There are the poems I manage to write, and then, because I don’t believe in “throwing away” poems, there are the poems I’ve begun but don’t know how to finish. I am thinking, again, about “Mine Own John Berryman,” in Phillip Levine’s The Bread of Time: Toward an Autobiography. Specifically, I return to the moment where Berryman offers this advice:
“You should always be trying to write a poem you lack the technique, the language, the courage to achieve. Otherwise you’re merely imitating yourself, going nowhere, because that’s always easiest.”
Over the years since first reading this quote, I’ve worked at learning how to be more attentive to my drafts, to get better at listening to what a poem requires of me, instead of thinking I can force the poem to its finish. It’s made me more aware of how to approach every new poem, how to adjust to what it needs even though I might not yet know how to provide for it.
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On my office door are lyrics from Kendrick Lamar’s “Swimming Pools” off good kid, M.A.A.D. city, that read: “All I have in life is my new appetite for failure.”
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The most important poems end up being the ones I haven’t written yet. They include the images I can’t shake, images or moments or events that return to me despite the months that have passed, despite having started drafting new poems. I love those poems I can’t write. I hate those poems I can’t write.
The best analogy I have to explain my understanding of these unfinishable but undeniable poems comes from a story I’ve heard about my father. Though it’s kind of a fucked-up one, it’s what keeps coming back to me. I’m not sure if it’s true, knowing my father, who could be frugal to the point of bizarre, but I believe it could be.
Before I was born, every once in a while, a stray dog would wander into our yard. My family would feed it leftovers, set out a bowl filled with water, let it sleep in the backyard. After a day or two of this, the family would consider it a pet. My father, however, always complained about a dog being another mouth to feed. (I suppose he was right, but still.) There was only one way for them to know if they could keep it. He’d “test” the dog by taking it for a drive and dropping it off far away, usually by the side of a road outside of town. If the dog came back to them, it was theirs. If it didn’t, it wasn’t.
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The dog that comes back is a poem about the day of my brother’s release from prison, in which my mother makes a guest appearance, though I don’t know why she’s there. The dog that comes back is a poem I don’t even really know how to begin talking about, except by telling you about the line that won’t leave me: “Everything I love has a fence around it.” The dog that comes back is set in the undeveloped field behind the high school I went to. It’s lunch period. There’s this kid we called MYTH with a red bandana wrapped around his right fist. Though I’m not sure why, he’s about to fight this Black kid, whose name I don’t remember or never knew. All his homies are there. All of MYTH’s homies are there, including me. I’m told to be lookout, and so station myself on a corner between the empty field and the main stretch of campus, where students are eating lunch together, laughing and chatting. In the poem, I realize no one is coming to stop us, which is important, though I also know the poem wants me to do more than this. Still, in Berryman’s words, I don’t know if I have the courage or language to get this poem or the others down. Not yet.
When I mention all this to a friend, she wants to know what my father represents in this situation, or the dogs that don’t come back. Were they somehow not equally deserving of care? And who are you in this story? The questions give me pause. For now, all I really mean is this: that some poems insist on themselves, and that they can’t be regretfully redirected, lost, given up or given back to some other place or future.
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These days, I’ve been worried and cautious about the writing I’ve been doing since finishing my first book, An Incomplete List of Names, released a few weeks ago. I fear imitating what’s in this book in my new work, so much so, that I’ve imagined what a break from poetry would look like, thinking it might create a sort of clearing of the mind. (It looks like a lot of driving around, going for walks, and eating pumpkin pie.) But failure has been a type of fuel in the past, and I have to trust it will be again. I don’t really want to take a break from poems. I think I love them too much—writing my own, reading others’. So I’ve decided to welcome them—the relentless images like that of my mother, or of MYTH, red-faced and tired after a fight, that hover near me. I might not know how to do them any justice yet. I have to trust they’ll insist on themselves, that they’ll teach me how.
Michael Torres was born and raised in Pomona, California, where he spent his adolescence as a graffiti...
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