the rix mix

Looking over poems from the 1970s I published in various little magazines, maybe I'll find some brilliant little thing I forgot about that I can add to a "selected poems" list. It's a painful process that I can manage only for a few minutes at a time. "I wrote this crap!?" "What was I trying to do/say?" With the chutzpah of youth I was publishing anything anyone would take, & the editors were no better than your poet. I wrote a few accidental gems, but those I remember. I have favorite poets from my own generation & from the two preceding me, & I'm still in awe of these writers. I know I'm not at their level of natural talent or craft. But in 70s & 80s I already saw all around me the results & dangers of mere competence, & the various tricks & techniques for having it. The better literary magazines had better merely competent poems & a higher percentage of them; the college & alternative publications has more failed experiments & more outright imitation. I struggled to be different. The Jersey Arts council used to require something like 20 pages of unpublished poems for a fellowship application, the jurors favored consistency & some politically correct topicality, & I could never pull together a selection that demonstrated I had chosen a particular creative path & stuck to it. Later, when the rules dropped the number to ten, I did submit some pretty good portfolios, but .. I was up always against a few really good poets & a crowd of more socially adept competent poets & I never made the cut.

My best overlooked older poems are unpublished, because they didn't fit the kind of poet I was trying to be at the time, whatever that was. Instead, I published all those poems that I now find almost unreadable. When I did finally settle down toward the mid 80s I discovered that audiences at readings were more responsive & local peers showed slightly more respect. Even then, I became easily bored & couldn't help throwing sand around the sandbox. My poetry guru had warned me about this in the 70s & I didn't listen. I was too busy worshipping him while at same time trying not to imitate him, which was the opposite of what he wanted. Eventually I did imitate him & they were good poems. He had predicted I would be a late bloomer, which hasn't happened yet, but since I wasn't setting up shop in downtown New York City (which would've pleased him) he also recommended I get down to business & enter an M.A. (not M.F.A.) program, preferably at one of the SUNYs where he had allies on the faculty who would at least smooth out my many literary lumps & indoctrinate me in the ways of the academic world. But that meant Albany, Oneonta, Buffalo, & huge loans, gawd help us. & who knows, if I had done that maybe I'd now be working evenings as an adjunct teacher of remedial English at a county college. This was solid advice, but he'd attended three great schools & dropped out of them all, & had worked in printing shops for many years before he got into teaching. If you spend enough time sitting in diners with tenured professors, you come to greatly admire their learning while having only fractional comprehension of what the hell they're talking about. They aren't poets.