At a party in SF Sunday I was making a new acquaintance. Rachel, her name was. Her husband was sitting to my left and he & I each had a plate of food in his lap. When David offered to fetch her her own plate Rachel insisted she wasn't hungry. The three of us had shared a few of those what-do-you-do generalities ... David is an architect, Rachel works in PR. I work at the library. Rachel & David were related to the party's hosts by marriage, I think, one of them the sibling of the host's sister's husband, something like that. Rachel had decided to mingle a bit and was rising from her chair when I had an inkling her face, which had seemed familiar in a she looks like someone I know but isn't sort of way, actually was a face I knew, somehow. Abruptly I said, "Rachel, what's your last name?" "Dacus," she said. That would be Rachel Dacus the poet. So I dropped my full name and she recognized it from our online poetry interactions. And she sat back down and we talked shop. Poetry, that is.
Among other things we talked about revision and workshopping and I said I will now & then post a poem on LoveSettlement from one of my old notebooks. Then I will comment on it and post revisions, which I will comment on, noting what changes I like, what still isn't working, hopes for improvements, dismay over lack of progress. I haven't done that in awhile. Last night I started reading through Tales of the Blue & Yellow Sun / Work Journal, Part Two, a notebook from 1982 & 1984 which I've mined for other poems I've revised here. Apropos to what Rachel said yesterday about poems that would detract from one's carefully-cultivated reputation, poems which should be burned in order to prevent their being posthumously discovered, I paged past "I walk a night of solitary lights. / Follow the candles as they bob, / the lines singing Ave Maria." (from the "Ave Maria" sequence in Disney's Fantasia?) and "Ghosts close-up / reveal their intentions / unlike politicians on talk shows / who hide behind polyester ties when cornered" ... These weren't offering the potential I was looking for. As I said to Rachel, however, when I was a baby poet I had to give myself permission to try things, just to write, to commit failure to the permanence of the bound notebook.
When I decide on a poem to post here I want a poem that has interesting things going on in it. I also want to have no idea or no clear idea how those interesting things could join up to make an interesting whole. I want the process to be a challenge. I don't want to pick a poem that with a tweak or two would be finished. I want something to look back at me with some defiance, to resist when I try to push it one way or another.
"Inevitable spraying" -- the title is merely a phrase from the poem -- was written in July or August 1984.
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