"Working Class Hero"*

Because of the schools I have attended (all on assorted scholarships), because of my publishing success (it took me three years and three hundred submissions before I published a single poem), because I do not comport myself in a stereotypical lower-class manner, some people assume that I come from an economically comfortable background, that I have always known success, or that my success as a writer is due to social connections. Nothing could be farther from the truth. I am sure that everyone experiences a degree of cognitive dissonance between their own self-conceptions and the way they are seen by others. But if one is black, if one is gay, if one has been raised in poverty (as I was, in tenements and housing projects in the Bronx), if as an individual one has never fit into the various social contexts to which one has been expected or even to which one has hoped to belong, the burden of the distance between one’s own sense of self and the fixed and often distorted images others have of one is especially heavy.

Though I have a publishing career, some highly contingent place in the literary world, that still feels as if it could be snatched away at any time, and my material life is quite precarious. I certainly don’t have the financial security and stability I had hoped and expected to achieve by this age and this point in my career. I haven’t done the things that one should do to be successful. I haven’t networked, haven’t schmoozed. I’ve been no one’s sycophant, and though I would have liked to have had patronage, to have been someone’s protégé (something I had naively hoped to get out of attending Iowa), that hasn’t happened. I even foolishly removed the thanks to my teachers from my first book, afraid that readers would think that I owed my publications to them. Nor have I ever been a member of any club or clique.

Unlike the vast majority of those in academia or the literary world, I have nothing to fall back on. Since leaving my Aunt Mildred's house in Macon, Georgia, where I lived for two years after my mother's death, at seventeen, I have been on my own. It’s vanishingly rare for someone from my background, having nothing (no family, no independent resources, no “home”), to have achieved anything in the literary world, which often seems the preserve of those born with trust funds. English in particular seems to be largely populated by those who aspire to an Edith Wharton-esque, prissy, propriety-obsessed hyper-WASPiness: something which as I recall from The House of Mirth made all concerned quite miserable.

Several years ago I read a profile in The New Yorker of Jorie Graham, who as my teacher at Iowa once told me that I had had everything handed to me, to my ex-lover Chris Cutrone, a video-maker and critical theorist who grew up in a working class neighborhood on Long Island. He and I had bonded, among other grounds, as intellectuals and artists from poor backgrounds, people who as kids knew lots of words we couldn’t pronounce correctly, because we’d only read them in books. Hearing about Graham’s childhood in an Italian villa, the lavish parties her mother (a prominent sculptor once featured in a Gap ad) threw attended by Roman Catholic cardinals and Italian nobility, her marriage to the son of the owner of The Washington Post, Chris turned to me and said, “It reminds you that people like us weren’t meant to be artists, doesn’t it?” The art that saved me has so often belonged to the wealthy and privileged that it’s hard to remember that it’s not merely an ornament of power. Part of my project as a writer has necessarily (in order for me to be a writer at all) been to attempt to disentangle art’s liberatory from its oppressive aspects, to remember that those who so often own art don’t define it, that (as Adorno pointed out) art is the enemy of culture and culture is the enemy of art.

I had a dream that perfectly encapsulated my relationship to academia. I was in graduate school, walking with two professors, one an older white man and one a young hipster (swarthy, indeterminately ethnic, shoulder length hair, snazzy green blazer). The older professor was musing over some rhetorical question whose answer he didn’t really care about (something faux-political, as I recall), but I tried to respond anyway, and the hip young professor put his hand over my mouth and said, “We don’t need to hear from you about this.”

As the John Lennon song my title alludes to points out, they hate you if you’re clever, and they despise a fool. But I will be heard from. I’m determined not to leave the field to those born with spoons of various precious metals in their mouths (who nowadays include the children of the black bourgeoisie, however much they whine about “the rage of a privileged class”). The culture I’ve acquired with so much work may be their birthright, but I appreciate it in a way that those who take it for granted rarely do. It means something to me—it means everything to me. Sometimes I stand in the poetry section of Barnes and Noble and wonder how many authors there come from backgrounds like mine. They can be counted on the fingers of one hand.

My oldest friend’s mother once asked me why, coming from what I came from, I thought that the world would or should be fair. I didn’t have an answer then, but now I realize that it’s because I believed that the world outside the prison house in which I was born and raised would be different. It was that hope, that faith, really, that kept me going, that keeps me going. Every “A” I got, every prize I won, was a punch in my ticket to that elsewhere. I wanted to escape the ghetto, but I also wanted to go somewhere better, which meant believing that there was somewhere better: my version of optimism, or simply blind faith. I have gone from place to place, from circumstance to circumstance, and still haven’t found that fair, just place, but I continue to search, hoping and believing that there’s a place for me.

I know that there are many smart and talented young people in the ghettos who haven’t have the luck I had, the opportunities, or just a mother determined that they would be something more than a statistic, but I also know that sometimes the system that puts one in one’s place and keeps one there with an iron-toed boot pressed down on one’s throat can be circumvented, though hardly defeated. Indeed, if one doesn’t come from privilege, one has no choice but to circumvent that system if one wants to breathe at all, and I have always insisted on drawing on my own breath. I am living proof of both the possibility and the precariousness of such an escape. I was not meant to survive this world. Many people have tried to crush me, sometimes with the best of intentions, as I know they have crushed others who have refused to know their place. I consider my survival a form of victory, however tenuous and conditional.



*For those who miss the irony in my title, seeing it as mere self-aggrandizement or self-pity, I point out the irony here. In the song to which this title refers, John Lennon means both that a working class hero is something to be and that a working class hero is nothing to be.

Eleven Books That Helped Make Me the Poet I Am

A couple of commenters on my last post asked me to list those poets, current and canonical, whom I consider inconsequential but of undeserved reputation. I can see nothing useful in such an exercise in negativity, nor can I see it bringing me any practical benefits; quite the opposite, in fact. W.H. Auden said that he never reviewed books he didn't think were good, because, given that there was only so much public attention to go around, he didn't believe in wasting it on work that would hopefully wither away of its own accord. In any case, my list would doubtless be different from someone else's, and without the kind of explanation and commentary I have neither the time nor the energy to spend on things I don't care about, it would amount to nothing more than a set of personal opinions (on about the same level as listing my preferences and aversions in food), rather than reasoned arguments. I thought that it might be more useful to list a few of the books that most influenced me as a developing writer and briefly discuss what each one offered me. This piece is adapted from an essay I have contributed to the forthcoming anthology Poet's Bookshelf 2, to be published by Barnwood Press. A description of the first volume of Poet's Bookshelf can be found here. I write about the books roughly in the order in which I read them.

I won’t attempt in this little essay to list even a fraction of my favorite books, either past or current. Some of my favorite poets, like Yeats, William Carlos Williams, and Marianne Moore, have not to my knowledge been strong influences on my work. Some of the writers who most shaped me, like James Wright, are not people I much read anymore. (Some of my strong early influences are things I hesitate to admit having ever read, like the poetry of Erica Jong and Alice Walker, though I’m curious what I would think of Jong’s poetry today.) There have been many writers since those formative days who have been important influences, like Michael Palmer, Ann Lauterbach, Paul Celan, and Osip Mandelstam, but I came to them as a mature writer, which engenders a different kind of encounter. I doubt that I’ll ever again be under the spell of a writer in the way that I was enthralled by these early loves.

T.S. Eliot, The Waste Land and Other Poems
Wallace Stevens, Collected Poems
Hart Crane, White Buildings
Louise Bogan, The Blue Estuaries
James Wright, Collected Poems
Marilyn Hacker, Presentation Piece
W.H. Auden, The English Auden
Louise Glück, Descending Figure
Jean Valentine, The Messenger
Laura Mullen, The Surface
Jorie Graham, The End of Beauty

I’ve probably written too many times about the impact that Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” had one me. It was the first poem I ever read, and it made me want to write poetry, made me want to be a poet (these aren’t the same thing). Eliot had taken my mundane misery and made it shapely, meaningful, beautiful, even. I wanted to be able to do that for myself, and to create things that would have the effect on others that poem had on me. I read all of Eliot soon after (I bought The Waste Land and Other Poems in the Walden Books at the Macon Mall). I didn’t understand all of it, but I experienced it, a hollow man traveling through Eliot’s wasteland as if it were my own. But I quickly discovered that while I could admire Eliot, I couldn’t emulate him, not without sounding like a parody of him.

In Wallace Stevens’ chilly, distanced intimacies and sinuous, carefully measured sentences, in his intermingling of intellect and emotion finding form, I found a mode that I could emulate, a model for the kind of poems I wanted to write. No matter how intense the emotional pressure, his lines never lost their poise: I aspired to that composure, to compose that way. Stevens’ embodiment of idea and feeling in images and landscapes like those of “The Snow Man” and “The Auroras of Autumn” is an ideal toward which I still aim.

The psychological landscapes of Auden’s early poetry entranced me, the loneliness and desire embodied in its craggy limestone wastes, desolate cityscapes, and cryptic vignettes of mysterious wars in which opposing soldiers steal moments of intimacy during lulls in the fighting. Edward Mendelson describes them very well: “These first poems often have the air of gnomic fragments; they seem to be elements of some…private myth whose individual details never quite resolve themselves into a unified narrative….The elusiveness and indecipherability of the early poems are part of their meaning; they enact the isolation they describe.” The poems’ overtly homosexual undertones (the paradoxical formulation is intentional) seduced me as well. Love was a secret agent operating in the shadows and interstices, always in danger of being exposed and betrayed.

Hart Crane’s extravagances of language and vision also enthralled me: he wrote poems that were unabashedly Poetry, utterly unlike everyday speech. His poems’ passion thrilled me, all the more so because it was the passion of a man for other men. That Crane sought transcendence in the flesh of other men made sense: other people seemed both to inhabit and to own their bodies, while I always felt a stranger to mine. The oceanic rush of Crane’s words transfigured emotions into “The silken skilled transmemberment of song,” proposing voyages I longed to embark upon, by means of which I could transcend my feelings without surrendering them, and end up in the arms of some beloved. Perhaps I could even conjure him up out of the luxuriance of my words.

Louise Bogan showed me the possibilities of a bitter lyricism like that of Sir Thomas Wyatt, disenchanted and yet enchanting in its lithe and lute-like music: “Loneliness was the heart within your side.” Her commitment to what she called the stripped, still lyric was a model and a reproach to my tendency to talk in poems; poems were “to be sung on the water.” Her poems were all songs for the last act, immortalizing the moment after passion, the eyes opening to a world of wonders now shown to be false or at best lost: "Now that I have your heart by heart, I see." That too felt true to me, who had never known passion at all but could only imagine it as out of reach.

James Wright’s deep image epiphanies, a man lying in a hammock surrounded by the flourishing natural world that reminds one of one’s own insignificance to the point that one realizes the waste of one’s life, floating among lonely animals, longing in fear and hope and hopelessness for the red spider who is God, showed me (along with my readings in Imagist poetry, H.D. in particular) the power and intensity of brevity and concision, the way moments can open up into exhilaration or desolation, the everyday can blossom into revelation: “My bones turn to dark emeralds.”

Louise Glück’s spare, lapidary poems contained so much passion in their restraint; they created a mythic world where pain was raised to a higher, nobler level, mere suffering transfigured into grief. The poems in Descending Figure seemed almost chiseled out of the suffocating, intractable mass of silence. To have been able to wrest them out of the void was a victory in itself. Their aspiration toward an impossible perfection, a finality of utterance as if one’s words could transubstantiate themselves into the Word, inspired and humbled me: “it is the same need to perfect,/of which death is the mere byproduct.”

Marilyn Hacker’s work demonstrated the way that formal poise and stylistic elegance could be combined with direct engagement with the materials of everyday life and with a range of diction from graffiti to sophisticated literary allusion. Her poetry affirmed that it was okay to write what a friend called flashy poems, poems that were unashamedly poetry and not just lineated anecdotes. Her work also confirmed that poems should be heard and not just seen. Under her influence I wrote exclusively in traditional form for about a year (my sophomore year in college), and my ear is much the better for it.

Jean Valentine’s poems exuded a cool but impassioned sense of mystery, and revealed how much could be said by so much left out. Her poems absorbed their occasions into themselves, leaving behind the luminous residue of event, these numinous tokens left behind, ordinary things illuminated by a scrupulously loving attention: “and trees paths stars this earth/how will I think of them.”

The infatuated yet skeptical music of Laura Mullen's poems sang itself to me for years. They embodied an almost perfect and perfectly precarious balance between what critic Charles Altieri calls lyricism and lucidity, enchantment and disenchantment: beauty and pathos and the awareness of all the things they won’t let you say. I, who longed for the raptures of romance but knew already that romance couldn’t always be trusted, aspired to walk that fine line, staying “Up all night for beauty you could use.”

Jorie Graham’s work, like Stevens’, made ideas shapely, and sensuous, and made the numinous bloom out of daily landscapes. Like Stevens, she demonstrated that one not only could but must think in poems, and to let the poem think. Thought in her poems was not conclusions but process, the flight of geese overhead a syntax to be parsed and explicated. Her exploration and excavation of myth and cultural narrative in The End of Beauty resonated with my desire to get inside and under myths, to find out what lay hidden on their underside, the other side of myth.

I hope that it may at least prove interesting to talk about some of the writers who have most shaped me.