Robert Peake

As my wife points out, artistry is a balancing act. I have been working on the manuscript portion of the creative thesis for my MFA—essentially, a book-length collection, composed of poems I wrote during my study in the program. Having scrutinized, selected, and arranged this body of work, I now find that the highly critical part of my character has become over-activated. Setting down to write new poems, a thought goes off in the back of my mind: will this poem be good enough to include in the manuscript? It is an absolute creativity killer.

And so, the dance between precision and wild abandon continues, albeit on a new dance floor. I can only assume poets working on their ninth and tenth books have somehow figured out how to resist this urge—to scrutinize when one needs to be devil-may-care free. This, more than any single element of craft, must be what breeds longevity in the arts—some ability to operate within the almost schizophrenic nature of artistry. Now that my manuscript is more-or-less assembled, and in celebration of my conscious rebellion against taking myself, and my body of work, too seriously, I am off to attempt to write a deliberately “bad” poem. The worse, the better. Such challenges goad the duende.

Valerie passed this article on to me with a warning: I might not want to read it, depending on how I was feeling. It was about someone else’s experience of losing a child. And well-written.

So, after a delicious evening all to myself, tinkering with my manuscript, writing a review, reading some poems, and sweating through an unusually warm late-September night, I clicked the link.

The piece paralleled my own experience in so many ways, but what I recognized most was the moment before pressing send on a group email—at once the most efficient, but instinctively such an inappropriate medium—to update friends, family, and colleagues about the hard left turn our life had suddenly taken.

When we cleared out the shed recently, we burned the hundreds of printouts of email replies we gathered in those dream-like days that followed. Out of the domain of spam and chain letters came a sense of human communion. And in this article, I found a little more.

In case, like me, you may have been taking yourself a bit too seriously lately, please enjoy what may be one of the strangest Monty Python sketches in history, featuring three of the big six of Romantic poetry, ants, the queen, and lots of sherry—all conveniently subtitled in Spanish:

I recently got the good news that one of my poems received an honorable mention in the Rattle Poetry Prize. According to the editor, the poem was selected from over 4,000 poems entered this year. It is particularly encouraging that they chose a poem that represents one of my recent attempts at breaking the “page barrier”—that is, writing a poem longer than one page. I look forward to reading the nine other honorable mention poems and, of course, the first-place-winner’s poem, when they are published in December. The $100 prize I plan to put toward—you guessed it—more poetry books.

This semester, like last semester, I am writing brief annotations on the books I read. As I mentioned earlier, I am focusing on late modernist poets. Here are a few notes on some iconic books that have had a great impact on my relationship to poetry:

Jarrell, Randall. The Lost World: New Poems. New York: Collier Books, 1966.

This collection of poems is strikingly different from Jarrell’s body of work about wartime aviation. These are mostly dream-like meditations on childhood, told from the perspective of a child, and sometimes as persona poems in the voice of a woman. They employ deliberately prosaic language and a stocky, often single-stanza form.

Merwin, W.S. The Lice. New York: Antheneum, 1967.

A forceful, strong-voiced body of poems. Possibly a predecessor of Glück’s ventriloquistic style? Also somehow reminiscent of Kinnell’s The Book of Nightmares. Haunting, powerful, and impossible to summarize.

Merwin, W.S. The Moving Target. New York: Atheneum, 1979.

The soldered-together sentence fragments, lack of punctuation, and disruptive repetition of certain phrases in this collection of poems is highly reminiscent of Paul Celan. This collection seems clearly more influenced by French than The Lice, which, by compare, moved into a more distinctly American voice, while retaining the high-voltage associations and also adding metaphoric elements reminiscent of Pablo Neruda. Merwin was striking out in new directions in The Moving Target, no doubt heavily influenced by his translation work.

Moore, Marianne. Selections from The Complete Poems of Marianne Moore. New York: The Macmillan Company, 1962.

Poems of observation, many of which follow a pattern of syllabic counts from stanza to stanza. Many of these poems employ a wit akin to that of the Algonquin Round Table (Dorothy Parker et al.), and certainly possess a kind of period charm. But beyond this, the work is interesting for its celeritous musicality, and in particular the ways that Moore works with enjambment and slant internal rhymes to create pleasurable disorientation.

Silkin, Jon. Poems New And Selected. Middletown, Connecticut: Wesleyan UP, 1966

These are compelling meditations on life and death, at once seemingly plainspoken and yet intellectually intricate and refined. His poems about the death of his son, as well as similarly resonant poems about the death of animals, betray a deep sensitivity and a beautiful use of forms that invent themselves as they go along.

Snodgrass, W[illiam] D[eWitt]. Heart’s Needle. New York: Knopf, 1959.

This is a collection of meditations upon failure, written in a variety of somewhat formal structures. The title sequence focuses on failures in parenthood. This collection does not strike me as “confessional” in the sense we have adopted since the 1980s of direct revelation and admission of shortcomings, as much as it attempts to find language suitable to relate a sense of futility in the speaker’s voice, and the speaker’s relationship to the world.

Stevens, Wallace. “Ideas of Order.” and “The Man With the Blue Guitar.” The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens. New York: Knopf, 1977. 117-188.

A collection of musically-driven poems, which seem to find their way by musicality into strange ideas and sensibilities. “The Man With the Blue Guitar” is an ars poetica composed in couplets, simultaneously explaining and demonstrating Stevens’ poetics through the metaphor of the blue guitar.

Williams, William Carlos. “Spring And All” Imaginations. New York: New Directions, 1970. 88-151.

An experimental work interspersing poems with fragmentary prose commentary on the importance of imagination in art and life. An incredible sense of freedom is achieved by the deliberate meanderings, starts, stops, and intentionally mis-headed sections. The poems, set apart from the surrounding experimental-style commentary, demonstrate Williams’ characteristic style.

There is a Zen story about working very hard wherein a young student (in some versions, an American,) approaches the master and asks how long it will take him to become a master himself. The master replies, “ten years.” The student emphatically explains that he will work twice as hard as any of the other students, pushing himself to the limit to master his teachings more quickly. “In that case,” replies the master, “twenty years.”

For me, poetry is like this. Usually, when I find myself wanting to work very hard, it is because I have not been writing consistently. You see, I have waned in my discipline of getting up early before work to write. And, as a result, I notice myself daydreaming about dramatic change, such as a fellowship with a great expanse of uninterrupted writing time stretched out before me. Yet, invariably, I find that when I start writing consistently again, I become more satisfied and accepting of my present situation. My careerist thoughts subside. I enter back in to the vocation of poetry, the lifelong pursuit.

The art of not pushing, but rather focusing on consistency, is alien to our fast-food culture. And yet, writing something daily is actually a form of instant gratification as well—a true and lasting gratification of actually having written, good or bad. It is also, ironically, good for one’s career. That is because publication and awards are a numbers game. And writing consistently produces a greater volume of higher quality work than an approach of fits and starts. At least, that has been my experience so far.

So, it’s off to bed for me, and up early to bang something out—good or bad—for sake of staying in the flow.

Today, we tackled the shed, a routine suburban act of tidiness for most couples. But the reason we hadn’t used most of the stuff in our shed since we moved in over a year ago is piled up against the back wall: the stroller, the diaper genie, the car seat, and the chest of drawers we refinished by hand, every drawer filled with baby clothes. We have been unable to have another child in the two-and-a-half years since the birth and death of our son, and today, we decided, in order to stop avoiding more than momentary forays into the shed for a critical item, that it was time to move the baby stuff into storage.

The chest, with all that it symbolized as an act of preparing for parenthood, we decided to set aside until we could find it a new home. That meant going through each drawer, re-packing the small hats and shirts and vests and the impossibly small socks. What got me was the smell. I realize that brand new baby clothes don’t actually smell like babies—it is, in fact, the other way around—but the two have become closely associated for me, and somehow my nose has secret wiring straight to my heart. I again recalled Keith’s post last year about the cap his son wore to keep warm, and how he and his wife tried in vain to hang on to what he left behind in that cap—his smell.

Moving the baby stuff offsite was also a way of accepting that we may not be able to have another child. Facing this has meant riding out a second wave of grief, with many of the same effects as when we first lost our son. In the past two-and-a-half years, many new people have come in to our lives—new friends, neighbors, and colleagues at work—who know nothing about our James. And so, I find myself, at times, living in two worlds at once. Occasionally, the disparity between what others can see, and what I carry inside, is brought into startling contrast by, for example, a giddy new mother, unaware of our past, eagerly accosting us about our plans for “starting a family.” I respond with a sheepish grin, and change the subject. They probably think this means I don’t like kids.

Life was never what we thought it was supposed to be about. A shed piled up with junk is about more than clutter. The name “shed” somehow seems fitting—as though I have cast off a heavy coat or, like a snake, shed a skin. Or reached, perhaps, a watershed in recovering from grief, choosing once again to direct myself, despite so much uncertainty and disappointment, toward renewal—and with it, a strange kind of hope.

“The sea is dangerous, they say, but not if you’re the sea.”

Sarah Maclay drew me down to the seaside tonight, to hear her read poems from her first book, Whore, her second book, The White Bride, and selections from a new, unpublished manuscript. It was great to be back at the Artists’ Union Gallery, among friends. Sarah read poems back-to-back, like a line of train cars speeding down the coast through evening fog. And, as is the tradition at this venue, and precisely at the end of one of Sarah’s poems, the 7:50 freight blared through the dark.

Though many of the poems she read were prose poems, her compelling imagery and sonorous delivery made her work sound as though it might have been written with the blade-like precision of couplets. For all of her unexpected imagery and captivating associations, Sarah is not a surrealist—in much the same way that a poet like Sandra Alcosser is not a surrealist. In fact, Maclay brings to the urban landscape much of what Alcosser brings to the wild places—rough, self-startling observations, deep sensuality, and a ravenous fascination with human concerns—all balanced with a keen, keen ear. It was a pleasure to hear Sarah read tonight, and to step out into the salt air, changed.

The best man at my wedding was, and is, gay. We met several years before I met my wife. We were both fresh out of college, finding our way in relationships. We would take turns, over espresso drinks, listening to one another’s hopeless crushes, dating mishaps, and heartbreaks. With each new relationship we learned a little more about what we each wanted in a partner, and encouraged each other that we would, one day, find The One—his patient, kind, domestic-minded guy; my smart, quirky, artistic girl. For both of us, finding a partner who wanted kids was important.

As soon as Val and I got married, we started referring to ourselves as a family. After the death of our infant son, my understanding of what marriage and family means changed dramatically. The commitment we made in our wedding ceremony—to love one another unconditionally, as best we can—was held to the fire. Grieving our hopes and dreams as parents tested the definition of “family” as a unit of support. Certainly, we were stronger together than apart—but some days we found ourselves both simply unable to give any more. It was in these times that the greater family—including relatives and friends—buoyed us up. Our commitment to love each other, and to support each other in learning and growing in the midst of adversity, became a new, refined definition of what it means to be married, and to be a family.

Shortly after Val and I got married, my best man met his man. Even as our lives ran in parallel when we were single, I also see both he and his partner now demonstrating this new meaning of marriage and family—supporting one another in learning, and growing, and becoming better human beings in the midst of adversity and prejudice. They baby-proofed their home prior to the adoption agency’s inspection the way some budding lawyers study for the bar exam—extensively, meticulously, because so much is riding on the result. They have been waiting for their child for some time now. Lucky the child who gets these two great, eager dads.

I would love to see them legally married. Not because it would deepen their commitment, or somehow legitimize their relationship, but because it would support a definition of marriage and family that is predicated on striving toward unconditional love. Anywhere this is found, there is a true family. Anywhere this is practiced wholeheartedly, it forms a bond thicker than blood. Because what makes life meaningful, what makes it all matter, is love. And love, like life itself, does not fit neat categories. It does not match our expectations and ideals. Because it is about so much more than gender, or genetics. It is about what makes us essentially human, and gives us the courage to endure.

Marriage is the sanctification of this commitment to love. A family is a unit of support that has made this same commitment to each member, whether two people or twelve. The success of these units in supporting each member to learn, and grow, and become better despite life’s challenges, is the measure by which the health of our society can be gauged. But first, this opportunity must be extended freely and without prejudice, in acknowledgment of its importance, and in acknowledgment of the potential of each one of us to better ourselves through loving one another past our differences and challenges—as family, in the truest sense of that word.

Living in two worlds can require a lot of explaining. When poets and poetry aficionados ask me what I do for a living, I usually just say, “technology.” Often, that one word is enough to make them change the subject. Most people don’t want to know the details once I utter the t-word. You’d think I worked in a slaughterhouse.

But even for the tech-savvy, an elevator pitch or traditional resume doesn’t really begin to tell the full story of what I do. That’s why, when I discovered VisualCV through Guy Kawasaki’s blog some months ago, it seemed like the perfect way to explain what I do, in a more rich and compelling way, to technologists and poets alike. I added screenshots of websites, narratives with hyperlinks, technical articles, and video to my VisualCV page using their super-easy, web-based interface. Then, I posted a link to my VisualCV page in the community forums, thus entering myself in to the VisualCV best resume contest.

A few weeks later, I got notice that I made the finals. My wife, Valerie, whose career story is equally complex and compelling, actually did as well. They generously issued Amazon gift certificates to both of us. I used mine to buy books for my final semester of the MFA. Then, a few weeks later, during my fourth MFA residency, I got notice that I won one of the grand prizes for best resume. How cool is that? My prize, an 8GB iPod Touch, arrived yesterday. It’s basically all the fun of an iPhone without those annoying cell phone features. I have nicknamed it the iFaux. Say it fast, while holding it up to your ear, and nobody will know the difference.

Big thanks to VisualCV for both a great application and a fun new toy.