Perfect Poem

Often, before I go to sleep, I close my eyes and remember things I've done I hate myself for.

I don't invite these thoughts. They come in two ways. Sometimes they rise up like vapors out of the bayou of my bad memories.

Other times, I can picture a voodoo doll in my midsection and feel long pins of dark thoughts pierce the doll, and, in turn, pierce me.

Last night, just as I dozed off, the remarkable Seattle poet David Wagoner's dignified face and upright bearing unexpectedly hovered over the hide-a-bed. Snug didn't bark, so I don't think he noticed Wagoner's arrival.

My first experience with David Wagoner was completely impersonal. I joined a group of North Idaho College students who traveled to Cheney to hear Wagoner read at Eastern Washington University. It was an exquisite experience that inspired my life-long admiration for Wagoner's work.

My second experience with David Wagoner happened at Whitworth College (now University). I was a very young volunteer teacher's assistant in a Creative Writing Theme Dorm. Part of what I volunteered to do was write letters to a handful of Pacific Northwest poets and see if they would come to campus and give a reading and give a workshop.

Wagoner agreed to. He gave a brilliant reading and his workshop was inspiring and, in its own way, rigorous, in terms of what he helped us all see his writing and reading discipline demanded of him.

I was the host of this reading and the workshop. My job was to introduce Wagoner at the reading, walk him over to the workshop, and be his guide on campus.

Somehow, I had it in my head that David Wagoner and I were best friends. I was so naive. I gave one of those casual, "here's my buddy Dave" kind of introductions, sounding like a pretentious insider, and after the reading, I tried to talk with Wagoner about his poetry like we were fellow student poets in the Theme Dorm.

None of this impressed David Wagoner. He was brusque, but not cold; distant, but not mean; business-like, but not condescending. He was simply being an adult, a professional, in a professional situation; I was being an immature, world-foolish kid, with little sense of boundaries and little sense that written correspondence and being a poet's host does not establish a seasoned poet and a twenty-three year old part-time composition instructor as best friends forever.

My thoughts and memories lightened up a bit when I remembered the workshop. Wagoner opened his instruction by reciting the following poem, "The Fascination of What's Difficult" by William Butler Yeats:

THE FASCINATION of what’s difficult
Has dried the sap out of my veins, and rent
Spontaneous joy and natural content
Out of my heart. There’s something ails our colt
That must, as if it had not holy blood,	5
Nor on an Olympus leaped from cloud to cloud,
Shiver under the lash, strain, sweat and jolt
As though it dragged road metal. My curse on plays
That have to be set up in fifty ways,
On the day’s war with every knave and dolt,	10
Theatre business, management of men.
I swear before the dawn comes round again
I’ll find the stable and pull out the bolt.

Wagoner recited this poem with more than passion. He spat it out with fury.

From the top, he wanted us to learn that before poetry is anything, before it is ideas or themes or before it "has a message", it is music. He recited this poem so we could hear the harsh, percussive, angry, frustrated music of this poem.

Maybe you'd like to read the first line aloud: "The fascination of what's difficult."

When used as derogatory words, I would argue our language's two harshest words are "fuck" and "cunt". It's the harsh "f" sound and the harsh "k" sounds, and the pointed "t", joined by the short "u".

This line has a similar effect with the "f" sounds of "fascination" and "difficult" and the "k" and "t" and short "u" in difficult. The harshness carries on in the poem as the "cult" rhymes with "colt" , "jolt", "dolt", and "bolt".

In fact, in form, the poem is almost a sonnet, but because Yeats is writing about frustration he frustrates the very form of the sonnet, making the poem thirteen lines long instead of fourteen, making the rhymes I just mentioned near rhymes instead of full ones, and frustrating the usual subject matter of the sonnet.

This is not a love poem. It's a frustration poem.

It's perfect.

The difficult business side of theater life frustrates his art. It "has dried the sap out of [his] veins". Like the tearing of a garment with biblical grief it has "rent/Spontaneous joy and natural content/Out of [his ]heart."

Pegasus, the inspiration of the muses, must "Shiver under the lash, strain, sweat and jolt/As though it dragged road metal".

Musically, it's a perfect poem. In form, it's perfect. Yeats' use of single syllable words, "rent", "lash", "sweat", "jolt", "dragged", "road" plus the image of a colt dragging road metal, all combine to create the feeling of artistic inspiration dried up by theater management and "dolts".

Berating myself before I fell asleep, this poem kept playing over and over in my mind. Self-loathing has dried the sap out of my veins; it rents spontaneous joy out of my heart.

In order to "find the stable and pull out the bolt" and let the colt of my spontaneity gallop free last night, I had to reconcile my pretentious younger self with my more mature self today.

In May of 2006, a committee at Lane Community College asked me if I would introduce Lucille Clifton to the campus faculty and staff and to a presentation for students.

I did. I wrote out the introduction. I kept it short. I did not tell the audience anything about myself. I called her Lucille Clifton, not Lucille, not Ms. Clifton, nothing casual, nothing pretentious. I worked to do what I have seen few introducers of poets do: deflect attention from myself, acquaint those who didn't know Lucille Clifton with her poetry and fame, briefly, and get her on stage and me off as efficiently as possible.

It worked.

I learned from my fascination with what's difficult. I prepared to introduce Lucille Clifton by remembering how I had behaved with David Wagoner.

Lucille Clifton will never rise up out of the quagmire of my subconsciousness and haunt he with self-loathing.

As a postscript, I'll add that last night before I went to bed and before the ghost of David Wagoner prevailed himself upon me, I was looking at a blog called the Self-Portrait Challenge. I decided to snap a couple of self-portraits just before I retired. I look at them tonight, and I think, from the way I look, that last night I was predisposed toward a dark night of the soul before I ever went to bed. Maybe I should have read some P.G. Wodehouse before I tried to sleep: