Poem In Your Pocket Day

Today is National Poetry In Your Pocket Day. I have chosen the 4th portion of beloved Frank O'Hara poem "Alma" which goes like this:


4
Onward to the West, “Where I came from,
where I’m going. Indian country.” Gold.
Oh say can you see Alma. The darling
of Them. All her friends were artists.
They alone have memories. They alone
love flowers. They alone give parties
and die. Poor Alma. They Alone
/She died,
and it was as if all the jewels in the world
had heaved a sigh. The seismograph
at Fordham University registered, for once,
a spiritual note. How like a sliver
in her own short fat muscular foot.
She loved the Western World, though
there are some who say she isn’t really dead.

1953

from Lunch Poems

I began my writing life as a poet, my first poem at age ten having something to do with moths. I think the first line was "There's moths a-plenty by my bedside now...." I recall also as a young thing looking at the Redbud trees starting to bloom in the neighborhood and writing: "Who knows if these/rows of trees/are really large curd/lavender/cottage cheese?"  I was so proud that it rhymed and was going for the look of the buds on the trees. That's still what I see when I look at a Redbud.

As a rounded peg in the square hole of Kansas Suburbia, I always took great solace during my stormy adolescence from those pleasing, small, transporting poetry books that City Lights put out. They were perfect, the size of a sandwich, and that too made them seem slightly subversive & outré. And man, I was hungry for outré.

On the ladder of writing genres, even though I write primarily fiction now, I have always placed poetry on the top rung. It speaks volumes that at the end of a particularly powerful poem at a reading, audience members emit a sound, something between a moan and a sigh and a whew and an oomph of surprise. I love that this low short guttural sound happens spontaneously and universally, as natural as breathing. I always feel moved to write after reading or hearing poetry. I still write poems myself, but it now it seems saved for the larger events in life: heartbreak, Spring, love, death, longing. When I need to express something and crystalize the verbiage, poetry is the means to get in touch with the essence of things. I admire the distillation and focus that requires.

I always recall what a fellow workshop attendee once said at the Napa Valley Writers Conference years ago. He was a poet and I was in the land of fiction. We got the chance to rub shoulders while waiting in line for a buffet lunch. I said:
"I always try to guess which ones here are the poets and which writers are in fiction."
"Well that's easy," he said.
"How so?"
"The fiction writers are talking about agents and the poets are talking about the food."