I write fiction. I know my limitations, so I don’t write poetry very often. You might have enjoyed my “Ode to Cassini” on the home page of this website; it probably broke all the rules, although it was heartfelt.

That poem was my most recent one—I mean, it’s been several decades since I wrote the last one. I’ve included some old poems in The Collector (the poem there was written for my father, who was a landscape and still life artist who hated abstract art). The Last Humans (to be published by Black Opal Books in 2019) contains another early poem. And the sequel to Rembrandt’s Angel will contain one too. All my ancient attempts to write poetry.

I find old stories and poems in basement boxes I’m just now unpacking from the last move. They all date from high school or college—not written on papyrus, but the paper’s often brittle and yellow.

All these futile attempts taught me that I have no real skill for writing poetry. Long ago, I didn’t even like to read it either, outside of a few limericks that made me laugh. That all changed at UC Santa Barbara when I attended N. Scott Momaday’s English class. Mind you, he’s more of a fiction writer too, but more about that later. Nevertheless, Professor Momaday taught me to love poetry.

Imagine if you will a man of average height, a bit portly, and with generally a happy face and twinkling eyes behind the lectern at times, or pacing the stage, with poetry book in hand, reading poems to about 250 students in a large lecture class. At least two-thirds of the students didn’t care what he was reading or saying about what he read; they just wanted to get through English without doing damage to their GPA. I must say my TA didn’t much care either. He gave everyone an A who found something Freudian to say in their analysis of a poem or short story. I did so. The TA taught me nothing; Professor Momaday taught me a lot.

On the other hand, I was mesmerized by the professor’s performance in every lecture. Most of the time he’d hardly look at the poem. He became the poet; he lived the poem. I wanted to be able to perform on stage like that, but I knew that the professor did it naturally. We disappeared from his mind; what he was reading took over.

But what about N. Scott Momaday’s writing? His most well-known novel is House Made of Dawn. It won the Pulitzer a year after I left UC Santa Barbara. Critics say that it started the Native American Renaissance. I always felt that there was some of Professor Momaday in this book; he’s a member of the Kiowa nation. That book has a special place on my bookshelf. I was surprised by it. I knew him as a fine English professor who taught me to love poetry.

He wrote poetry too—the Angle of Geese collection is representative—and he published a sequel to House Made of Dawn. He was a novelist, short story writer, essayist, and poet. He received the National Medal of Arts in 2007, and became the 16^th Oklahoma state poet laureate.

So what are my favorite poems? Who are my favorite poets? W. B. Yeats “The Second Coming” is a harbinger to human beings’ proclivities for war in the 20^th century and this one; Yeats started the Abbey Theatre in Dublin and is probably the best-know Irish poet. Dylan Thomas’s “Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night” figures in my novel Rembrandt’s Angel as Scotland Yard Inspector Esther Brookstone remembers her third husband; he’s considered the greatest poet born in the British Isles in the 20^th century (Scots, Irish, and Welsh are all Celtics, though). Finally, to make a trilogy, consider “Invictus” by William Ernest Henley. I remember Professor Momaday giving a powerful reading of that one; it’s the glass-half-full version of the first two, in a sense.

I have to admire poetry from afar for the most part. I think writing poems in English is difficult. It’s another story in Spanish, where Neruda is another favorite poet of mine. Don’t look for me in any poetry slam contests either. Just to end on a high note, though, and prove how bad I am, I offer this old poem I recently found (written in my last year of high school):

Ode to the Sea #1

The clouds roll high and in the sky

The wind breathes life to the sea;

The whitecaps spray and in the bay

The storm rolls in to me.

Lightning flashes and thunder crashes

As earth and heaven meet

In raging fight into the night

Until the storm retreats.

In with the tide the seagulls ride

And soar high into the bright’ning sky;

And with the day comes the foray

Of scavengers who cry

To storm and wind. Heavens then send

The dawn of day, its own display

Or answer to those who knew

The storm would end with day.

The waves wash clean the sandy scene

Of the beach, once a tragic thing.

The sun shines down on the golden brown

Of the sand where the water clings.

The sun then sets and with their nets

The fishermen head out to sea

To do their chore missed the night before,

But it’s home from the sea for me.

Maybe it was fate that I ended up at UC Santa Barbara with Professor Momaday—the school has its own beach! Watching waves roll in while thinking about plots and characters is the most relaxing thing I know to do now. The breakers provide the background music, and there’s something primeval about the sea, where we originated.

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In libris libertas!

 

This entry was posted on Tuesday, August 14th, 2018 at 3:30 am and is filed under Writing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.