The Anthologist Read Free Page B

Quinn, to be honest. But at least she actually accepted some of my own poems. Thank you, Alice! And rejected some of them--damn her! Things that just hurt me to have them come back saying, This isn't for us. This one didn't quite work for us, but we're glad to have something from you.
    "We're glad." The crafting of these kind no-thank-you letters. I assume Paul Muldoon will do it well, too. The really good editors have the gift. And they hurt so bad when they're nice. You get a turndown and then you flip through the magazine and you say, Why? Why did Alice accept this firkin of flaccidness here on page 114 and not one of my poems? Why?
    I should probably send Paul Muldoon a poem. One of my flying spoon series, none of which I've finished yet. Some of Muldoon's poems actually rhyme, but not audibly. He's cagey that way. He teaches at Princeton. He's probably there right now, talking to students. "Hello, poetry students, I'm Mr. Paul Muldoon." He's a little older than I am, but not much. Oh, but the idea of starting all over again. I can hardly face it. "Dear Paul Muldoon. Glad you're on the case now at The New Yorker. We met briefly at that poetry wingding at the 92nd Street Y a few tulip bubbles ago. Here are some fresh squibs, I hope you like them. 'My feaste of joy is but a dish of payne,' as the condemned man said before he was publicly disemboweled. All the very best, Paul."
    It's scary to think. Of course I'd kind of stopped sending things to The New Yorker even before Alice Quinn left. That's part of my problem, I think, is that I'd stopped already. And Paul will send them back, and he'll say, Great to have something from you, but these seemed a little.... And then he'll have some apt adjective--"underweathered," or "overfurnished." "Elliptically trained." And I'll flip through the newest issue, walking back from my blue mailbox, hunting for the poem he chose over mine, and it'll be the same thing as always. The prose will have pulled back, and the poem will be there, cavorting, saying, I'm a poem, I'm a poem. No, you're not! You're an imposter, you're a toy train of pretend stanzas of chopped garbage. Just like my poem was.
    H ERE'S THE THING . I am basically willing to do anything. I'm basically willing to do anything to come up with a really good poem. I want to do that. That's my goal in life. And it hasn't happened. I've waited patiently. Sometimes I've waited impatiently. Sometimes I've "striven." I've made some acceptable poems--poems that have been accepted in a literal sense. But not one single really good poem.
    When I look at the lives of the poets, I understand what's wrong with me. They were willing to make the sacrifices that I'm not willing to make. They were so tortured, so messed up.
    I'm only a little messed up. I'm tortured to the point where I don't sleep very well sometimes, and I don't answer mail as I should. Sometimes I feel a languor of spirit when I get an email asking me to do something. Also, I've run up a significant credit-card debt. But that's not real self-torture. I mean, if you stand back from my life just a little--maybe thirty-five yards--I am a completely conventional person. I drive mostly within the fog lines. My life is seldom in crisis. It feels like a crisis now because Roz, who has lived with me for eight years, has moved away and left me, and I'm in considerable pain, but this little crisis of mine does not resemble the crises that Ted Roethke or Louise Bogan went through, or James Wright, or Tennyson, or Elizabeth Barrett Browning, with her laudanum. Or Poe.
    One time, I remember, I was in a laundromat. It was a laundromat in Marseilles, France. "Marseilles." Do you hear that? It's a mattress of a word, with a lot of spring to it. "Marseilles." I was in there, doing my laundry, and I look over, and there's this guy there, this little guy. He was kind of pale, pasty looking. But moving with a methodical grace. And I said, Ed? And he looked up slowly. He nodded, cavernously. I