I have a memory of sitting on my front porch in Palo Alto. It was probably the spring of 1965. There was a large walnut tree in our small front yard. I was keeping sane in graduate school by learning the neighborhood birds. Mockingbirds were easy to identify because of their elaborate and ventriloquial songs and because, as they took off, their wing feathers flashed white. On the day in my memory, a mockingbird flitted from a branch of the walnut onto the eaves of the house, a swift, graceful movement. I had been reading contemporary poets, Denise Levertov in particular, trying to understand how the free verse in contemporary writing worked. I found myself describing to myself the shape of the mockingbird’s flight, and I recorded it in my notebook this way:
A mockingbird leans
from the walnut, bellies,
riffling white, accomplishes
his perch upon the eaves.
I witnessed this act of grace
in blind California
in the January sun…
And, looking at it, I thought the line break caught exactly the way the bird leaned into its flight, and the line break at bellies / riffling caught the way the bird’s underwing in flight flashed white, and the next line break (across a stanza break), accomplishes / his perch, got the neatness and completeness of the bird’s movement. Writing the poem gave me a feel for how to convey movement in free verse and made it seem like one could make an occupation of catching the movement of the world and making a music of that language. And led me to think about catching movement in internal states and discovering, by following out a rhythm, the shape of a thought or a set of feelings.
This article appears in Issue 35 of Alta Journal.
SUBSCRIBE
So why write poetry? Because I could or, in those days, because it felt like perhaps I could. As a response to the world, to living in it. What was on my mind, the mind of the young in my generation in those days, was the idea that the world was poised on the trigger edge of enormous destructive violence because of the nuclear arms race. It was also a time when, on the television news, we saw the faces of young white Southerners disfigured by rage, as a Black child in her Sunday best dress tried to march past them and enact an idea of American values by attempting to integrate a public school. The mid-1960s was also a moment when the United States Congress was gesturing toward environmental repair to save what was left of wild places in North America and to recover some of what had been lost to pollution and relentless extraction. These concerns were becoming attached to a second-wave feminist politics. All this culminated in the movement against the escalation of a colonial war in Vietnam, which seemed an evident disaster and came to define a generation.
It seems a stretch from there to think that writing a line of poetry that caught with luminous, or at least disciplined, exactness some detail of the natural world or made some revelatory leap into metaphor would address the violence and disorder of the world we were coming to adulthood in, but it did feel to me like the practice of an art was a small way of doing the work of setting the world to rights.
From living a life and being in a marriage, I came to realize something of the limits of what I was trying to do. I think I had picked up a particular masculine aesthetic, which went like this: I’ll tell you what I’m seeing, and you guess what I’m feeling and thinking. The next order of business, writing the poems in Praise, was a sort of shift from external observation to experiments with the rhythm of sentences that caught the shape of thought and feeling. That gave me more work to do.•
