Poet's Studio, The

American Poetry Review, The, Jan/Feb 2004 by Revell, Donald

APz In the Studio

I WRITE IN THE SOUTHWEST CORNER OF OUR MASter bedroom. It is, as the vacuum cleaner salesmen say, a heavy traffic lane. My dear ones come and go en route to the bath, my son and his friends and the puppy careen on by, banging the terrace door as they go in and out of the yard in clouds of brown Mojave dust. It is a busy, open place of blessed interruptions, such a site as I feel poems to be. For me, a poem is made of thresholds and transgressions, and nothing poetic is ever still enough to be interior or apart. In writing, I aspire to go over, via the poem, into the day. If all goes well, the arrivals and tender interruptions profuse, and the day comes also over to me. Interruption and distraction are the authors of real time. I think of Charles Olson:

This morning of the small snow

I count the blessings, the leak in the faucet

which makes of the sink time.

("The Songs of Maximus")

I think of Robert Creeley:

Make time

of irritations,

looking for the

recurrence

("Mazatlan: Sea")

The lines of a poem are instances of timing, by which I mean to say a verb-"to time." The permissions I give and am given by the interruptions of my thought in the corner of my room contrive my cadences, showing the line breaks to the onrush of my words.

I write in the lyre-backed wooden chair I've had since I was nine. It is the chair in which I squirmed and somehow managed to learn the art of long division. The seat is terrifically frayed, almost threadbare now, and the lyre is cracked and dry and coming away from the frame. I like to think of it as the objective correlative of my argument with Orpheus, that manipulative prude. If only Orpheus had had the good sense to let Eurydice take the lead! Think of one springtime followed immediately by another even more wild and free! Dr. Williams did, as in Spring and all where he, at least, let a real Eurydice lead the poetry throughout its greeny good transgressions: ...

The imagination, freed from the handcuffs of "art," takes the lead! Her feet are bare and not too delicate. In fact those who come behind her have much to think of. Hm.

Also, my chair always reminds me that I've a long way still to go. The stain of Orphism is still upon my words. Hm.

My poems are written first (I will not say "composed," as I've adored Robert Duncan's notion of a "disturbance of words within words" too long to accept so poor a settlement) upon my manual typewriter, a portable Olympia (oh stain of Orphism!) I've carried around since college days. Many's the time it served a double purpose, i.e. both as writing implement and luggage. Into its case I could easily pack a few days' change of underwear and socks, as well as a toothbrush. I guess I could say my "studio" is mobile. Even now, in clement weather, I can take the heart of it outside, and I do, right to the foot of the flowers. I can bring the writing across my threshold into the open air. This pleases me a lot, as I am very fond of urging students and myself to get, by any good means, poems into the world, and not to mind about getting worlds into poetry. Leave such distillations and entombments to the Platonists, Heaven help them. And it pleases me too that, because I write on a manual typewriter, I am in physical contact with the page. I'm ever reminded that a poem is first a piece of white paper and only later (to paraphrase Robert Rauschenberg) a piece of paper more or less covered with words. In the interval, letters and words have taken the places into which I've put them, and those places are not mine. It's my poem all right, made by my pressures, placed by my hands and eyes, but it doesn't look like me. Putting poems on pages, I put the words exactly where they are. I cannot disavow them, but they are always already gone from me. As Creeley avers, "Position is where you / put it" (and notice the heavy emphasis the line break puts on you, i.e. just look at what you've done). Everything is on, not in, the line. Poetry's all an envoi; I can feel it getting out of hand, and I like that.

Back indoors now, back to the southwest corner of our room for one last noticing. Writing there,! write below two portraits: a daguerreotype and a photo. The former is of Thoreau, the image of him we all know best: soft-shouldered and disheveled, transparent-eyed and wry. His portrait is there because I love him, because I read him almost every morning of my life, and because, for me, poetry is morning work. The moment I open my eyes upon waking, eyesight begins its wonder-working power. Thoreau's great theme was triumph of vision, literal human vision, over adversity. he had the courage of his senses and, writing, I consult the courage of those transparent eyes every time.

The photo is of Ezra Pound, near the end of his life, walking away from the camera down a side street in Venice in company with a white sleek cat. (I am hearing Vivaldi as I write this; Ezra would have liked that.) The photo is there because Ezra Pound wrote the most beautiful poetry I know and paid full price for the privilege. Out of wreckage and wrong-headedness he managed to find, in Pisa and after, a perfect music of nearness, of fondness, and of humility which, unlike modesty, consists wonderfully with visionary pride. Every day of my life, writing or not, I try to come to terms with my wreckage and with the considerable proportions of my own wrong-headedness. Ezra and the durable, habitable ruins of The Cantos give me, daily, hope that, by coming to terms, I also will come home.