final class, blank verse

Blank verses is like a wall on the page, long edges, little white space.  And perhaps, in an effort to comply with iambic pentameter, poets stretch out an idea to make the line, flush out a point they might otherwise have left to interpretation.  It seems a suitable format for the dense “Directive” by Frost.  I hadn’t read it before class and was unsettled by it’s reading.  It sounded like list of my own bad habbits – habits of perseveration, not uncommon, I’d guess, for writers. 

As Frost moves through the woods and “all this now too much for us”, he continually re-introduces us to what are, most likely, his own confusions.  I’m tempted to say, “Go kiss your grandchildren.” 

I’m sure I share with many writers insomnia and a nagging need to understand people – motives, emotions, experiences – and existence – meaning, morality, faith.  But at some point, aren’t we ill-equipped to comprehend it all?  Frost suggests that there is a point at which “you’re lost enough to find yourself.”  But just when you find orientation for your values and identify, your mind can start wandering to the past, the dissipation and loss of what we care for… the “house that is no more a house” just a little dent in the landscape that’s “now slowly closing like a dent in dough.”

This reminds me of a cab ride in Dublin many years ago with my mother.  I remember we were, as we tend to, talking about many things at once, including my grandfather’s quip that, “There’s got to be a heaven because this is a bag of shite.”  “Everyone's got a bag of shite,” she said… “We just have to keep moving though, don’t we?”  But writers dig through their bags of shite.  This is how we come to learn.  We cull through emotional memory and then dream up images, landscapes, and characters… let them mingle, see how things play out.  Sometimes we find a sense of resolve life didn’t allow.  Sometimes we reveal a truth.  But I suppose we also torture ourselves.

In any case, we got the cab, and the cabbie, Donny Sullivan, without prompt, began telling us about his family.  He was one of sixteen and whenever a boy turned sixteen (and they were mostly boys), they were sent out of the house.  They had to find a job, a place to sleep. 

When we got out of the cab, my mother, dry as ever, says, “You don’t think he doesn’t have a bag of shite.”  I laughed.  She was right.

So, as I read directive, I think of what a luxury reflection is, time to comprehend (or try as best we can).  But on the other hand, I wonder how much more peace Donny Sullivan has known because his life didn’t allow him a certain kind of artistic self-absorption.  He had to go out and make a buck.

To quote my mother again… “We really can’t be happy without being of service.”  And maybe that is the final, balancing note.  Be a writer, investigate the emotional terrain of life, reveal existence and, as Colum McCann says, "the anonymous corners of life," but do it to make other people’s lives better.  Do it to reveal injustice, beauty, humor, courage, trauma, whatever truths you can find.  And, among others, do it for the Donny Sullivans of the world who didn't get to go out an explore.  But if you turn too far inward, if writing becomes too much about your own need to pick scabs, as opposed to seeking life, and an arrogant desire to comprehend creation in its entirety, you’ll find yourself many years later picking through the woods with a broken goblet hoping to “drink and be whole again beyond confusion.”  I think I’ll take a more humble route and accept my confusion along with family, friendship, and service to my fellow man.