“. . . from free verse to free love . . .”
You’d think somebody would’ve put those six
monosyllables together that way in print long
before 10 December 2024, when I found them online
in the New York Review of Books, minted only,
my search skills reveal, by one Francesca Wade,
writing from the future issue dated 19 December,
nine days in the Notyet of my glowing screen
and which happens to be the birthday of friend
and poet Dave Smith (no relation). “No verse
is libre for the man who wants to do a good job,”
said Ezra Pound just before or just after T.S. Eliot
said, “No verse is free for the man who wants to do
a good job,” TSE curiously sidestepping the language
he loved while following Pound through today’s
pronoun minefield in order to evade romantic
genius-talk in order to arrive at the prosy under-
statement of a workmanlike “good job.”
Poets. Half a century ago, Thomas Kinsella
wondered “if one expects / flowing tie or expert sex /
or even absent-mindedness / of poets any longer,”
lifting what seems today an aristocratic nose
above “we,” as well as “you,” to “one”—or maybe
that was simply to preserve the perfect rhyme.
From houses and rooms full of perfumes Walter
Whitman Walted himself, one is thinking, from
one of those frees to another—but all Walt’s sex
was I-maginary, evidence suggests, truly some
low-hanging fruit picked directly from those
ecstatically long lines, filaments that flung Walt
truly out of himself, to out-of-body experiences
that made an amorous body both visible and possible.
O, God, one says (you), another poem about poetry.
No, Drear Reader, I’m fixing to veer into auto-
biography, to become undisguised and naked
so that you and I can admire ourselves, can go
from strength to strength, like apes moving
through a generous jungle, which arboreal loco-
motion is called brachiation. Pound swung from
an English oak of a wife named Shakespeare to
an Ohio Buckeye unfortunately named Olga
Rudge (gifted violinist), where he stayed pant-
ing and hooting to the end of his many days.
Double-ruptured Tom, on the other handed arm,
swung in awesome daring into the vivid dark
that claimed oldyoung him until he was finally
literally old, collapsing into a shareholder’s
embrace, stolid Valery’s, who’d had him in her
crosshairs since high school. I was six months old
when she first shook his damp hand, not to mention.
Soon, she folded his folds into her bosom,
at #3 Kensington Court Gardens, eating cheese
and playing Scrabble day after ordrabinary day.
In 1994 she said, of the guy who saw free verse
as chaos, its kingdom anarchy, “He obviously
needed a happy marriage. He wouldn’t die
until he’d had it.” In 1989, with my friend’s
ashes in my baggy sport coat pocket (zip-
locked), I drove through Yeovil to East Coker
(which many years later Andrew Motion would
move to certify World Heritage). I was there
to sprinkle some of George near Eliot’s Möbius
strip sentiment and mortal remains. Ends. Be-
ginnings. Circling this:
OF YOUR CHARITY
PRAY FOR THE REPOSE
OF THE SOUL OF
THOMAS STEARNS ELIOT
POET
I did and didn’t (sprinkle, pray). I did touch
the cold, dusty plaque with my fingertips.
To be fair to Francesca Wade (and to
Pound and Eliot) “from free verse to free love”
names mere “subjects” that Wade’s subject
(Margaret Anderson) “found most [intellectually]
stimulating,” not target destinations between
which the vine-dangling vinous might be able
to swing. It was “inspired conversation”
The Greats desired, generally twosomes,
rather than three or four or more. No poker
parties. With such minor exceptions as Edna
St Vincent Millay, whose verse was modern,
but not free, words mattered to them more than
bodily fluids or orgasmos—on the whole, which
is to say the manifest beauty of inflections and
innuendoes, of Pound expounding, Eliot intoning,
Stevens sonorousizing. And just after . . .
…………………………………………………………………………………………..………………………………………………….
Snow Begins at the End of the World
At first I wasn’t sure—
pale flicks sometimes rising,
white floaters cavorting
where my secret black ones
should be, these frolicking pinprick whiteouts
devising pure space, that living unseen
I forget to account for.
Volume made visible.
Then, the frank delight of fat flakes,
parachuting into a murder of backyard crows
on the disappearing healthy green
of the exorbitant grass
I have not yet killed.
I open windows to make the crows rise
like the slo-mo nightmare of a street blast,
dropping insults as they weave away
into the quiet neighborhood.
I close the windows on the cold.
And now the sprayed burst of a
cardinal’s shriek, tapering squall of a red shouldered hawk.
Good to be a writer, close to the coffee,
able to fling off the snarling complexity
of an obstreperous novel
and spend an hour luring the snow
into my tiny notebook.
On the kitchen tiles, yesterday’s Times screams
crimes over and over on its front page,
smothering still in clear plastic, vile deeds
typeset just before deadline
and superseded before they can blacken my hands.
And still the snow comes down,
spectral snow that thickens the sight,
emptiness somehow every color of the rainbow.
Nothingness is always something.
They said a storm was on its way,
that we could all lose power.
Beyond the mailbox, the asphalt street
has grown as white as my head.
