FROM FLYING BACKWARDS, 1931-20—: A LIFE IN VERSE
Even when I told myself my life was just one damn thing after another, I somehow knew there was a story to it. I just didn’t know where to find it. I wrote this memoir hoping to do so.
But why should you read it? That, I cannot say. But I know why I read memoirs. As I’ve grown older I’ve become more interested in truth than art. I know, of course, that memoirs aren’t entirely true. We dramatize our memories. Or we simply don’t remember what happened accurately. And it is paradoxically true that without art we would never get to the truth of many things. Nevertheless, the fact that the author of a memoir claims it’s true gives his work a different “feel.” I read it a different way from the way I read fiction. And, yes, I’m just plain curious about other people’s lives.
This memoir is different in that it’s written in conversational verse. I did not do this because I think of myself as “a poet,” nor because I think my life is poetic. I did it because it would have been harder for me to write it in prose. Prose tempts me to digress. Verse forces me to focus.
Since I am not a politician, a movie star, a criminal, or a victim, my memoir contains no lurid revelations. Nor is it a narrative that zips people and events together the way Vikram Seth did in his .verse novel The Golden Gate (1986). The poems in my memoir are more like buttons holding a shirt together. There are gaps. But the story they hold together is not only understandable, it is illustrated by my drawings. The poems range from descriptions of actual people
I AM NOT MAKING THIS UP, 1936
bent down to speak to me, she made me wince.
Gigantic earrings framed her weathered face
I daydreamed that detectives would arrest her.
To my surprise she left at mid-semester.
But then, alas, Miss Lemon took her place.
to longer poems about experiences and relationships that altered my ideas and attitudes. This is a poem about our first apartment. Mary found this place. She knew about the bar, of course, but had no idea the second floor was a bordello, or that the convenience store across the street was a front for a small casino. We were so-ooo naive and innocent! But the drunks and the whores and the wiseguys were very nice to us.
POLITENESS, 1953
and bigotry was like the weather. Yes,
but every age is dark. We were polite
and wandered safely through the park at night.
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