Interlude for Dana Ward

It’s been so long since I wrote this way—with a freaking pen!—the way you probably do all the time, all looseness and I’m-just-saying-this, probably with a pen but it could be pencil or markers or even a computer.  I guess it feels like a young person’s style though you’re not much younger than me, besides you’ll probably write that way forever, Berrigan did, you’re as committed.  Something must’ve pulled me another direction, changing me the way young people promise, when they’re young, they won’t.  It’s a long life, Youths, let’s see how you fare.  This resistance to the colloquial comes, likely, from mistrust—but of what? Enthusiasm? Exposure? More like naiveté: I fear the note will be false when the stakes are real, etc.  There’s some great critiques of ego cults out there, and they’re spot on, but is there really a choice?  Not a lot of lines from your poems I want to quote, and your grief is a hot swamp in there, but there are still events, right?  I mean we’re still alive, apparently, and there’s the mechanics of time or whatever—I had a better phrase for it a second ago—and that all shows up in your poems.  Melodrama is a problem, it really is, but not like the stock market is.  Anecdotes, the allegorical, delicate frames, that’s all fine, but now I’ll tell you something that happened.  The other night, coming home from work (this is about labor, duh) it was getting dark, it does that earlier now, and I got on the BART and had this feeling I get, one I’ve never found a way to get into a poem.  It starts by taking quick glances at my fellow riders, also a little depressed I presume, the winter light stuff, also burdened, rush hour, fighting for scraps in a miserable time or however you’d put it, and I felt like there were just so incredibly many of us.  That’s what struck me, the mass, and its own mass behind it.  “A human being here among the mountains / understands how pretentious he is.”  Velimir Khlebnikov wrote that, look it up, it’s the Paul Schmidt translation on Harvard.  So this is about the number problem, like in Oppen, except I didn’t feel small exactly, though I didn’t feel above anybody either.  Sometimes on the train I get sort of an envy thing, just middle class angst over the slipping away of time, especially when the students come in, the blessed subjects of movies, campaigns, fashion, all wired up on beauty and position. This wasn’t that. Instead I felt how weird, how improbable, that we’re all these people, each going through something while meanwhile assembling, internally, a certain reasoning to contain and manage that something.  It’s like an endless, imaginary scaffold that has no purpose except the survival of practical life.  Its size is almost not possible, you know?  And that’s where poetry, especially yours, situates itself, in the overwhelmed.  We all know the aggrandizing should be over by now, needs to be over, but meanwhile the experience is the same, the scaffolding still there, every second moving and happening, I guess by definition.  Like tonight, commuting again, my salad fell out of this plastic bag I had it in, into the middle of the crosswalk, and I needed it, so I had to pick up plastic cups of sesame dressing while the cars waited for me, and meanwhile a homeless woman asked me if I ride BART as a kind of ice-breaker before asking for money, crazily she was trying this trick even though she could see me picking salad from the street, which I think says something about habit and awareness, and about the scaffold too, but here’s the problem: the feelings I felt there, and that she felt there, not to mention what the drivers and whoever else felt, and all the many gradations thereof, literally cry out for poems of their own, yet all that simultaneity, that mass of contained diversity, just proves, bummer that this is, how stuck and entrenched we are, and not because we couldn’t write all those poems but because we probably could.