A couple of people have suggested that it was brave to run my early work here, a little like posting one’s second-grade photo with the terrible cowlick & missing front tooth or something. Actually, I don’t agree. For better or worse, I made my mistakes in public – I published the first serious poem I ever wrote & I was sending work off to The New Yorker when I had all of four or five weeks’ experience. That some of these were accepted is what seems a little bizarre, not that I fumbled around with different approaches, different styles.

Joe Green notes rightly that he “knew plenty of guys who were writing stronger poems at 21.” Me too. I was painfully aware that I lacked the natural lyric gift of certain of my peers – Gerard Van der Luen among the readers at the Shakespeare & Co. open readings in 1965, Heywood Haut at San Francisco State a couple of years later, John Gorham at Berkeley. Of the three, I’m only aware of Woody Haut ever going on to publish a book. I was turned down for the very first creative writing class for which I ever applied by Leonard Wolf, better known nowadays as Naomi’s dad. Never once in any of my classes was I ever a star student.

It may be an instance of making lemonade because I had lemons, but somewhere along the line I decided that my inherent klutziness as a writer – which continues unabated to this day – was an advantage. It forced me to think harder, work harder, ask more questions, including the dumbest & most basic, like what does it mean to capitalize at the left hand margin, how does that change everything else that happens in the line?

Andy Gricevich asks if I feel the repulsion toward Crow, for example, my first actual book, that I do towards “Youra.”¹ The answer is no, I don’t. By that point, I was actually writing, not just mimicking my elders. I can envision a volume of early works built around Crow, Mohawk, nox, the poem “Berkeley” & my Rilke translation, “Do We Know Ella Cheese?” plus a smattering of others. Actually, I’m not so certain about Mohawk, a text that was an attempt to identify a space midway between Clark Coolidge’s early work & Helmut Heissenbüttel, but there are some other shaped texts from that period I’d think pretty hard about.

In 1977, Tom Mandel & I were running a reading series at the Grand Piano Coffee House on Haight Street. One of the events we sponsored was a “first poem” evening, with everybody bringing the first poem they ever wrote & reading it aloud. I can’t remember if Rae Armantrout brought the poem that was published in My Weekly Reader when she was around seven or not, but Carol Gallup had something fabulous I do recall. And we all had a wonderful time with what was mostly dreadful work. After all, what you get when you first write poetry is not poetry itself, but all of your expectations about poetry, all your received ideas & stereotypes, which may or may not be clear given your sense of your own tools at that early stage. You may not even be able to reproduce your misimpressions. Much of actually learning to write is figuring out how best to cast off those inherited ideas until what emerges is the writing itself.

 

¹ Gricevich identifies some of the work in Crow as going “beyond the general Robert Grenier mode of a lot of that book.” In fact, more than half of it was written before I first met Grenier, which didn’t happen until I entered a rough draft of that manuscript for the Joan Lee Yang award at Berkeley, which he was judging, and won. He later told me that he was sure I was Arthur Sze when he first saw the manuscript. So that book has less to do with his influence on my work – which has been vast – and more to do with why we hit it off when we first met.