I won’t say much about the poems I’ve not written. Because I still plan on writing them. Because I’ve come at them at different ways over the years and still not managed to get them right. It’s like looking at a sculpture, trying to grasp the whole of it. You have to walk around it. You have to stop, back up, move in close. You have to go home and remember it wrong. You have to recall who you were when you first saw it. Who the world was. And wasn’t.
And when I say you, of course I mean me. And when I say me, I mean that character who was me and would become the person who talks in circles now. Not wanting to give too much away. Because I still want to find those poems. And I want them to be a surprise. To me. To the you that is you. I want us to be changed by what we read.
I have boxes and sock drawers and pockets of old jackets with scraps on which I’ve scrawled the same words over and over. Alive with silverfish, the brittle bits read: Colette, driver’s ed, Mr. McDuffy, b’s handcuffs, Chattahoochee, sugar packets, the tunnel.
I keep meaning to make something of those scraps. First I wrote, make sense of, but it’s not sense, maybe, that I’m after. Or not in a conscious way. And I can only bring myself to say words here that are code, words that will give nothing away about the possible poem. Because every poem I have tried to write that meant anything to me, well, I still mean to write it. By which I mean to be there when it is ready to find me. And what I can also say is this: most of the poems I’ve written that matter most to me were not poems I planned to write. They just showed up. Someone knocks at the door. You let them in. And it turns out they’ve been living there all this time.
— Andrea Cohen
* * * * *
In 1978, my father was dying of prostate cancer, and had only a few weeks left. I had never written a poem about him – our relationship was more like a series of battles with no truces. I don’t think that he ever got that I was a poet, not just a research chemist trying to follow in his footsteps.
I guess I felt I owed him a poem, and a title came to me: “Poem For My Father, Still Alive.” However, it was hard to get started. The first stanza was tentative:
Why not write it now? My memory
won’t improve. These days
we get along O.K.
What I have to say
just fits a poem.
Not much, but still all
yours and mine.
While I liked the four stanzas that followed, they were shaky. The images jumped around from childhood memories to my internal conversation with him. I sent the draft to David Hilton. He was my closest “poet friend” and we had kept an early promise to share our work, frankly criticize each other and not take offense at anything the other had to say.
About a week later, Dave sent me some of his new poems and returned mine with the following note written on it:
“I’d rather not try to ‘improve this’ now. I think it’s still very much at the feeling stage where your own intuitions should operate pristinely. Show it to me after a while. I suggest you not let ‘style’ control the language so much — let the poem genuinely flow from within itself: perhaps it has, you may think so now but I don’t think so.”
Even then, I realized that Dave was right. I was forcing a final conversation that I could never have. Nonetheless,
In the years after he died, I wrote and published a number of poems about his life and death. The unbridgeable distance between us let me “see” him more clearly, and there was no pressure to write the perfect farewell poem. Let’s face it, it is easier to write about the dead than about the dying, and those about to leave us should get the last word.
— Warren Woessner