I Am "He Who Cuts-and-Pastes Every Ort of Kindness Strewed His General Direction and Fallen upon the Floor of the Kingdom"....

Bernard Welt said some kind things about me and my blog on Dennis Cooper's blog.

Bernard Welt wrote one of the greatest poems of the last quarter century, so I was duly honored...one of those poems that should end up in The anthology. You know the one...the one that doesn't exist because it's called the living...that's the most influential anthology in every generation, although if you believe backcover copy, you might not realize it...

Poets pass this poem along like a beautiful anti-Grail of poetry. I knew it wouldn't be hard to find it on somebody's site, because poets can't resist sharing this with poets. Even non-poets get it and enjoy it, but it holds especial meanings to poets.

It unsurprisingly (or should I say surprisingly considering some of the things I find in there some years--meoowrrr, I know...) appeared in the Best American Poetry anthology for the year it came out.

Here you go. Enjoy. And thanks pamjam for putting this up!

I'm not sure whether the italics will transfer, for which I apologize. If not, check it out on pamjam's site...


     I Stopped Writing Poetry...

I stopped writing poetry
When I was just starting to get good at it. First
I got good at rhyme, so I cast it away.
Then I got good at line and stanza construction--
So good I hardly needed to say anything at all.
My meanings emerged
in the spaces between.
So I got rid of that, too. Metaphor, metonymy,
Allusive echoes of my betters--well, frankly,
I was a whiz at that stuff pretty early on.
So I emptied out the file-drawers
Of rhetorical strategy, musical form,
Continuity or criticism of tradition,
And I just wrote. Finally I found
I was writing ... prose, like everyone else.
But it was prose with a difference: prose with a rich,
Totally hidden other life lying behind it, unglimpsed
(I think) by the reader. Not like a prostitute
Who reforms and becomes a nun. I've seen
That movie. More like a nun who becomes a prostitute.

I stopped writing poetry
at 16 (seriously), then again at about 20
but only for six months, once again
at 27, then at 32, 35, 40, and 42.
I'll keep you posted.

I stopped writing poetry
when i realized that i understood romantic and symbolist
poetry sound sculpture objective verse conceptual art
pure language the confessional and elegiac modes and still
everything i wanted to do in poetry pretty much everything
i wanted anyone at all to do had been done already and much
better by don marquis in the archy and mehitabel poems

I stopped writing poetry
when everyone else did--in the early 90s, when television
became more interesting than culture.

I stopped writing poetry
when they came and deactivated my poetry button

I stopped writing poetry
when I got married--I mean settled down-
since the laws of the state of Maryland do not allow me
to marry the love of my life--though I'm not here
to whine about it--and maybe marriage would ruin me
as it seems to have mined others--but one thing I know-
it is certainly nice to have someone to blame
for taking it easy and resisting inspiration when it inconveniently
insists on arising occasionally no matter what you do
(PS thanks for the dashes Emily Dickinson)

I stopped writing poetry
because the last thing I ever wanted
was to develop some obnoxious false
self masquerading as voice the way artists
as soon as their style becomes identifiable
are stuck in it and in what it will allow them
to think style isn't a correlative of personality
or a way to explore transcendent issues
that lie beyond mere worldly content style is
exhaustion ennui and fashion and death

I stopped writing poetry
when I received the praise of people I admired.
It's a terrible thing to receive exactly the attention you want
when you are unprepared to admit you might deserve it.
Of the many ways in which poets are always going on
about how poetry not only receives inspiration from love
but imitates it in form and feeling, this just may be the worst.

I stopped writing poetry because I saw what it was doing to
people's prose style. Yikes.

I stopped writing poetry-
well, basically, because I'm white. I don't
like being white, it isn't a choice I'd make freely,
and to get argumentative I don't think it's entirely fair
that I have to be white right now when it's so 10 minutes ago
when if I'd been born fifteen years earlier most racists
would have considered me anything but, what with
the whole Jew-as-vermin thing, but OK, OK, I concede
the point, I'm culturally white, or whatever, dammit,
and in case you haven't noticed, this just isn't
white people's moment, poetry-wise. Don't even
get me started on the griot tradition and that stuff,
I mean, just look at rap-poetry that communicates
exquisitely within its chosen boundaries of class
and common interest, and hardly at all outside it,
except for those to whom it stands as aspiration to cool.
Just like Shakespeare and Donne. What have white people
contributed to culture recently? Postmodernism?
Please. My own revelation came when I realized
Little Red Corvette meant more to me than any poem
since the early 1970s. On the not-very
mean streets where I learned versification, poetry
wasn't a mode of expression spontaneously developed
from living people's lived experience, it was a regime.
Well, that's over now. Get over it.

I stopped writing poetry
When I just ran out of steam.
It's really not a whole lot
More complicated than that.

I stopped writing poetry
When my friends started dying. Some of my friends
Wrote beautifully about the conditions of their illness,
And insightfully about mortality and their own impending
Death. Some wrote angrily about their invisibility
And created a literature of testimony in which we learn
What it was like to walk in the streets of American cities
As a ghost. Some wrote poems to memorialize their lovers,
Or to embarrass right-wing senators or arts funding agencies.
But I just counted 67 people I knew and was fond of
Who've died of "AIDS-related illness," and not once
Have I genuinely felt I could respond to their suffering or death
In poetry. Is it poetry? Is it me? The era? I am willing to belie
That if Milton and Shelley and Tennyson could do it,
It can still mean something. Why should I think their ages
Made death any more manageable a subject than mine?
But whenever I sat down to try, I stopped in despair.
Whatever the political advantages of slogans
Of the time, it wasn't the right words I looked for
But some way to make silence heard in lines
Of verse, and I never found it.
Now even that
Sounds like a device to me, like special pleading.
Fuck it. Just fuck it. Let someone else do it.

I stopped writing poetry
but I still love the stanza. All that other cool stuff-
tropes, the caesura, enjambment--I can live without.
But the stanza--wow.
I stopped writing poetry
after I went to my first MLA conference,
where they were attacking a way of reading
and understanding literature they called
"mainstream" and "dominant" that I'd never even
encountered. It was like what they meant by "book"
was totally different from what I meant by "book"-
as different as "washing machine" and "golf ball."

I stopped writing poetry when it was eclipsed by criticism
for purely sociological and economic reasons.

I stopped writing poetry when people began writing
scholarly articles explaining how to read Frank O'Hara's
Lunch Poems and it never occurred to them to mention
that you should read them during lunch.

I stopped writing poetry when it became popular. I realize
Robert Frost read at Kennedy's inauguration but now
Ethan Hawke is telling Vanity Fair that he keeps
your book by his bed, and poetry as adjunct
to commercial culture and the veneration of celebrity
is so much more deliciously embarrassing for everyone
than even poetry in the service of the state.

I stopped writing poetry when taking it seriously
started seeming more likely to indicate
intellectual complacency than intellectual liveliness.

I stopped writing poetry when it got boring.

I stopped writing poetry
when the internet replaced the telephone
(since now that everyone has a phone,
and takes it everywhere, it's obvious
the telephone is over). Ted Berrigan I thought
destroyed the sonnet by inviting the beloved
to just pick up the phone and call him
sometime--thus no more need to plead
and seduce through verse--so the channel
changed: it works both ways. Now we are all
(gay str8 bi-curious) pleading and seducing
in lower case as only the freest verse used to
hitting reply b4 the intimacy of communication
has time even to register killing off poetry
by creating the first real audience for it in centuries

I stopped writing poetry
because I promised to. I read something
at the Ear Inn around 1984 in which I encouraged everyone
to give up writing--as I engaged to--and it went over
real big. Afterwards any time I ran into any of the
poetry crowd they'd always ask me if I was still
not writing. I understood it was a performance piece
and so did they but I kept getting this gnawing feeling
I was abandoning a principle by continuing to write.
It was entirely superstition, like actually feeling sick
when you call in sick, but I suppose I have been a victim
of the terrible conviction that you must mean what you say.

I stopped writing poetry
when I had dedicated poems to everyone I knew, at least everyone
I wanted to impress.
I promise to start writing poetry again as soon as I meet some new
people.
Interesting people, anyway.
Interesting people I can't just come out and say things to, anyway.

I stopped writing poetry
but as satisfying as it has been to turn my back on it
as on a distant homeland fallen under the spell of a fascist party
still a breeze reaches me from time to time fragrant of verse
and suddenly I am as nostalgic as an exiled Russian
grand duke waiting on tables in Paris in a screwball comedy
sometimes I wonder would it really be so terrible
if I wrote just one more line.