Category: Emily Dickinson

Confessions of a recovering poet

For the better part of 40 years, I’ve made a pest of myself to poetry lovers. I’ve complained too often that too many poets seem to think they can declare their depth and genius by stringing together words that are incomprehensible and full of themselves.

I don’t like reading anything that has to be explained. Some of it is probably just over my head, but how would I know?

Today, I apologize and make a full confession: I, too, am a recovering poet.

As many of us do I went through my young writer poetry affectation stage back in high school. I just strung together words I liked in strict meter. I still believe that even free verse should have a rhythm, but again, how would I know? I never studied poetry and grew tired of pretense when I started writing plays and sensible prose (both of which I also never studied.)

This is the one poem I wrote that I love and keep. It’s calligraphed and nicely framed and displayed on a wall in our home. I wrote it for my wife, the lovely and feisty CarolAnn Williams, on our first Christmas.

I love and am keeping her, too.

My Christmas Carol

You are Christmas
and I am a child,
enchanted by eyes that sparkle
with the merry shine of a thousand twinkling lights.

As Christmas, you hold secrets:
promises of wonder
in yet unopened gifts.

And I am so filled with joy
that there is no room in me
for fear or despair;

The magic of Christmas is in me!
You put it there.

– For my CarolAnn, my wife.
December 25, 1988

I didn’t do the phrasing. I don’t know where to leave one line and begin another willy-nilly. I guess it’s to look cool. Yet again, how would I know?

I do know that our friend, the late Rosemary Schmidt, understood it. She put my words into attractive (if weird) line breaks while maintaining the meter.

Meter is a big deal to me because I used to be a drummer.

Anyway, I’m open to all the criticism I deserve except for my motive. When you love someone with all your heart, corny metaphors and even some metric missteps are totally acceptable.

Though I can’t know that for sure.

PS. A few years ago I started a Facebook page called Why I Hate Poetry. You can see it here and call it Why I Hate Dave if you like.

November is Norway

Today is November 1, 2023.

I went searching for a pithy quote about November and this is where I stopped looking:

“November always seemed to me the Norway of the year.”
–  Emily Dickinson

Emily Dickinson

Emily Dickinson has always cracked me up. I know I know — she is widely considered to be America’s greatest poet. I’m a troglodyte when it comes to poetry. I’ve spent 25 years ridiculing the “Belle of Amherst” since I wrote a play making fun of her work on nearly every page. After I finished writing it I was shocked to learn that Harvard University Press still held the copyright on most of her creations and they insisted on reading my two-act mockery before granting permission for me to quote her.

Even more shockingly, they decided it was fine, go ahead and perform it!

Hope is the thing with feathers
That perches in the soul…
–  Emmy again

You can’t make this stuff up. Oh, I get it, in this famous piece, a bird is implied as a metaphor for hope. I just find most metaphors to be unnecessary and often unintentionally funny abstractions.

And yet, when I went looking for a pithy quote about November  I was hoping to find a touching metaphor of life approaching its final days.

Since I turned 70 more than two years ago I’ve made an effort to think philosophically about aging. Songs and stories are always referring to May to December romances and such.

Oh, the days dwindle down to a precious few
September, November
And these few precious days I’ll spend with you

– “September Song”,  lyrics by Maxwell Anderson, music by Kurt Weill

I retired from radio yesterday and I’m very happy about it. I have no second thoughts and no regrets.

I just wanted to say something pithy that would express my complex sense of aging and, quite coincidentally, of leaving one’s lifelong career in the past.

Norway would have never occurred to me.

“If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry.

-You gotta love her, Emily Dickinson

I have wondered if it was sheer bravado whenever I heard retired people praise their retirement as the “new chapter” in their lives. Maybe it is for some, but I’m all in.

I’ve had a wonderful life and I still do. I’m more aware than ever of how fast my life has gone because I cherish every moment. I wouldn’t change a thing. I mean that literally.

I also know that I’m relatively close to the end of my life, but I’m not there yet.

Happily, I’m finally old enough to get it. These really are my golden years.

You’ll get it when you get here.