Robert Peake

This afternoon felt like Christmas. Except that Santa pulled up to our place in a black Thunderbird, on time as usual for her piano lesson with my wife. And instead of a red velvet sack, she came in cradling a small cardboard box. Inside were the fruits of many months of painstaking labor: sixty eight limited-edition letterpress chapbooks of my poems, each hand-bound, numbered, and signed.

The process began in September of last year, when Mary Zawacki, an accomplished graphic designer and talented amateur pianist, asked if she could use a few short poems to practice hand-set typography in a letterpress class she was taking with Gerald Lange at Otis College of Art and Design.

The thought of someone spending so much time with my poems in setting them—aligning each letter carefully, even as I had carefully chosen each word—felt like an honor. The process, and the result, were remarkable. However, because some of the tiny metal letters had been used more often in other print runs than their companions on the plates containing my poems, some letters were minutely more worn than others, producing a slightly uneven tone when inked and pressed to paper. For Mary, this just wouldn’t do.

But this “setback” only opened new vistas. Mary used a digital version of the same font¹, along with her own beautiful hand-drawn line illustrations inspired by each poem, to lay out the pages digitally. Then these designs were developed on photo film. The film was laid against a metal plate coated with a special polymer, and exposed to light. The light-exposed polymer hardened, and the rest simply washed away with water (a far less toxic option than, say, the metal-etching acids William Blake was accustomed to using). The resulting plates, containing both my poems and their well-matched illustrations, became the pages and cover of this book arts book.

The chapbook contains three poems, including the poem that was a finalist in last year’s James Hearst Poetry Prize. The settings can only be described as perfect: from the illustrations, which add to the text, to the layout, the paper, and the three-hole string hand-binding. I am deeply grateful for this act of creative generosity, and for the opportunity to collaborate with such a wonderful artist.

I value concision. I have told myself this value is the reason that I often prefer shorter poems. And I have told myself this preference is the reason that I have tended to write poems under one page (~40 lines) in length. All that, however, is changing.

I now recognize that in my work I have had a tendency to want to end a poem after delivering a few good lines, to “look ahead” to the conclusion and shape the direction toward that end. Reading Marvin Bell’s “Dead Man” poems, which always appear in two parts, helped me recognize just how much can still be said even after the conclusion of the first part of a poem. In some ways, every poem could be said to be just the first part of a poem on that topic.

Reading other longer works has also helped me understand how I might go about resisting conclusions in the effort at arriving in more interesting poetic territory. Being halfway through my third semester in the Pacific University MFA program, I have now read over fifty books of poetry and poetry criticism in the last fifteen months of study. I have learned a lot. Perhaps more importantly, I have absorbed a lot, imbibing poetry as much as analyzing it, and letting it shape my aesthetics from the inside out.

Most recently, I have been reading David St. John’s Study For The World’s Body. I am struck by the success of his longer poems. Comparing his work to another poet whose longer poems I also admire, Li-Young Lee, has helped me to understand some of the qualities of longer poems which I hope to deploy in my own efforts at breaking the single-page barrier.

Foremost among them seems to be a tone that reflects confidence. This sense of confidence about the speaker, and by inference the author, helps me as a reader to give the author permission to dwell on unfolding details, provided they remain grounded in concrete images, interesting language, music, or other elements of good craft. Careful examination of details in this way produces the actual poetry, and gives a sense of focus and precision to the work, despite its length.

The stand-up comedian Billy Connolly is a master at delivering humor through seemingly endless digressions. When he finally comes back to the main topic, long since forgotten in the audience’s mind, he earns not only laughs but trust that he knew what he was doing all along. Good long poems can also function in this way—taking time to deliver poetry through the details, but retaining a sense of focus and direction all along.

In some ways, it seems to me that longer poems do not necessarily have to end on lines as spectacular as those required for the success of shorter poems. A rider who has hung on to a bucking stallion with dignity and tenacity need not necessarily dismount with great flourish to win cheers. The sustained quality and duration of the work is a feat in itself. Such feats I look forward to attempting in practice soon.

It is fitting that National Poetry Month begins with April Fool’s Day. Poetry is, in fact, the most “foolish” of literary pursuits.

I live in a country founded by Puritans, immigrants, and pioneers. These groups hold in common practicality as a crucial value: the best work is useful work. In fact, this value took on mythic proportions over time, culminating in what is sometimes called the “Protestant work ethic.” But it is more than this. It is a mythos of practicality shared by many groups. Max Weber points out in The Protestant Ethic and The Spirit of Capitalism that even in Japan, a nation that is not predominantly Protestant, the idea of working hard toward a practical, material end has become an intrinsic cultural value.

Faced with survival, individually and as a group, it only makes sense to channel one’s energy into material results. In Abraham Maslow’s model of hierarchic human needs, such groups function on the levels of physiology and safety, deriving their sense of love, belonging, and esteem from their contribution to the material needs of the group. In the case of many religions, morality and sense of higher purpose are also aligned with practical material work.

Poems are not edible, and one can not take shelter under a poem, unless we are speaking metaphorically. In Maslow’s model, poetry exclusively serves the need of self-actualization, which depends on other needs being met. Ironically, in a society that has struggled so long to build up each successive generation with greater capacity to fulfill the lower needs, self-actualizing behaviors often end up being seen as frivolous. We work so hard to maintain all the other cultural elements that ultimately enable self-actualizing behavior, and in focusing on the other needs so intently, often forget how to be creative, spontaneous, and solve problems of language and insight for the sheer pleasure of expressing the wondrous complexity of being human.

Poetry is the fool in King Lear’s court, pointing out where society has picked the wrong daughters to trust. We celebrate in Spring, when nature puts on its display of gratuitous beauty. Surely there are more practical ways to exchange pollen and ripen fruit. But the lilac and poppies and orange blossoms here in California are all saying: poetry, poetry, poetry.

Happy National Poetry Month, to all you hardworking “fools.”