Running and Jumping — SONG OF BOB

The simple pleasures of youth become the big dreams of middle age. What do I dream? What I have always dreamed. If my body fails, the impulse remains. Is that desire enough, even when our bodies crumble?

Today I was feeling that failure

that piercing in my hip a seagull's cry

and wondering about the time when I felt the spirit of life from the other side… the beginning. I thought of a certain moment from my youth, and dug up this essay from 25-some-odd years ago.

At the time I shared it with only a few people… one of them a trusted colleague, a "real" writer, whose response was so disdainful I shelved the writing, if not the sentiment. Re-reading the essay now, I think it has some value.

And like all of this blog, it's for Japhy—may you never lose the youthful spark.

Towards a Feminine Poetry [1994]

When I was 13 my family attended a Fourth of July concert at an outdoor arena. The Cleveland Orchestra did their version of the Boston Pops, or perhaps it was the Pops themselves, and when it got dark there were fireworks. During the early part of the concert we kids roamed around the sprawling lawn and tried to find some middle ground between the general unhipness of orchestral music and the genuine freedom of our midsummer youth. We did not care for the holiday itself except that it meant good cold chicken, fresh watermelon and corn, and a chance for us to be independent in our own way. The parents were beginning not to worry when we disappeared, were beginning to allow our fledgling selves to take their own paths, albeit with the parting admonition—meant to restrain and not inspire—remember who you are!

So I with my two older sisters and their friend Janet, all them newly in high school, romped across the lush lawns and blacktop paths of the Blossom amphitheater, and pondered what we should do. Food was mentioned, as was going to look for their friend Scotty. And me? I was almost giddy with the panorama of senses which presented itself: the pervasive hubbub of 20,000 people, the aroma of all those spreads of fried chicken and melon and cups of lemonade, my incipient sense of fashion and the feeling that I chose the right clothes to wear this evening, the perfect midwestern evening, humidity gone to crickets and lazy lightning bugs beginning to spell the safety of the night in some kind of lighthouse language. I was unburdened even by high school and its attendant sexual intrigue. I was free. Sensing this freedom made me practically swoon, and for the first time I tried to put language to this solid feeling. What do you want to do? They looked at me. Words formed and I said them, doing a kind of impromptu pirouette: I want to run...and jump!

Before the sentence was over I tried to keep it from rolling out of my mouth; I could feel it like some errant bowling ball about to crash through my teeth, I could tell that, simply, it was the wrong thing to say. My sisters and Janet stood still then, with expressions of worry, said, "What?" The brief minutes of independence had ended, and as the first screamers and booms addressed themselves to the sky, with the suddenly overbearing strains of a 120-piece orchestra performing "When the Saints Go Marching In" assaulting my ears, I wondered if it was even a few minutes of freedom, if it were not merely seconds, just the time between the forming of the words and the moment my mouth opened to utter them, when was lost innocence and when began the calling of the poet.

At a meeting of poets some 15 years later, I raised the question of a regular radio broadcast for us. Why? asked the others there. I answered that I was interested in building a community of poets or those who were sensitive to the art. The process of recording and sharing that experience in common with other local artists might engender some kind of communal feeling and perhaps encourage other group endeavors. Another poet said that he did not think it was possible to "plan" a community, that we should look upon this project as a way to "immortalize poets" and record them, local and otherwise, for posterity.

I thought that one could plan posterity even less than one could call out each other's name in a confused city, but it was clear that we had completely different assumptions and may not be able to reconcile a common interest even in this project. The participant said that anyway, he was busy, and if anything major happened, to call, but he wouldn't really be able to offer anything in the meantime.

Meridel Le Sueur, venerable activist novelist, poet, reporter, actress, mother and teacher, says in the introduction to her collection Ripening, that she wrote to make connections between people, that she wanted to draw people together through common experience. That experience was rooted in the present moment. The expression of it took risks, in its artistry as well as its mere existence. For a woman to write "artistic" news-reports, filled with images and full language antithetical to Hemingway's matter-of-fact style, was treason, as the perpetrators of the House Un-American Activities Commission pointed out. Le Sueur lost favor as a writer for her point of view, until the rekindled feminist movement of the 1970s.

I try to write a feminine poetry. This is different from a female poetry, or women's poetry. "It" is the gender of the poem itself, rather than its author. Its language has its own power and purpose which makes the work of the "author" the work of love, the work of letting go. I wish less to construct a poem than I wish to let the poem grow. To do this I must listen to its voice, for each poem has a particular voice and language and form. I must clear out what is unnecessary, what is my fingerprint, my author's graffiti that says: I made this. Sometimes this graffiti will be a poem, this masculine self-definition, this individual's squawk. Masculine poetry has its place, but that model of "art" seems to presents itself at every place, our culture's emphasis on heroism and self-sufficiency ready to devour the less stout at every step. If poets then feel the need to shout back at the world which ignores them if they are "feminine," (the traditional complaint), then I encourage a poetry of such necessity, connection, common language (perhaps common language of hearts, a more subtle and powerful thing), common experience, all in all, of such power, that it will cause the world pause, cause the world to yield and listen. For this poetry is about listening, this poetry-making allows the gentle tide of words to repeat their questions again and again onto the shore until it yields: is it so? Is it so? Is it? This poetry treats the reader, or listener, with grace for their essential and fearful task. They do not know what they may hear. We do not know what we may hear.

The listener will descend, ascend, travel into the exchange between words, into the discourse of listeners, poets and readers alike. Words will allow the spaces between them to grow vast with the translation, let go of themselves seeking, listeners let go their imaginations to find the unknown. A feminine poetry considers our possibilities for a future together, but it does not try to throttle the future into existence, try even to force "us" together. It focuses on our relationship now and lets the future grow into its own tiding. The strength of a feminine poetry relies in its fragility, its reach towards the possible, its acknowledgment that all strength is not absolute, that fragility is necessary, that things may break, do die, but it is not our province to spite them by doing it ourselves. Feminine poetry has power, beware, indelible power, but it uses grace rather than force to express it. It expresses the power of language and not the power of the author. If it acknowledges immortality, it is not through a single eternal voice, but through the passage of language through translations, through speakers andlisteners, mouths and bodies and linked lives, through the very truth of mortality.

The major contemporary event in poetry is "Spoken Word," or in its most characteristic expression, the Poetry Slam. I wonder why we no longer call it simply poetry. Perhaps our culture has lost the ability to listen to mere poetry with our ears. Perhaps we are slowly becoming de-sensed. But if we have senses, as well as reason, if we can feel, if poetry too is something alive, like a garden, the seed is sown gently, slowly, and with sometimes spontaneous moments of inspirational splendor. I want to encourage acknowledgment of this kind of voice, acknowledgment that all men must not limit themselves to a kind of angst-ridden poetry full with the search for immediate immortality. I want to encourage a feminine poetry in the public arena, where we need it most. It is not "nice" but subtle, it is not "pretty" but wondrous as the world is, with pain and celebration and complexity. It seeks not to analyze that reality, not to become overburdened with the force of names so that they are mere stamps or hammered labels. A feminine poetry seeks to balance the cacophony of naming with the act of letting go words unto themselves, allowing them to ask themselves into existence, allowing that hunger to echo in the space between writer and reader, to be filled with that exchange, yes, content, and engendering curiosity again.

Where in our public love poetry could one shout the word "hug"? But could anyone even hear a public whisper? And how else could two people come together? The balance of community life depends on the balance of its expression, self and other-wise. It depends on our ability to hear what would grow as well as what we would plant. I want to encourage a kind of fallow season of voices (still hard work, maybe harder than we know), a kind of organic poetry, the poem which lets the reader go, the poem which is itself let go, the poem whose power can draw people together. There is a time for masculine poetry, as some of the best is, but examples are found readily, in abundance. Alternates exist, surely and perhaps in equal abundance (but missed for their orientation), in certain publications, in the notebooks of many cafe sitters and even some public poets, male and female. I want to encourage more of it, say with the secret voice of all those who feel a possible freedom and who hear the small voice I want to run and jump! singing helplessly in their hearts and bodies, I want to say, and I do: Let us.