Discipline Like a Saturday Afternoon

Saturday… late morning, damn-near noon, and I’m thinking about influences, role models, and what I admire in the work they do. As I get older, I’ve come to admire discipline, the ability to focus and to keep at the work over long periods of time, which, for me, gets more challenging with age. It’s an accomplishment to write and to publish a book, but seeing someone publish one book isn’t quite as astonishing to me these days. When I see people who’ve carried on for years, publishing book after book, I’m fascinated by their discipline. To publish over a period of time requires a sense of not only purpose, truly knowing why you’re in this world, but also a resolve to get the writing onto the page. These are people who know what conversation they are having with the world, and I don’t mean “likes” and “dislikes” on social media. 

When I first began writing, in a quest to find my voice, I imitated everyone I read. It might seem counterintuitive to find one’s voice by imitating someone else’s, but it really is the way of the world. Every jazz musician I know, imitated—transcribed, as they put it—the solos of their heroes. But as those lines in their heroes’ solos became rote, they started branching out, finding their own voices. 

With some writers, you can swing from one book to the next, and you can see how the conversation broadens. Look at the evolution of the books of Claudia Rankine, for example. Who among you has read Nothing in Nature is Private or The End of the Alphabet? Did you think she started with Citizen? Look at Rita Dove and read beyond Thomas and Beulah, though a sacred text. Look at how different the poems in Ellen Bryant Voigt’s Claiming Kin or even Kyrie are from Headwaters. Take a weekend, or some weeks, and read Ed Roberson and see from where MPH and Other Road Poems emerged; I started with Atmosphere Conditions, but I had entered a conversation that had been going on for decades, in medias res. I had to go back to When Thy King is a Boy to get fully hip. 

And so, here I am, sitting alone, reading. I can’t think of a time I’ve been more moved than when I first encountered the poems of Robert Hayden. Poem after poem opened and closed and opened again for me, and I kept coming back, chasing after that initial high, which has never been matched. Since then, his poems have lived on my desk as I’ve approached each new book of my own, his poems growing in meaning over the years like a book of psalms. How different to read “Those Winter Sundays” as a 20-year-old, compared to my experience of studying those lines now, in my late 50s. Without hype, hardly a day passes that I don’t question, “what did I know, what did I know, / of love’s austere and lonely offices?” How beautiful this mystery is, this wondrousness, this self-interrogation. I don’t trust any adult who doesn’t question their evolving understanding of love—and of self—over time. Hayden bends the sonnet to his will, to contain the emotion, which he splits open like an atom in the final two lines quoted above. The poem, not only a sonnet but also an elegy and also a love poem, is what Horace Silver would call a “Song for My Father”; it continues to break me down. Check out the opening lines:

Sundays too my father got up early
and put his clothes on in the blueblack cold, 
then with cracked hands that ached
from labor in the weekday weather made 
banked fires blaze. No one ever thanked him. (1-5)

This first stanza establishes Hayden’s control both over tone and pacing in the poem. The opening sentence is draped over the first four and a half lines, ending the sentence on a molossus: “banked fires blaze,” conjuring fire where, earlier, in the second line, another three stresses conjure ice: “blueblack cold.” Contrasts and vicissitudes abound. Those three stresses hit a medial caesura, pausing to catch a breath and to put some white space around the shortest sentence of the poem, built from trochees: “No one ever thanked him.” This moment serves the poem like a thesis serves an essay. We find that the poem is partly about what the father did for the speaker, and about what the father did that went unnoticed, for a period, by the speaker. But it’s really about the growth of the speaker, the evolution of his understanding of his father’s love language, so to speak. This understanding of the father implies an understanding of the world, a better understanding, at least. When we have an incrementally truer understanding of the world, those are also moments of interiority. We want to know how one gets there. Today I read this poem and I hear the speaker talking to himself, as if in that moment he realizes, Damn…no one ever thanked him, which implies, Damn…and I never thanked him. I see my own father, who died in 2005, and I have to tip my hat to all those missed opportunities.

This sonnet, which—on my first read of it, decades ago—I had to read a few times before I realized it was a sonnet, being so swept up in the language and message I hadn’t bothered to notice it was only fourteen lines long, was the first poem that both puzzled me and, all at once, tugged at me. Up to that point, in my ignorance, I hadn't realized a sonnet could come with such nimble language. The sonnets I had been taught as a child, and even in college, felt like they had been poured into what I’d now call an iambic pentameter ChatGPT program. I could anticipate the rhyme and the meter, and, despite how much hagiography surrounded their reputations, they never stirred me.

I’m writing these words in Oakland, CA, where I now live. It’s afternoon, but the sun feels like it’s still rising higher. I still can’t get used to this, born and raised in the gray of the Midwest. I feel judged by others whenever I mention that I’ve learned to love a cloudy day… I’ve set a timer, as I always do when I read, for 30 minutes, and I have about six minutes left. In the past 15 minutes or so, I’ve drifted, reading poems by others who I think are in this conversation with Hayden: I’ve taken in some Denise Duhamel; some Major Jackson; some Rita Dove, whose work, irrespective of the subject matter, always feels like home, our shared Akron. I’m thinking of the masters of form today, the masters of discipline, these titans who continue to play and continue to keep form in play as they improvise. 

Discipline. I set a timer to read because parts of me are at war whenever I take an afternoon to take in a book. I didn’t grow up in a household where people sat around reading. I grew up in a household where people always had something to do, inside or outside the house. If there was nothing to do, my dad, looking almost disappointed to see me with a book, would urge me to go outside and play. And my mother always had something for me to dust inside or some weeds to pull outside, so this work—which reading is, if you’re a writer of any worth—still feels a bit like a luxury. I train with a timer.

Today, I have sonnets on my mind, and there’s one by Marilyn Nelson that still continues to move me.: “How I Discovered Poetry” contains a sharp volta, turning on both rhetoric and on plot, if you will. I say plot because there’s a narrative engine to this lyric form in Nelson’s hands, which shows just how malleable the sonnet can be, in the hands of a master poet. Here is the poem in its entirety:

It was like soul-kissing, the way the words
filled my mouth as Mrs. Purdy read from her desk.
All the other kids zoned an hour ahead to 3:15,
but Mrs. Purdy and I wandered lonely as clouds borne
by a breeze off Mount Parnassus. She must have seen
the darkest eyes in the room brim: The next day
she gave me a poem she’d chosen especially for me
to read to the all except for me white class.
She smiled when she told me to read it, smiled harder,
said oh yes I could. She smiled harder and harder
until I stood and opened my mouth to banjo playing
darkies, pickaninnies, disses and dats. When I finished
my classmates stared at the floor. We walked silent
to the buses, awed by the power of words.

Mostly four to five beats per line, until that God-awful moment in the antepenultimate line: “darkies, pickaninnies, disses and dats. When I finished,” when the stresses come quickly, distending to seven or eight in this line, depending on where your tongue is from, fleshing out the true nature of the scene in this turn, this reveal of true intentions. So important to keep in mind where the stresses should fall when making a point. 

This is the kind of poem you read and then ask, how did I get here. Well, so much of this poem feels built on the delayed release of information, which builds suspense. The title itself builds anticipation for what, as a reader, I lean into, anticipating the ars poetica. Indeed, it sets an expectation, both in tone and in subject, which it then strategically upends. I not only get a master class in how a sonnet turns on its rhetoric, but I always learn how, despite Machiavellian attempts at quashing  youthful Black intellect, it can still emerge. When making decisions on the rhetoric within a poem, turning to life itself works well—which is to say, how it is in life is often how it is in the poem. In this case, the girl figure in the poem, let’s assume it’s Nelson as a child, is held in amber in dramatic irony. As readers, we may have more immediate knowledge of the cruelty to which the child has been subjected than the child herself. But with the retelling of the event, we assume that, like Hayden, she, too, is wiser through experience. I know I am, having read it.

So, there: a Saturday afternoon.