To The Poets

Just now, I was attempting to read some poems in a journal foolish enough to print one of my stories. I figured, Hey, if these guys liked my particular brand of juvenile man-boy rantings, maybe their poetry will be swell! Alas, halfway through the first poem, during an admittedly interesting line about shadowy men holding lanterns like severed heads, the song "Joy and Pain" came on XM's 80s station, and I was driven to distraction.

Possibly there's some sort of metaphor in there, but since I'm not a licensed poet I don't believe I'm allowed to construct it. Union rules and all.

Lame joking aside, there was a time, not so very long ago, when I enjoyed poetry. It was a simpler time, perhaps -- I was younger, less burdened by the world's often-sucky realities. I'd just moved to Washington, D.C., and many of my favorite moments were spent reading poems on the Metro ride to work, something perfect about experiencing these little meditative bursts while all around me a veritable crush of badly dressed humanity headed, grimacing, to their variously acronymed workplaces. Or: reading poems while exploring my new neighborhood, which within a six-or-seven-block radius contained Peruvian chicken and Vietnamese spring rolls and Chinese people playing ping pong in the rec room of the Chinese embassy (seriously! I saw this! It was awesome!) and tiny twenty-something granola-type women walking absurdly large dogs and tweed-suited ambassadors or attaches or dignitaries (oh, to one day be referred to as a dignitary!) disappearing strange models of foreign luxury cars behind the ivied gates of their rock-walled compounds.

Anyway, during this time I often found myself wowed by poetry. Broken apart by poetry. Every now and then, it felt as if my heart had been slurped from out of my chest, seasoned with some sort of Peruvian dry rub, roasted on a spit, and served back to me with salsa verde and a side of fried yucca (delicious!). There are reports from those days of tears, but I maintain it was dusty in those rooms, that I had something in my eye, that I'd just been peeling onions.

I recall reading a particularly moving Philip Levine poem that involved a dream-like image of the narrator's family doing nothing so much as moving around a living room, smoking and talking about money, yet seemed to open the door to a world as rich and mysterious as whatever went on behind those menacing compound gates.

There was a poem by Kim Addonizio with a beautiful extended metaphor involving regrets being born like children, then gathering outside the window and peering in at their mother as she danced with a handsome stranger, feeling already the kick of a newborn forming inside her.

There were some poems by Shirley Kaufman and Carolyn Forche that I read over and over; a couple I liked enough to photocopy and paste to the walls of my dingy studio apartment (though, to be fair, this may have just been a tactic to convince women I was deeper and more interesting than I was).

A year or so later, at perhaps the height of what I think of now as the Poetry Appreciation Era, I was sitting, alone, in a tiny bar in Madrid, still trying to process the bullfight I'd just witnessed, trying to process, too, my job prospects once I returned to D.C. (having quit my most recent miserable employment situation rather abruptly to travel), trying to process, too, why my girlfriend hadn't responded to my last several emails (Later, I would realize there was an inverse relationship between the frequency of her emails and the amount of Other Guys Cock she was putting inside herself) and in this state of strange existence, maybe three beers in while the jukebox played forgotten North American hits of the 80s ("Joy and Pain," for instance, which triggered this whole memory in the first place), the Spanish being spoken all around me bearing only the tiniest passing resemblance to the Spanish I'd been forced to learn in high school ("Donde esta la biblioteca, Gabriella?" is not as great an ice-breaker as one might expect), while all of this was going on I turned the page in a Stephen Dobyns book and read his poem "Quirencia" and experienced that profoundly odd sensation of being equal parts overjoyed and heartbroken at exactly the same moment.

That was then, this is now. What happened? What is it that I've lost?

I have no idea, but I think I'd like to get it back. So, dear poets, now that we've added you to our stable, I'm putting you to work: What should I be reading? How should I be reading? What went wrong? Please help me right this ship before I turn into a completely cynical, cold-hearted bastard.