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Daily Notes on Poetry
15 September 2004: Actually, I'm typing this entry 9 April 2005. I'm in the process of storing all my entries on a CD--or more than one CD if required, which I suspect it will be. There are three gaps in my entries becuase of Hurricane Charley, this being one. Since it is only one entry long, I thought I might as well fill it. It happens that I just put an old poem of mine into my computer for use at a poetry website whose mistress invited me onto it, so here it is:
The Canoe
Head unbent,
his heart an insolent ferris wheel,
he stands watching his father
whiten with anger
in the acrid stillness of his salary.
An overturned canoe from a poem the boy would write
more than twenty years later
lies half-buried in sand on the outskirts
of the tension between them.
Forever once
as a child of four
he had ridden that canoe
out of his mother's strawberry breezes
and into the midst of islands and gulls
on the fringe of a rude wide sea.
His father had done the paddling,
picnic-eyed and strong in a summer Saturday.
But it is another season now
and the boy faces an older father,
a father pale and strange
to the orange adolescence the boy can't help
taunting him from.
It is a different season now, and years will go by
before the boy reflects upon,
or even notices in the shadows of the moment,
the partially-buried canoe.
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This is a revision of a poem I wrote in my thirties for a writing workshop at San Fernando Valley Junior College in California. The original, which wasn't too different from this version, won some kind of student contest for all the junior colleges in Los Angeles and some surrounding areas. This accomplishment remains my greatest statooznikal feat as a poet (except, I guess, for getting an entry in Richard Kostelanetz's Dictionary of the Avant-Gardes and having an essay in the Gale series of autobiographical essays by writers). I consider it a reasonably good Iowa Plaintext Poem, and still feel somewhat proud of its tripled temporality. It is one of the very poems I've written about my family. I don't generally consider one's family important enough to make the subject of poetry. Certainly, it has been done nearly to death as a subject by others. But nothing can ever be entirely exhausted as a subject for poetry. (And I certainly use another overdone subject for poetry, poetry, a lot.)
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