Eliot was wrong. April is hardly the cruelest month – for one thing, it’s the one moment of the year when many baseball fans, Philadelphia’s among them, can pretend that their team has any chance against the big money rosters of New York, Boston, Los Angeles or Atlanta. I’m not much of a basketball fan – a game that as a kid managed to make me feel short, slow & uncoordinated all at once – and there’s no major league hockey this year. So once the Superbowl (which spell check actually suggested should really be Superb owl) comes to its ignominious conclusion, the sports fan inside has naught to do but wait for Opening Day.

 

Punxsutawney Phil was right. Our real winter this year is occurring for the most part after groundhog day. I had thought that I’d missed the one real snow dump this year while I was out in San Francisco in late January. I was wrong. This is my tenth winter here in Philadelphia & I continue to be amazed to look out the window & see snow in all directions.

 

One of the most irritating aspects of living, as I did for 48 years, in the Bay Area is hearing Easterners describe the weather there as having no seasons. The seasons there are specific & fabulous, moving as they so often do subtly from one to the next. Auslanders don’t know – and the locals aren’t about to tell them – that the best weather in the Bay Area occurs in September & October, & that the fog bank that sits offshore in July & August is no aberration. At dusk, the changing temperatures of the bay act like a straw, sucking the fog through the Golden Gate, depositing it smack atop the Berkeley Hills. Back when I worked in San Rafael & commuted from San Francisco every day (1972-76), I learned that you could virtually set your clock by the arrival of the fog down over Mount Tam & the Marin headlands each afternoon.

 

I remember Bill Berkson – somebody who has done the coastal switch in the other direction – once telling me that the biggest difference between the East & the Bay Area was that back east there was a clearly defined distinction between indoors & outdoors, while the distinction out west seemed much more permeable, even casual. That seems very accurate.

 

A poet whose work strikes me as being particularly outdoors – in the sense that first drafts may have been written there, certainly, but also in the sense that I often think he envisions his readers there when they read his poems, is Gary Snyder. A poet whose work strikes me exactly the opposite, as quintessentially indoors – I can almost hear the rattle of the radiator in his texts as I read them, even when they’re about the beach at the Hamptons – is Edwin Denby. Here is an example of what I mean:

 

Awakening, look into sweet

Beast eyes, nightmare dispelled, cheerful

I feed cats, me, do chores; the great

Day waits then for heroism

Exhausted, I get myself out

Store, gallery, chat, have coffee

Heroes, heroines abound; hope

Who trusts it, but it’s contagious

Back upstairs, poetry I try

Alive by chance, civilian I

Chance roommates, you cats and roaches

You have cultures purer than mine

Of yours I shelter the success

And at mine’s failure don’t repine

 

More than the imagery or the use of language & sound as dense as Zukofsky’s, what gives this the feel for me that I completely trust – and completely feel as being indoors – are the poem’s semicolons.