Author? I Hardly Know Her!

Recently, I have been working my way through a thick volume of the collected poems of Charles Reznikoff, which has been both more and less rewarding than I expected. I don’t remember where I found out about him or read his poems for the first time, but it was the prospect of reading poems about New York, because I had found out that he was a New Yorker and wrote about where he was from, that led me to the book; and though it turned out that some of them were about New York, but most of them weren’t, it was still mostly enjoyable.

And then, on page 367, very near the end, in a section called Last Poems, the first of six parts of poem #10, subtitled “Just Before the Sun Goes Down,” was this little nubbin:

Of all that I have written
you say: “How much was poorly said.”
But look!
The oak has many acorns
that a single oak might live.

It’s not like I’m ever going to stop writing, and it’s not like I need any especial inspiration to sit down and work a little bit every day. Inspiration to be confident about what I have written, however…that remains in short supply ‘round here. The lines quoted above acknowledge what should be common sense: not everything we write is great work—but anything we write is of value, because who knows how or when what you initially believe to be inconsequential will reveal its importance?

I read those lines by Reznikoff late Tuesday night, and then came across a poem called “Poet’s Guide to the Foucault Pendulum” in the current issue of the Indiana Review while I was out and about on Wednesday afternoon, having stopped to read for a short time in Military Park. I don’t imagine that it’s couth for me to reproduce that poem here in its entirety, but the gist of it is that progress is a matter of perspective rather than necessarily a demonstration of fact.

The world spins under you
in such quiet and purposeful ways;
you move even if you refuse to,
so why bother being so stubborn,
so convinced you’ve never made
any progress at life?

And then moments later we are asked to “witness how slow / swaying adds up to a complete / revolution. This is all you can ask / of yourself, all the world does too." In the simplicity of those lines is the same appeal to common sense that struck me in the lines from the Reznikoff poem. Like I said before, I don’t need any inspiration to go on with the work. What I sometimes lack (“What do you lack?”) is the ability to believe that the going on isn’t futile. Unearthing little gems like these, out of the blue, goes a long way in that respect.