Chapter 11

Specificity

In the mid-seventies when I had already been writing and publishing poetry for many years, I sent some poems to Ruth Lisa Schechter, the editor of the Croton Review. She wrote back to me, saying she’d like to talk to me about my poetry and asking me to visit her. In the years that I had been publishing, no editor had ever asked me to visit so I was thrilled. I immediately called her and made an appointment to meet with her.

At her house in Croton-on-Hudson, she sat with me for more than three hours, and explained that my poetry was strong, but it could be much stronger. It lacked, she told me, specificity. Line by line, she went over a poem I had written about my father, pointing out each place where I had been less than specific and asking me questions about my father. She also advised me to read Allen Ginsberg’s “Kaddish.” She said I could learn a great deal about specificity if I’d read that poem.

I have always been grateful to Ruth for spending that time with me, for providing me with the push I needed to get me to take bigger risks in my work. It’s the same kind of help I’ve tried to provide to writers and to students. Sometimes we are insulted when people try to tell us the truth about our work; after all, our poems are like our children. Do we want anyone to say that is one ugly baby? No, of course not, and driving home from Croton-on-Hudson, I was no more ready to hear what Ruth was telling me about my work than anyone else would have been. But I immediately bought Ginsberg’s book and read it all the way through, and then, I looked at my own poem and realized it was too general. My poem could have been about anyone’s father. I went back and re-wrote that poem for months until I was satisfied that this was a poem about my father and that he could not be mistaken for anyone else. The result was the following poem, called “Betrayals,” which appeared in What We Pass On.

Betrayals

At thirteen, I screamed,

“You’re disgusting,”

drinking your coffee from a saucer.

Your startled eyes darkened with shame.

You, one dead leg dragging,

counting your night-shift hours,

you, smiling past yellowed, gaping teeth,

you, mixing the eggnog for me yourself

in a fat dime store cup,

how I betrayed you,

over and over, ashamed of your broken tongue,

how I laughed, savage and innocent,

at your mutilations.

Today, my son shouts,

“Don’t tell anyone you’re my mother,”

hunching down in the car

so the other boys won’t see us together.

Daddy, are you laughing?

Oh, how things turn full circle,

my own words coming back

to slap my face.

I was sixteen when you called one night from your work.

I called you “dear,”

loving you in that moment

past all the barriers of the heart.

You called again every night for a week.

I never said it again.

I wish I could say it now.

Dear, my Dear,

with your twisted tongue,

I did not understand you

dragging your burden of love.

Try to picture the person you are writing about – try to see, hear, touch, smell that person. Picture the place you associate with the person. Pretend you’re a camera, a video camera that has a sense of smell and touch. Quick! What do you see? What do you smell? What is the person doing?

Go to “Kaddish,” the poem to which Ruth sent me. If any poem can teach us about the willingness to take risks and about specificity, this poem can do it. Next, go to Robert Hayden’s “Those Winter Sundays,” a short poem, but one in which Hayden allows us to know his father. Sections of “Kaddish” are available on the internet, and Hayden’s poems are available there, as well.

A poem has to be rooted to the earth. It is the details, the specificity of the poem that roots it to the ground and pulls the reader in. I think what we all want as poets is to have people remember our work, to have that work become a part of someone else. I carry the poems I love with me wherever I go. I want people to remember my work, and write to me about it years after they’ve first read it or heard me read it. I want that experience for you, as well. I know I’m listening to or reading a failed poem, when my mind drifts away while I’m reading or listening. The details are the magic ingredient in poems. You cannot make a poem without them.