Blessed by the Muse are the poets who beget volume after volume of poems for the happiness of mankind. I have only one, the present Otherwise Poems, but it is one that has been evolving over much of my life. Three earlier stages were fixed in print in Simplicities in 1974, Collected Lyrics and Epigrams in 1981, and Where Is the Light? in 2006; they were always the one-and-only book growing up. The adding, removing, modifying, refining never ceased, and they have continued as recently as last night, so to speak. However, the mortality of man decrees that Otherwise Poems must be the terminus. I thought, in fact, that The Final Word would be the aptest title for this little book, but better heads felt it to be too gloomy.
Because of that persistent process of addition, deletion, revision and refinement, chronology falls into a blur. What is the true date of a poem written in 1960, revised in 1990 and again reworked in 2010? Is it an early, middle or late poem? Evidently all three. In response, I have arranged my poems by topics, though rather loosely, not by year of composition or publication. All manner of other arrangements would have suited the poems as well.
Here I reproduce a few words from the preface to my 1981 volume:
“If early and late are made good neighbors in this book, so are contrary moods and notions. A book of poems is not a philosophical tract, where the writer, having thought his way past pits and boulders, reaches at last a level assurance. A book of poems is allowed to mark the pits and boulders; it is even allowed to mark nothing else and never reach any destination at all. Poems are not improved by being consistent with each other.” And I quoted Wallace Stevens, to the effect that each poem is the “cry of its occasion.” All this remains evidently true.
While I do not pretend that all my poems, in their varied moods and notions, are “easy to understand”, I have always hoped to be intelligible to the intelligent; a hope nourished by the cheerful expectation that admirable poems that speak and sing nakedly will continue to live at peace alongside those others, dominant today, in which fragments of speech, private allusions, enigmatic gaps, mysterious collages, pregnant spaces between words or lines and other cunning operations bring about their own wonderful results, but which mask the limpid thought-filled intelligibility I want. This is the first difference from the trend which, in my opinion, justifies the title Otherwise Poems.
Poets of both schools have at hand many “weapons” by means of which they are able to strike pleasure into their readers. I reviewed these at leisure in my Fundamentals of the Art of Poetry. As even children know, among these weapons, or tools, or means, or devices, or qualities, are rhythm and rhyme. They were for ages the chief poetic weapons wielded, pen in hand, by the poets of our Western cultures. They are so no longer of course. The old confident beat of
The roll, the rise, the carol, the creation
has bowed to the democratic slouch of
Oh yes, and my laundry number,
597.
Nor is rhyme doing better than fighting a rear-guard action against slouching unrhymed verse. To be sure, free verse has beckoned to me when it seemed to me that the matter truly wanted it, but my love of music-in-poetry has remained steadfast, and at every stage of my life I have instinctively expressed my thoughts in their very strong feelings (often sardonic) through a confident verbal music without sounding, I hope, like a left-over Victorian bard. I take this pervasive music to be the second justification for the Otherwise in my title.
With a few exceptions, my notes to the poems are personal, beyond the reach of the most astute search engines. In my 2006 collection, wishing as always to be limpid, I identified historical persons, places and events in footnotes, but nowadays a few taps of the finger on an electronic device will do the job as well and better for the reader who may be unfamiliar with one or another fruit of what I call, in one of my poems, my sophomoric erudition.