left me thinking, I have crossed that line. That was four years after the poems I was looking at this morning were put together. Four years during which much in my life changed. I left Jamaica, I spent six months traveling around the US and reading a lot of things I had never read before. I moved to Canada to start studying in a cold and strange country and I, for the first time, became truly Jamaican by being out of Jamaica. All these things must have played some role in shaping my art, leading to the change—the shift. One does not plan these things, and one does not ever fully understand or explain these things. Nonetheless, I think of the clumsy, awkward poems I wrote all those years ago, the poems that were so earnest and so heavy-handed in their moralizing and so self-conscious in their effort to sound “poetic”, and I think of where my work has come from with gratitude. I have a great deal to say to young poets. It can look like this one day, and then like this the next. This has to be a useful lesson.