Borrowing, Stealing, Influence

Given the average lifespan, I know that some books I will simply never get to read. This is understating it—I will not come remotely close to reading most books already written, to say nothing of those to come. There must be a German word for the sorrow this fact of life produces. Whatever its name, this particular kind of sorrow, like most sorrows, also gives rise to the promise of a flipside feeling, namely joy, that which will be brought about by those astonishing books I know nothing about yet.

About the poetry books that I have read but will never, ever, under any circumstances willingly read again, I won’t say much, except that they exist in plenty and, in all likelihood, the world’s supply of terrible, horrible, no good, very bad books will not soon run out. I take that back. I will say one more thing: I hope not to be the author of one of those books.

Then there are the books I reread.

Most of the time, I go back to a poetry collection for the pure pleasure of the encounter with it—with its words, sound, wisdom and insights, its attitude, its way of perceiving and receiving the world, making that world its own and, in a word, unforgettable. But I feel obligated to qualify this reason for rereading certain books: it applies from my perspective as a reader. When I return to a book of poems not as someone reading but making poems—I have something else in mind. A different motivation sets the stage for which books come down and which remain on the shelf.

As a poet, the books I choose to reread become companions in the process of writing a poem. If an issue presents itself in a poem—it always does, whether an image, an ending, the lineation, the syntax, or even the title—and I cannot figure it out, and nothing else has come to the rescue, not my imagination, the advice of friends, chance, or dumb luck, then I walk to the room where I keep my books to find the answer.

The exact number of poetry books I own, I don’t know—I stopped counting years ago—but I would guess around one thousand. How many of these I return to regularly, repeatedly, I also don’t know—I haven’t kept count—but it is a very small number. And the books on this list change, a few times each year, but some have remained on the list for a very long time. These books—the “regulars,” if you will—I go to them so often and rely on them so much that I know exactly where they reside on the bookshelf (I could probably pick them out blindfolded), and I know just the poems to turn to when I open them up (with some, I’ve flipped to the right page on the first try), and I know precisely which phrase or image or metaphor or structure or line or line break that will do the trick—the “trick” being writing my poem.

For the way they convey a voice of authority, I have been reading and rereading Lawrence Joseph’s poems for more than twenty years. I’ve already reread, a few times, his brand new collection, So Where Are We?. But more than not, I reach for Curriculum Vitae, his second book, and Before Our Eyes, his third. The poems in these collections are illuminating, unflinching in their determination to bring reality into focus—and they remain entirely relevant today, as they have been over the past three decades. This is just one reason I keep going back to them as a reader. As a poet, though, I view these poems in a different light. I want from them something much more self-serving: to guide me in my own poem-making process.

For instance, when I’m worried that an emotion may overwhelm a poem-in-progress—lately, indignation keeps threatening to undo what I write, to spiral my words out of orbit—Joseph’s poems have served me well, acting like teachers who don’t explain or tell me what to do but by their own example show me how I may proceed. “Some Sort of Chronicler I Am” comes to mind. Soon after the poem opens, there is no mistaking the poet’s feelings, those aroused by injustice, not to mention the “problem” of presenting those feelings and the ideas both informing and growing out of them:

Some sort of chronicler I am, mixing
emotional perceptions and digressions,
 
choler, melancholy, a sanguine view.
Through a transparent eye, the need, sometimes,
 
to see everything simultaneously
—strange need to confront everyone
 
with equal respect. Although the citizen
across the aisle on the Number Three
 
subway doesn’t appreciate my respect.
Look at this eyes—both of them popping
 
from injections of essence of poppy;
listen to his voice bordering on a shrill.
 
His declaration: he’s a victim of acquired
immune deficiency syndrome. His addiction
 
he acquired during the Indo-Chinese war.
Specified “underclass” by the Department of Labor
 
—he’s underclass, all right: no class
if you’re perpetually diseased and poor.
 
Named “blessed” by one of our Parnassians
known to make the egotistical sublime
 
—blessed, indeed; he’s definitely blessed.
His wounds open, here, on the surface:
 
you might say he’s shrinking his stigmata.
I know—you’d prefer I change the subject
 
(I know how to change the subject).

And then, of course, he immediately changes the subject: to the change in atmosphere in a lower Manhattan neighborhood, to children who “play and scratch / like a couple kittens until the green / layers of light cover them completely.”

What I learn from this—what it gave me the last time I went to it, in order to resolve an issue in one of my poems—is to consider how the reader may regard my righteous anger—the loss of control such anger always risks—and rather than hide or skirt around my own annoyance, frustration, or resentment, to make these front and center, openly admitting to my readers where I’m at, and where I think they may be at, where I think they may not want to go with me. Put another way, this is to understand the poem as a conversation and to allow into the conversation the choices I make, both the apparent and hidden choices.

I might have arrived at this “solution” on my own—but I didn’t. And I didn’t need to go it alone. No poet does.

I’ve been returning to Joseph’s books with another specific aim in mind: to pay close attention to his lines, which are measured, concise, and robust, and which manage to approximate everyday speech, yet still enjoy the sound and feel of elevated language, of being both casual and eloquent. The goal, the purpose of rereading the poems—looking at the lines in them—is simple: they show me, teach and remind me, how I may accomplish the task for myself.

Other poets I’ve used similarly. I admire and enjoy their work immensely—that’s a fact—but their poems also serve a utilitarian role in my own poetics—also a fact, one I am not ashamed to admit. Some of those well-worn books on my shelves: Philip Levine’s New Selected Poems (especially the poems from 7 Years From Somewhere), Hayden Carruth’s Tell Me Again How the White Heron Rises and Flies Across the Nacreous River at Twilight Toward the Distant Islands, James Schuyler’s Selected Poems, Ruth Stone’s What Love Comes To, Charles Wright’s Chickamauga, Khaled Mattawa’s Tocqueville, Chase Twichell’s The Ghost of Eden, Charles Bukowski’s The People Look Like Flowers At Last, Larry Levis’s The Afterlife and The Widening Spell of the Leaves, and Fady Joudah’s The Earth in the Attic, to name a few.

Two poets I’ve been returning to a lot lately are Audre Lorde and Russel Swensen.

Audre Lorde: for the way the images in her poems appear to exist instinctually. I had barely exited my teenage years when I first read Lorde and to this day hers are among the only lines in poetry I have memorized (I am utterly incapable of memorization, even with my own poems), but her images, I cannot forget—it may due to their exactness, their ostensible naturalness.

The opening lines to “Coal,” for example:

I     is the total black
being spoken
from the earth’s inside.

Or the short poem “Love, Maybe”:

Always
in the middle
of our bloodiest battles
you lay down your arms
like flowering mines
 
to conquer me home.

And Russel Swensen: a poet with only one book, the stunning and underappreciated The Magic Kingdom, for the indulgences taken—the risks inherently involved in doing so—and for the way the indulgent utterances show me how to walk up to the brink of sentimentality and melodrama (which, by the way, I am prone to do—which, probably most poets do—at least in drafts) but not slip off the edge—a move that, in Swensen’s poems, almost always leads me to heartbreak and feeling wrecked.

Take the opening section from the title poem, “Magic Kingdom”:

Sun, sun, sun on the 101
 
            And here’s the red-paneled apartment in Silverlake
            where they wore hoods
 
carried Raj halfway out the door—
 
eyeholes cut into pillowcases; welcomes to the party,
she whispers,
 
wearing chopsticks in her hair,
 
Hollywood & Highland, with its dumpster full of offal, Ashley
still wearing her Lego bra—  dancing on my birthday
 
to the tune of Nine Inch Nails: listening to Bled White on the 405
watched a girl in a summer dress
 
die in a hatchback car, mashed into the guard rail, full of
 
strawberries.

Don’t get me wrong: I’m not reading poems like a tactician. I don’t pick up a book of poems, or put one down, simply because it does or doesn’t serve my purposes as a poet. But I do use the poems of other people. Every poet does. I’m convinced of it. Every poet I’ve talked to about this admits doing something like it. And if a poet was to deny or plead ignorance to the practice, or a version of it, I have no doubt I would be in the presence of a bald-face lie.

Besides which, we already have a word for the practice, for how it works, a word most poets take for granted, don’t argue with, and rarely find troubling: “influence.” Often, another poet’s influence happens less deliberately: the many poems we read over a lifetime, usually imperceptibly and with subtlety, influence us over a lifetime—we don’t need to literally walk up to a poem and read it on the spot for it to do its job, to influence or “inspire” us. But that happens, too—more than most people who aren’t poets know about—and maybe more than most poets admit.

In many not-so-subtle ways, every influence of this kind is an instance of borrowing. Strictly speaking, though, borrowing presupposes the intention of returning the thing used. You can give the bank teller her pen back after filling out a withdrawal slip, and you can return your neighbor’s lawnmower because yours ran out of gas midway through a mowing, but how do you give back the influence of another poet?

Maybe “borrowing” is the wrong metaphor. Stealing may not be right, either, but it may come closer to what actually takes place. Maybe what I have been all these years doing is an acceptable, if not honorable kind of theft.

Every theft incurs a debt, and this kind we pay back with gratitude. Every time I reread a poem with the goal of making some aspect of it mine, I am thankful to its maker, and I hope that one day my poems will also be stolen, and the kindness paid forward.