Ready for Bagging

I burnt my ancient index cards, thousands of which I had kept in a few letter files since around 1970, diaries of my youth, plethoras of forgotten imbroglios, occasionally poetic, almost never original; the inferno of anyone’s twenties.

The index cards had more plastic in them than their paper façade suggested. The embers were filled with a hundred points of light, star-like galaxies floating around like butterflies, all flickering out point by point like teenagers leaving a Bob Dylan concert, the sequined pages fluttering like a Yayoi Kusama room around the palms.

I did it over two days in two different Weber barbecues we had in Kailua. The first one was too small and the burning ashes flew everywhere, alarmingly. Hot prose. The embers had to be tamped down by whatever stick I could find in the winds that rose; days that seemed calm were in fact filled with silent dust devils you would never notice without the flying carbon wisps emblazoned with stars. I never noticed the breeze beforehand; the index cards reveled in it.

Two or three novels, maybe more, disappeared in the charcoal blaze. The smoke rose up for most of the day, until I covered the grill and went inside. The next day, prose was impeccably metamorphosed to ash. My fingernails were black with the soot of prose. Who knew writing was so dirty?

I could have patched together picaresque steampunk teen escapades from those cards, if I had wanted to bathe in the dirty water of what Shakespeare calls the salad days; but I have long been too horrified by myself before I married to want to memorialize it. I’ve published now some twenty books of poetry and notes, which represent the moments of light I wanted to highlight, my best moments, often suggested by Cathy. There are another twenty volumes I may never get to, poems and notes that surprise me with their liveliness.

John Frederick Nims wrote me that my notes were witty, and my poems weren’t, so I set out to equalize the two. So I have to thank him for being my one-sentence mentor. Archibald MacLeish wrote me that “sleighs lost in snow” would haunt him for a week. So I tried for a year to write snow poems where every line was in that spirit. MacLeish was my second, kind influence. I was introduced to Richard Wilbur by John Simon at the 92nd Street Y during a James Merrill reading, but I’m sure Wilbur never remembered it. When Kimon Friar, our mutual friend with Aggie Eisenberger, told Merrill that I wrote poetry on the computer, Merrill told him it was impossible. But it is their poetry, not forgotten handshakes, which will always be with me.

I got more done because of the computer than I did on typewriters or longhand, and I was young enough back when the Mac was developed around 1980 that the process became inchoate in me. When Chris Cerf got one of the first Macs, those tiny round-screened bots, I remember being as scandalized by his writing on it as Merrill was at the thought of my writing on it.

Other than these glancing brushes, I never met any poets, except a few of our lovely guest poets at Tippet Rise. Jenny Xie was nice enough to discuss one of my poems there (although I haven’t met her). I think it’s a better experience to encounter a poem than the poet himself, and I hope that the world will look as kindly on them as Jenny Xie did. I’ve always thought you get more out of reading a poem than erased drunken nights with the writer. Maybe because I’m not looking for anything that can’t be found on a page.

I might be horrified at burning my pleonastic past if I didn’t have a low opinion of it. I wasn’t burning Pale Fire or Lolita, although both of them mention the idea. I suppose I felt I’d rather invent my future than plunder my juvenilia. I’d rather be prescient than precocious.