Introduction

Looking back at the table of contents of an earlier issue of Ploughshares that I guest-edited some twenty years ago, I was surprised by how few of the writers were then discoveries for me. Two certainly were. Their poems had almost nothing in common: her three poems were straightforward & hard-edged; the details came out of her working-class life in Detroit & elsewhere. The other's poem was far more oblique & shrewd, but his voice no less authoritative. I was deeply moved by the poems of both of them—reading them now all these years later I'm even more impressed by my editorship, if that's possible. They were a high-point of my working on that issue. There's nothing quite like discovering someone out there you never heard of but you know in an instant is the real thing.

I ask myself why is it that in the last two decades I've seen almost no poems by the first, while the other, Dean Young, has gone on to considerable success and deserved recognition. (I met him for the second time in May at a meeting of the American Academy of Arts & Letters, where he was receiving an award for his body of work.) Luck, good health (often a form of luck), perseverance, character, the profound need simply to make poems & keep making them? It could be that some writers early in their careers figure out a wise use of their literary capital & others don't. Of course fashions change, & a poet's work can come into or out of fashion through no effort on his or her part. (I think if I were starting out now no editor in his right mind would publish me.) It is also possible that the first poet has stayed true to her engagement with poetry & merely grown tired of the whole process of publication & acclimation, & that she possesses a closet of superb unpublished poems the writing of which were satisfaction enough. I hope that is the case, for her poems that appeared in this magazine are like no one else's. Anyone who has written poetry in America—that is tried to make a life of it—can understand how a poet can become disgusted with everything that relates to "a career." A weekend at an AWP annual conference can drive a sane person to studying rainfall in the Kalahari, or selling shoes in Saginaw.

As I push on into old age—I'll be eighty a month after this issue appears—I wonder more & more how & why some of us turn away from poetry, & others—like me—keep writing for better or worse. This essential puzzle reminds me of a wonderful song I once heard Lightnin' Hopkins sing at a retirement center here in Fresno. (I'd gone to the place to hear Hopkins & not to retire.) In this song, there was a line that was repeated again & again as though to authenticate itself: "I just keep scrubbin' at the same old thing." At the time, back in the late seventies, Hopkins was much younger than I am now, but he wasn't young. I was young enough then to think the song was about fucking, but now it strikes me that the song may have been about enduring as whatever one is, & getting what pleasure one can from simply persisting. For all I know, Hopkins did his own laundry & was being totally literal. Even a great blues singer's clothes get dirty after a time & require laundering. Dirty clothes or not, Lightnin' "kept scrubbin'" at the same old thing, that is he persisted in his craft & art, & remained—as one critic wrote—"a walking embodiment of the blues" right up until his death in his early seventies.

In poetry, for many years my model has been Thomas Hardy, who, for me, came into his greatness as a poet in old age. Jude the Obscure, published when he was sixty-five, received such a ghastly reception that Hardy, I've read, turned away from the writing of novels. But of course he kept writing. The curious thing is that the poems he wrote in his seventies & eighties are far less bleak in their vision than that final novel. Indeed, there are moments of utter triumph, poems so perfectly wrought & so at peace with the death that would soon be his, that one wonders if, after all the pain & all the losses of his difficult life, he did not wander into some small region of redemption. This man who had seemed so distant from a life-changing epiphany or a vision of cosmic beauty writes in his final book—published posthumously & completed just before he turned eighty-nine—one of the great lyrical & triumphant poems in our language:

Proud Songsters

The thrushes sing as the sun is going,
And the finches whistle in ones and pairs,
And as it gets dark loud nightingales
In bushes
Pipe, as they can when April wears,
As if all time were theirs.

These are brand-new birds of twelve-months growing,
Which a year ago, or less than twain,
No finches were, nor nightingale,
Nor thrushes,
But only particles of grain,
And earth, and air, and rain.

A great artist in his last days still in possession of perfect mastery over our magnificent language. It's truly inspiring to see an artist in his final years capable of such technical wizardry & emotional power. Other examples come to mind: Monet, Picasso, Matisse, Sophocles, & in our own time Pablo Casals & Stanley Kunitz. Gaudi was just realizing his true greatness as a visionary architect when in his mid-seventies he was hit by a streetcar. He had given up both smoking & drinking, & it had been decades since he'd chased after young women. With some luck, exercise, & good nutrition he might have completed his great masterpiece, the Sagrada Familia. Is there any likelihood that I could join these giants? (Or that you could, for that matter?) I wouldn't bet on it. In my sixty-five years of stumbling toward verse I've never done anything to suggest such mastery was alive or even dormant within me. But I also know how monumentally stubborn I am, & how deeply I believe in scrubbin'. If clean clothes is all I get, so be it. One of the glories of writing poetry is just how badly & how often you can fail & still believe in your right & need to make poems; if you have any success at all, it is utterly thrilling.