Page 24 - WTP Vol. XII #2

Lea (continued from preceding page)
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I can recall that on the drive to the theater, I felt a spark of actual gratitude for the boys’ remarks, for the perspective they lent to what I’d end up doing over these five ensuing decades. Even beforehand, I’d half unconsciously developed an antipathy to the self-styled “sensitivity” of some poets, to their notions, for instance, that they took risks in their writing. Come now: combat is risky; so is bearing a child; so is stock-car racing; so is showing up in the “wrong” neighborhood if you’re black; on and on.
I’d likewise rejected the idea that those sensitive poets’ efforts were so crucial that anything— in- cluding father-or motherhood, friendship, or simple human decency—must be set aside to accom- modate the muse’s appetite or indeed any appetite they might have themselves: drugs, alcohol, sex, what have you. The only thing poets may be more sensitive to than carpenters, dancers, elec- tricians, schoolteachers, what have you, is language. Some of the most tone-deaf, thick-skinned
people I know pose as bardic seers. I don’t mean that I’ve always been immune from such self- delusion myself, but I try to recognize it and choke it off, the more promptly the better. The kids helped me to stay aware that precious poetic postures are garbage.
After that first volume went public, I’ve felt a greater or lesser surge of depression over my work for a stretch of weeks following the appearance of its every successor. I frequently wonder: does anyone really need another set of Lea poems, another sheaf of his essays? I’ve waited 35 long years between novels. I usually stop writing for a spell after publication. Yesterday, though, my glum outlook preceded the sixteenth collection’s arrival by many months.
As I thought about American racism, but also about our blights of poverty, inequality, homeless- ness, militarism, misogyny—the list is long: yesterday, I stepped back from Dewey’s glorification of the local. Though my home state of Vermont is overwhelmingly white, there’s racism here too, as everywhere, along with plenty of other miseries that scorch our consciences too, or should: ad- diction, illiteracy, hunger, suicide, bullying. Again, the list is easy to expand.
My gloom had to do with an indefinable, self-rebuking sense that, old man that I am now, I still should have been somewhere else, should have been Out There, the way I was in the ‘60s. I should have been protesting, lobbying, fighting—something!—and not here bird-watching on a kitchen stool, not battening onto the hyper-local, not glibly observing those gaudy birds as they grabbed for seeds and those lively little rodents frantically scurried after the ones jostled from the feeder’s tray.
Almost every day I hear wretched news on our radio. More than a little inevitably sneaks into my poems, but that’s about it. I too feed on spills. Given my morose appraisal of world and nation and self, an expression leapt inevitably to mind: Art’s for the birds.
It will pass, of course. It always has. So far, at least.
Tough Luck
To me, like many, it seems an age since I started to read about hapless refugees persistently and frantically trying to poke holes through barriers at our southern border. How many have been shot down by now, I wonder? More than “reasons of state” will allow us to know, I suspect.
I leave justification for such abuse to our vile former president and his self-styled “Christian” advo- cates, though I can’t help wondering if they’re as versed in the Gospel as they claim to be. If indeed they are, what do you suppose they make of their Lord’s words in Matthew? I was hungry and you gave me food, I was thirsty and you gave me drink, I was a stranger and you welcomed me. Or, since they seem more inclined to favor the punitive God of the Hebrew Bible, how do they deal with some- thing like this from Leviticus? You shall treat the stranger who sojourns with you as the native among you, and you shall love him as yourself, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt.