Old poems

At a certain point in one’s life, one begins casting backward, like a fly fisherman casts a fly downstream. I guess at 55 I’ve about reached that point. Being a poet means, in one way or another, one’s always looking back. That’s where the tradition is, and the tradition—whether Western or, in my case, Chinese and Japanese, as well—provides answers to questions that I might waste a lot of time trying to figure out myself; the tradition prevents us from having constantly to reinvent the wheel. We also, periodically, look back at ourselves, measuring the distance we’ve come, noting changes we’d make in older poems if we had it do all over again. Of course, we do have it to do all over again, and that’s the reason I've gone and looked at poems from many to several years ago. The poems cover about twenty years, from the mid-seventies to the mid-nineties, and represent early poems and poems that somehow never made it in collections.

This last may require a small explanation. For me, the process of taking poems I’ve written and turning them into a book involves looking as much for the unifying themes as judging which poems display the better craft and artistry. This means that perfectly good poems never find a home, except occasionally in journals, and lay about until I forget about them. Some of these poems never found their way into my first collection, A Fire in the Cold House of Being, and others were composed in the years following that publication. In the almost twenty years that passed between that book and my fourth collection, The Precincts of Paradise, during which time I published one rather thin collection of poems that worked around a very particular set of themes and a volume that gathered together three longer sequences of poems, I assembled many manuscripts, studied them, tossed some poems out and shuffled others in, the whole time looking for that unifying thread. Of course, some of those poems fell out of sight—might as well have been off the planet. Since I’d written most on a computer, as software has changed, copies of the poems have become irretrievable, unless I chose to root through my file cabinets and find those old manuscripts to see what they held. Finally, something nudged me to do just that, and I found a few pleasant surprises.

The course of a career is matter of evolution, whether slow or accelerated, and I’ve usually shown a considerable change of style between collections. Looking back at these poems, I’ve found flaws—wordiness, awkward use of line, clunky rhythm—which begged for revision. In revising, it’s hard not to apply the lessons learned in the interim, so many of these poems take dramatically different form than they did originally, which means, I suppose, that even as I’ve cast back I’ve kept my footing steady on the river bottom. At least I hope so.