Poet, mortified

Not by these poems, by the one I'm not showing you.

I mean, if you’re taking time to read this, it’s the least that I owe you. Photo by Annie Spratt on Unsplash

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I’m pulling myself together after having realized that the poem I’ve been working on for … a week? ten days? … is not just not great (I could work on that) — it’s dishonest.

In expiation, and to help me get my balance, here are two other poems written decades apart which are rigorously (I dare say beautifully) honest in every line. They’re followed by a rant on Truth In Poetry which is probably worth skipping unless you’re feeling extra indulgent. The poems, though, are worth staying for.

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THE WOMAN WHO WALKS ALONG THE BEACH ALONE                  1984


The woman who walks along the beach alone
smiles politely and watches the water
when lovers, hands clasped like shells,
wander past in search of treasure.
Dogs, patrolling the tideline,
glance at her without comment and hurry by.
Her feet feel tides tug softly at the earth.
A sand dollar breaks in her hand;
she leaves the pieces side by side
for lovers to find.
Sandpipers rush up and down the shore
like fleet, anxious housewives.
She watches the undomestic ocean erase
their faint, fretful tracks
and sees the sky, but never herself,
reflected on the shimmering, wave-soaked sand.

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DUNSMUIR CITY PARK                                                                            2024


Each swing on the empty set sways gently
in its own slow arc, rocking memories
of happy small bodies tossed in flight.

On the western slope a freight train
hoots and rattles past, car after car
clattering down the track between the trees,

and once it passes, the loudest voice again
is the young Sacramento, narrow here,
loud and deep and eager in its bed.

East, the sun climbs clear of the ridge,
rests at the top of the tallest pine,
dazzles the meadow with mid-June light.

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Two poems, as honest as I can make them. Now for a few words (altogether skippable, I promise) about the dishonest poem I’m not showing you, and why I’m so mad about it.

I wrote the, um, ex-poem to mirror and comment on an older, more honest work of mine. I call the ex-poem dishonest partly because it attempts to make me seem witty (not) while offering Sage Advice (ugh), a form of cringe I’ve tried hard to avoid since I outgrew adolescence. I call it dishonest mostly because it asserts things that simply are not true (even if I sort of wish they were) about what the older, more honest poem describes and expresses.

There are lots of ways poets can play with the truth, but I believe it should always be the truth we’re playing with.

For me, my writing is most connected to truth when it speaks in terms of the senses. (See the two poems above.) With every step I take away from sensory detail and into commentary and explication and showing-off, I double my chances of being dishonest or boring or both. I was already on thin ice, writing a poem as a comment on another poem; to do that without getting heady and abstract was never going to be easy, and I don’t prosper trying to write (or, honestly, read) heady abstract poems. But then to read things into the older poem that just … weren’t there? Nah, girl. Find the next clean page in your notebook, and be thankful you caught yourself when you did.

Why am I telling you this? Well, to calm myself down, for one thing. Also because here on Substack we keep encouraging each other to learn from our mistakes, and I thought I’d try some learning out loud in case it’s useful to anyone else. I’m not brave enough yet to show you the dishonest poem next to the “real” one it was telling lies about; maybe someday. Today I’d rather show you a couple of poems that work, and tell you (okay, rant at you) about one that didn’t. If you’ve actually read this far, you’re my hero. Please go back and read the poems again, as a palate-cleanser and a reward.