The question of identity is, for me, one of the most interesting themes in literature. How do we know who we are? Do our actions create who we are? Is there an identity—a soul, a mind, a spirit, whatever one wants to call it—on the “inside” that might be different than what we project through our actions? I suppose I shouldn’t be answering a question with more questions, but I think about identity a lot when I’m writing. Partly that may come from the performative act of creating a poetic voice—the mask that, even when I’m writing as “myself,” differs from, to borrow from Yeats, the bundle of accidents and incoherence that sits down to breakfast. In the end, I may not best know myself when I’m writing, but that may be when I’m most actively thinking about knowing myself. Or creating a better self that speaks in the poem.

 

If the answer seems muddled, I suppose it’s because I ultimately do think what we know of ourselves is a bit muddled. And that was part of what’s behind “Windows.” I remember, before we had children, going to the zoo with my wife and noticing how young the parents there seemed. Thinking about it and writing about it, I was interested in the tension between the fact of being a parent—which is, at its most basic level, a biological thing—and then the deeper meaning of that role, the many different ways one may act as a parent. Yet as the observers we don’t know most of the how and why of other people’s actions. So I started with the idea of the windows between us and the animal enclosures as metaphor for the kinds of barriers separating people from each other and the poem seemed to wind away from that and through a small narrative. I tried to let that situation, the setting, the characters, etc. all speak for themselves, transparent as window glass, yet also as physically separating and tangibly solid as glass.

 

 

Absolutely, poetry is all those things. Writing it is like preparing a meal because you’re doing it to sustain yourself and whoever might see it. But being a reader and—an important role all readers of poetry ought to assume—a sharer of poems serves the same purpose: inviting a friend to sit down with you at your favorite restaurant, recommending the foie gras or the eggplant parmigiana and hoping they love it as much as you do.

 

When I’m teaching students to read poems, I often compare them to the songs in musicals, a theatrical genre I kind of hate, ironically. You have characters on stage going about their lives in a rather realistic fashion: they’re running a floating craps game or getting ready to rumble with an opposing gang, right? Suddenly, some character is so moved that he or she can do nothing else but burst into song, a song that every other character, apparently, knows the harmonies and dance moves for. But the song has to happen, because the emotion is so intense it can’t be communicated through the actions and speech of “the real world.” It has to be put into a form of art. Aren’t poems the same way? Tennyson’s friend dies and he’s so moved by it that merely saying he’s grieving isn’t enough. It takes iambic tetrameter quatrains, 133 cantos of them, for him to adequately give voice to that grief. I suppose my comparison to musicals is an essentially Romantic view of poetry. Things happen in the musical and characters burst into song; they happen to poets who burst into poem. In both cases, as listeners or readers, we’re acutely aware that we’re in the presence of crafted art that does relate, in some way, to the world that exerted the pressure that caused the burst.

 

And of course a poem’s like a walk in its often exploratory nature—as writers such as Frost and Ammons have talked about, in more elegant ways than I might

 

 

This question reminds me of the narrator of Nick Hornby’s High Fidelity, who is asked by an interviewer to name his top five songs, and he calls her back again and again to change the list because (identity, again) of what his choices tell the world about him. Having a bit of the pop music obsession Hornby’s character does, I’ve thought and rethought who I’d put on this list (’cause it has to be a rock star who would come into my home to sing, have a beer, then walk out, right?). There’s a punkish part of me that would want to hear the Clash play “Janie Jones.”

Or since he’s popular with the NPR-listening literati set, I’d want Richard Thompson to play “1952 Vincent Black Lightning.” Or to show that I keep up with today’s music and ask for Gaslight Anthem or the Kaiser Chiefs? Anyone who knows what’s mostly on my iPod would expect, rightly, my real choice would be Bruce Springsteen. It’s a fantasy answer, so why not have him ring the doorbell with guitar, play “Thunder Road,” then get on a night-dark highway back to Jersey?

 

Well, at the risk of sounding sappy, the real answer is that I’m happiest when my three year-old son strums his little guitar and sings. He has no idea how to form chords, but he makes up these lovely, childishly absurd lyrics for songs with titles such as “Good Dogs and Bad Dogs” or “You Want Some Rice.” I like seeing someone close to me making things up and sharing them, especially offering them so freely and confidently, with no fear of criticism or rejection. It’s the same kind of good feeling I get teaching a poetry workshop, when students really take risks with their work and want to write well. I’d let anyone sing for me, I guess. Just sing like you really mean it.

 

 

There’s a small rotation of fairy tales—Hansel and Gretel, Goldilocks, and Three Little Pigs (which my son calls “Big Bad Wolf,” actually)—that are bedtime stories. Ideally they’re practical, meant to bring on sleep, which doesn’t always work. Otherwise, we’re very big on reading to them, hoping that helps them to see books and reading as an essential part of everyday life. I really like the children’s books by Sandra Boynton, because—unlike a lot of children’s stuff in verse—they use meter well and rhyme in often surprising ways. I hope they lead my boys to appreciate the play inherent in using language. For the same reason, I also like reading from the collection of poems for children edited by Elise Paschen. A few of my three year-old’s favorites are Kay Ryan’s “Bear Song,” William Stafford’s “First Grade,” and Galway Kinnell’s “Crying.” Blake and Yeats are in there, too, and Rilke. How could a poet not like introducing that lineup to his children?

 

 

 

 

A heat lamp warms the cold-blooded snakes:

a white-mouthed moccasin, a black-mouthed mamba.

A girl points, says only, Snake, over and over.

 

She follows her saying of this word

through the reptile house, its walls full of caves.

Their windows open on us, my wife and I,

this child, and her parents:  teenagers paying

more attention to her than to the animals.

 

They’ve gone the same way as us all day:

bears, tigers, insect house.  The girl wanders

far enough from her parents, someone entering

might think she’s with us.  I imagine her

calling me Dad, asking if the glass can hold back

the python large enough to kill a child.

 

But she’s secure enough she wants to reach

through the glass to touch each snake,

reach from our world into others:

the sidewinder’s Sonoran desert

or what could be our backyard

with a pair of rat snakes.

 

Each world has its own sun, some food,

the weather’s free of hurricane or drought,

skies clear of predatory birds.  The green tree snake

twines among many tiny branches, a second

rests in the dirt.

 

My wife and I watch

our child from a distance.  She learns her world,

finds the glass around her.  Someone opens

tiny doors in walls painted like sky, dunes,

or ruined rainforest temples.  He moves the snakes

with hooks, changes water, prunes a plant.

 

Someone controls the worlds we watch,

yet we’re still scared.  We leave this couple with their girl,

happy to leave the snakes, to chance

that in our world no cobra hides in tufts of grass

imported from some place overseas,

some world wholly other than our own.

 

 

 

 

 

The road to Emmaus, a third man

Joins two others.  They talk about strange things

Happening in the city behind.  They do not

Burst into song the way men in musicals do.

 

In Carousel, after a suicide, one woman

Sings to comfort another.  You’ll never

Walk alone, she croons.  No one, in my life,

Sings to me.  My wife sings with the radio,

 

But the meaning doesn’t add up:

I can’t get no satisfaction, she sang

On her last birthday, before

I gave her gifts.  Those two men met

 

A third outside Emmaus.  No songs

but they still dined with him.  Years later

T.S. Eliot thought of them when reading

A polar explorer’s journal.  He swore

 

He saw another man plodding in the snow—

A mere phantom.  Did that vanishing man

Sing an icy song or hum Beethoven

In hope some crashing note might crack

 

The coldness in the sky?  Songs persist:

That suicide is gone, but the words

Sung to his wife echo at football games.

In Liverpool the fans serenade their team—

 

You’ll never walk alone—before each game.

The goal’s sad nets hang in the breeze.

What words might Christ have sung

After breaking bread, taking wine

 

Giving his blessing to those two in Emmaus?

He chewed, swallowed, his mouth was clear,

He smiled.  Those two recognized him,

Awaited their Lord’s words.  He disappeared.

 

 

 

 

 

Fingerprints scallop tiny worlds into the neck,

and show more cares than wrinkles did.  Lips

hold fast—now is no time for saying,

nor time to let the body tighten, rise, and move.

 

If going is the goal, it would seek permanence

behind the patina’s glaze, beyond what doctor’s work

might keep dying a day, then an hour away—

 

Here everything has entered the eyes:  One empty,

looks down at the world, the body gone,

the lack of open hands to clutch

the things and nothings in his life.

 

Scanning another world, the second eye

is closing.  It swells as if bruised, as if

it swallowed a rose ready to blossom.