I Fancied Myself a World-Weary Picaresque Melancholic Poet Dude (Part Two – In Which I Venture onto the Treacherous Byways of Language)
You wouldn’t know it unless you’ve tried it, but writing poems can be difficult, dangerous work. Those who look down on poets as namby-pamby couch loungers in plush purple bathrobes are in for a surprise if they ever deign to take up pen and paper and give it a go for themselves. The mental stress alone is more than most mortals can endure. The hunt for metaphors is exhausting. Imagine your soul is a cabbage. Life is your vinegar. Now run it all through a mill churning on slow speed. The resulting slaw is your poem. May the gods grant you talent enough to make it palatable. And, Oh, Brother! May you survive the punishing process.
As a young hopeful settled into my sanctum sanctorum – or rented room – I began my apprenticeship in the disciplines of poesy. I studied the old masters – Milton, Chaucer, Donne, and Byron – and I studied the masters closer to my own time as well – Eliot, Stevens, Cummings, Pound, and Plath. I blithely fell to the wiles of both free verse and rhyme. I heroically galloped into heroic couplets, and fearlessly ambled into iambic pentameter. I scribbled haiku until I was punch-drunk with nuance.
For the first time in my life, I began to really probe the gutworks of language. Sure, I had been speaking and writing in more or less comprehensible English for quite a while, but like most people, I had been blind to its sparkle, deaf to its musicality. Now, suddenly, words became amazing to me. How could these little gasps of breath, blown as they are over our tongues and teeth and lips, carry so much meaning and magic? How could a string of words send our spirits soaring with happiness in one moment, but then, when rearranged, crush us with their gloomy weight in the next? That these spoken words could then be transposed into abstract written symbols, and then strung together into lyrical epics of lasting worth to the passing generations – well, that was almost incomprehensible to me. And yet, struggle to comprehend it I did. For long hours. Day into night into day. Week after week.
I didn’t recognize it when it first started happening to me, but writing poetry was slowly becoming a sickness. I began sleeping at odd hours. I kept to myself. I broke into sweats. I mumbled and giggled in my empty room, as if I were channeling whatever depraved or moonstruck personality I imagined speaking and giggling the lines of my current poem. The most distracting symptom of my malady was when a single word would lodge in my brain, vibrating in my head like a pop song, or the buzz of a mosquito, refusing to leave me be until I found a place for it in a poem. I couldn’t shake it loose. The word owned me like a slave. These were sometimes only benign words like toaster or happy or lark, but could sometimes be weirder words like ennui or hobbledehoy or floccinaucinihilipilification. Some of these words were so persnickety and tenacious that I would have to go for a walk – get them out in the open – just so I could see more clearly what I was battling.
These walks were like something from the realm of zombies. On one plane I was a young man aimlessly strolling the quaint suburban lanes of my little college town, while on another plane I was a desperado seeking escape in my turbid brain from the twisting, hazardous pathways of language. This other wordy way was full of pitfalls and terrors. It was full of shadows and dead ends. I remember one night following down an obscure path that lead me tumbling headlong into the dumbstruck conclusion –
“There is no suitable rhyme for foible!”
After the shock and disappointment had passed, and after the fear of being lost had subsided, I began to fantasize about starting a movement based on my new discovery. Surely it would revolutionize poetry. No one would ever read literature in the same way again. I would call it Foibleism. I would be its chief practitioner and founding member. It would be a poetry based on hopelessly rhymeless words strung together in nonsensical patterns. Years hence, when students cracked open their books on the history of verse, they would find a portrait of me with a little blurb underneath that read – “Brian Kindall – daring… brilliant… radical … said to be the first Foibleist.”
Looking back on that time, I can see that poetry might well have killed me. I was obviously too young and untried to ever truly meet its challenges. I was travelling on nothing but enthusiasm and the desperate need to shape my recent heartbreaking experiences into something I could clutch and cherish and then throw out to the world so it could see how I’d suffered. All very romantic. But my skills were next to nonexistent. My naiveté laughable. Still, the sickness had me pretty bad. Nothing, it seemed, could save me.
Summer passed and autumn took hold. The nights grew frosty without me even noticing. I grew sicker. The true stuff of poetry – all that life passing beyond my window – was lost to me. I was too immersed in the detail of craft, too bound to my own blinkered tragedies, to ever notice my need for new lifeblood. And then one day, thankfully, something happened.
The fountain in the square outside my window had been running nonstop since I had moved into my room. It had become a sort of white noise, always burbling and splashing in the background. But one afternoon someone decided fall was far enough along that it was time to turn off the fountain before it froze up the works. A switch was thrown; the fountain stopped.
The sudden change in the air was enough to cause me to look up, something I hadn’t done in weeks. And when I did, my eyes, as if guided by some divine force, lifted to the apartment above the jewelry store directly across the square. There, behind another window like mine – only less shabby – sat a girl at a table. She was working hard at something, using what appeared to be drawing tools under a low lamp. I watched, transfixed, as if viewing a distant dream. Finally, the girl paused to assess her work, and then, tucking her blond hair behind an ear, she turned and looked out her window, her blue eyes falling directly on mine.
For a little eternity, we just stared at one another across the misty space. A flock of sparrows passed between us. Then she smiled and waved. I lifted my own hand. I was surprised to find my gesture to be less of someone saying hello and more of someone reaching out for help.
“Not waving,” I muttered, “but drowning.”
The girl didn’t know it at the time, but she was to become my salvation, curing me of my sickness just before I slipped away once and for all into the verbose and moribund depths of my own paradise lost.
As a young hopeful settled into my sanctum sanctorum – or rented room – I began my apprenticeship in the disciplines of poesy. I studied the old masters – Milton, Chaucer, Donne, and Byron – and I studied the masters closer to my own time as well – Eliot, Stevens, Cummings, Pound, and Plath. I blithely fell to the wiles of both free verse and rhyme. I heroically galloped into heroic couplets, and fearlessly ambled into iambic pentameter. I scribbled haiku until I was punch-drunk with nuance.
For the first time in my life, I began to really probe the gutworks of language. Sure, I had been speaking and writing in more or less comprehensible English for quite a while, but like most people, I had been blind to its sparkle, deaf to its musicality. Now, suddenly, words became amazing to me. How could these little gasps of breath, blown as they are over our tongues and teeth and lips, carry so much meaning and magic? How could a string of words send our spirits soaring with happiness in one moment, but then, when rearranged, crush us with their gloomy weight in the next? That these spoken words could then be transposed into abstract written symbols, and then strung together into lyrical epics of lasting worth to the passing generations – well, that was almost incomprehensible to me. And yet, struggle to comprehend it I did. For long hours. Day into night into day. Week after week.
I didn’t recognize it when it first started happening to me, but writing poetry was slowly becoming a sickness. I began sleeping at odd hours. I kept to myself. I broke into sweats. I mumbled and giggled in my empty room, as if I were channeling whatever depraved or moonstruck personality I imagined speaking and giggling the lines of my current poem. The most distracting symptom of my malady was when a single word would lodge in my brain, vibrating in my head like a pop song, or the buzz of a mosquito, refusing to leave me be until I found a place for it in a poem. I couldn’t shake it loose. The word owned me like a slave. These were sometimes only benign words like toaster or happy or lark, but could sometimes be weirder words like ennui or hobbledehoy or floccinaucinihilipilification. Some of these words were so persnickety and tenacious that I would have to go for a walk – get them out in the open – just so I could see more clearly what I was battling.
These walks were like something from the realm of zombies. On one plane I was a young man aimlessly strolling the quaint suburban lanes of my little college town, while on another plane I was a desperado seeking escape in my turbid brain from the twisting, hazardous pathways of language. This other wordy way was full of pitfalls and terrors. It was full of shadows and dead ends. I remember one night following down an obscure path that lead me tumbling headlong into the dumbstruck conclusion –
“There is no suitable rhyme for foible!”
After the shock and disappointment had passed, and after the fear of being lost had subsided, I began to fantasize about starting a movement based on my new discovery. Surely it would revolutionize poetry. No one would ever read literature in the same way again. I would call it Foibleism. I would be its chief practitioner and founding member. It would be a poetry based on hopelessly rhymeless words strung together in nonsensical patterns. Years hence, when students cracked open their books on the history of verse, they would find a portrait of me with a little blurb underneath that read – “Brian Kindall – daring… brilliant… radical … said to be the first Foibleist.”
Looking back on that time, I can see that poetry might well have killed me. I was obviously too young and untried to ever truly meet its challenges. I was travelling on nothing but enthusiasm and the desperate need to shape my recent heartbreaking experiences into something I could clutch and cherish and then throw out to the world so it could see how I’d suffered. All very romantic. But my skills were next to nonexistent. My naiveté laughable. Still, the sickness had me pretty bad. Nothing, it seemed, could save me.
Summer passed and autumn took hold. The nights grew frosty without me even noticing. I grew sicker. The true stuff of poetry – all that life passing beyond my window – was lost to me. I was too immersed in the detail of craft, too bound to my own blinkered tragedies, to ever notice my need for new lifeblood. And then one day, thankfully, something happened.
The fountain in the square outside my window had been running nonstop since I had moved into my room. It had become a sort of white noise, always burbling and splashing in the background. But one afternoon someone decided fall was far enough along that it was time to turn off the fountain before it froze up the works. A switch was thrown; the fountain stopped.
The sudden change in the air was enough to cause me to look up, something I hadn’t done in weeks. And when I did, my eyes, as if guided by some divine force, lifted to the apartment above the jewelry store directly across the square. There, behind another window like mine – only less shabby – sat a girl at a table. She was working hard at something, using what appeared to be drawing tools under a low lamp. I watched, transfixed, as if viewing a distant dream. Finally, the girl paused to assess her work, and then, tucking her blond hair behind an ear, she turned and looked out her window, her blue eyes falling directly on mine.
For a little eternity, we just stared at one another across the misty space. A flock of sparrows passed between us. Then she smiled and waved. I lifted my own hand. I was surprised to find my gesture to be less of someone saying hello and more of someone reaching out for help.
“Not waving,” I muttered, “but drowning.”
The girl didn’t know it at the time, but she was to become my salvation, curing me of my sickness just before I slipped away once and for all into the verbose and moribund depths of my own paradise lost.
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