Earth, Dirt & Dust

I got a problem. Honest to God. I say it’s about this book; my wife says it’s about me: The issue is that I always loved poetry. I always wanted to be a poet. I never looked down on the profession just because of Edgar Guest or ee cummings. And I remained determined to write even when my father told me that all poets were faggots, and my mother wailed that, though my father was wrong to call every poet a queer, they were certainly all atheists, and alcoholics, too. Well, at least they tried to guide me in the right direction. But I kept filing my little bits of paper with short lines on them in a folder I kept in a series of bottom desk drawers. Now, I know you have never heard of me. That’s because of the imparted wisdom of my parents—which means I never dared tell a soul of my poetic ambition nor my reclusive practice of the art. Outside of school, I never read a single poem nor owned a single poetry book. If you found me in a bookstore, I can assure you it would be nowhere near the poetry section. All this to say that, as a miserable isolate, I tracked my life with my poems for a long while, so long that the folder got cumbersome and stuff started falling out. I bought a computer in order to format the poems and sort them by topic. Shortly afterward, the miracle occurred. I looked down one day at about three-hundred pages of neatly printed blocks of short sentences handsomely decorated by a bunch of white space, and said to myself: "By God, this looks like a book!" And yes, my ego won over me. I came out of the closet. I drove to the city, strode boldly into a bookstore, and purchased twelve books of poetry written by the most bastardized surnames I could find¾which is to say, the most revered of the world''s contemporary poets. I also set my tuner to National Public Radio and left it on when voices¾possibly trained by horny people talking to themselves during long Minnesota winters¾pumped the air with verse. And yes, I read them all, and I listened to them all; every book, every recitation, hour after hour, day after day until¾ You guessed it. I listened to one too many. And I came to know the piteous error of my ways. I wallowed in self-contempt for a while. I even forced myself to rent the video and watch once more "Planet Of the Apes". It made me feel at home . . . and I was not even one of the apes. But that small solace did not last. I called myself contrary, insolent, even aesthetically illiterate. I tried again to read the poets, to re-read, to open to new horizons of meaning and metaphor, rhythm, meter, beat, shades of sound and tone and verbal textures, to senses of height, depth, color, liquidity—oh-so-many of which qualities so perfectly illuminated the insides and undersides of things only a roach, worm, or amoeba might normally enjoy. And, most impressively, all acutely alliterated with the fervor of a high school sophomore. I could take it no more! In desperation, I went philosophical. I told myself: So much better not to know so much than to know so much that is not so. I reasoned Buddhistically: Once the old monk attains the pinnacle of the mountain of knowledge, he is only expected to come back down and join the multitudes in the marketplace¾not substitute himself for a paddle in a Los Angeles sewage aeration pond. I decided to clean myself up. I threw out all of my chapbooks of contemporary poem. Then I threw out all my modern poetry books. I threw out all of my literature books, too. I went so far as to write ''Emily Dickinson sux” on the bathroom stall of the convenience store down the street. I even etched my ex-wife''s phone number next to it as if mere words could, after all, prove reality. But in my ears continued to ring alliterations. I wondered if Gerard Manley Hopkins or Hart Crane gone mad had been reborn