There's something to be said for avoidance, even besides its obvious virtue – not doing what you're supposed to do. Last summer, for example, I planned to write a memoir about my grandmother's secret, which I had only recently learned, and instead made phone calls, lingered with my coffee, or found myself writing something else. One morning, turning away from my notes, I wrote this line: "Night without you, and the dog barking at the silence..." Next morning: "Maybe genius is its own nourishment, I wouldn't know." Both lines led to poems, one a love poem, the other about Glenn Gould, neither of which had anything to do with my grandmother. Apparently I had tapped into some rich vein of psychic refusal, a source of energy that seemed transferable to subjects not related to it. Of course I needed to believe that I actually wanted to write the memoir. When it was clear after a while that I didn't, my avoidance-as-compositional-method lost power. But I was able to fool myself for several weeks. I wrote more poems that summer, many of them keepers, than I had during any comparable time. It should come as no surprise that "what if" and "let's see where this goes" were far more seminal than "here's what happened."

Avoidance suggests psychological fear, something unresolved that tempts us while declaring stay away. I was avoiding something, but so what? As Fitzgerald has Gatsby say about Daisy's marriage to Tom, "it was only personal" – a strange disconnect that nevertheless freed him to pursue the wildness of his dream. Such suppression of reality would come back to haunt Gatsby, but that's another matter entirely. At the time, it gave him permission to go forward. Whatever my reason for resisting grandmother's secret, it kept leading me elsewhere, if not forward. And, that particular summer, elsewhere was where the unexpected, the loose ended, the half known, resided. Avoidance led me into unforeseen areas, which is only to confirm that poems originate in unlikely ways. Then it helps that you've devoted your life to developing and honing the skills that might take you further.

Like opium or free writing, avoidance may get you into a poem, but rarely out of one. After all, it takes a lot of things-in-place just to become a merely decent poet: a passion for and a suspicion of language, for starters; empathy for otherness; contempt for sham; comfort with artifice; some balance between truth's cruelty and irony's armor; a love both of exactitude and ambiguity. If we're not beginning poets, all of these qualities should be ingrained in us before the poem begins. They must remain the poem's informants – behind the poem, not in it, unconsciously guiding its decisions. Something galvanizes them if we're lucky. That something could be anything – "a wild horse taking a roll," as Marianne Moore says, or an uprising in 1916, or something utterly serendipitous, like the way language in the act of finding companionable language also finds meaning.

Of course, I don't think of any such things when I compose. And I try to forget about my heroes and their daunting qualities: Jeffers' ferocity, the artful delicacy with which Larkin distills and orchestrates his bile, Dickinson's quirky incisiveness, Dante's perfectly imagined hell, Shakespeare's capaciousness. Heroes can become hindrances. They, too, need to be unconscious, informing elements – assimilated, ingrained, part of who you are.

Avoidance, indeed. Some things need to be forgotten in order to proceed. One summer I couldn't shake "That is no country for old men," kept hearing it in my head every time I sat down to write. Yeats was too much with me. I took a lot of naps.

Some therapists, for our own good, might want us to confront what we tend to suppress. When I'm writing, I'm happy to be the healing profession's adversary. It may be true that our lives are more important than our poems, but not when we're working on one. Besides, no poet wants to end up with a poem that is the equivalent of learning how to cope. Poems need to be better than acceptable, better, certainly, than their authors. In the broadest sense, they should offer the reader a good time, which, by my lights, can include a sadness, or even the horrific, wonderfully enacted. I never understand when people say that a good poem about a depressing matter depressed them. I'm a sucker for the world as it is brought home anew, whatever it takes to deliver it. Paul Celan's "Death Fugue" elates me.

Restraint, avoidance's mentally healthy cousin, has, in many quarters, a good reputation. I have been one of its practitioners. But there must be something large that enlists our restraint, else it be like building a corral for a mouse. I will grant restraint its virtues without listing them. We, the congenitally restrained, though, can't be too proud of ourselves for being so. Wouldn't we rather be praised for what's lesser in our natures – those times we've been excessive or expansive? Don't we love to reach that moment in a poem that makes us feel as though we've just gotten back home, safely, with stolen goods, all traces of how we got there hidden? Aren't we most pleased when our restraint serves some wildness?

Stevens said some poets prefer a hard rain in Hartford to a drizzle in Venice, and vice versa. He wasn't elevating one over the other. He meant that, in varying degrees, we're all unconscious servants of our temperaments. Perhaps, but within a temperament I have to believe there's room for a good deal of variety. I like rock music, for example, but not heavy metal. I love Hopkins' passionate syntax, but I come to it with George Herbert's metabolism. I'd like to own one of de Kooning's "Woman" paintings and also Vermeer's "Girl with a Pearl Earring." I suppose that my temperament inclines me to spend a longer time in front of the Vermeer; I love how quietly it invites contemplation. But the first time I saw one of the de Koonings my response was entirely and excitingly visceral. It disturbed, shocked. Now I find myself smiling in their presence. Like a disastrous love affair thought about years later, the encounter has become comic. I've found another way to live with it.

I suspect that I'm a drizzle person with a hankering for a good storm, quick to put up his umbrella. But would I prefer the drizzle if it were in Hartford? In the Bronx? Isn't context ready to confound almost anything we feel sure of?

I've always been tempted to be what I'm not, first out of a sense that I wasn't much of anything, then out of a conviction that it was possible to create oneself. I can think of a few achievements I never achieved, lies I eventually turned into facts out of sheer embarrassment of being caught. (Don't ask me to cite them.) I can also think of those times I got caught. Certainly, though, as writers, we can expand who we are by entertaining or impersonating who we're not. Witness any persona poem, all those women reinventing Penelope to reinvent themselves, all those contemporized Oedipuses discovering how to see in the dark. And to write is to reach into the dark. Occasionally we touch something we didn't know we sought. Sometimes we get bitten, or worse. Sometimes there's nothing. We move forward, our imaginations as feelers. We make things up to find what is or isn't there.

Poetry writing is more humane than life. It's full of second chances. Your sentence, so to speak, can always be revised. You can fix the inappropriate, adjust every carelessness, improve what you felt. How perfect for someone like me: unabashed avoidance one afternoon, a little excess in the evening, a few corrections in the morning. The various ways I've embarrassed myself, crumpled up, in the wastebasket, never to be seen.

But there is of course the final product. If you're ambitious for your work, there is no hiding. The issue is not that I've revealed aspects of my life (though I may have); rather, it's my skill and sensibility, which, combined, constitute style. And nothing is as personal or as individuating as style. My final product must be evidence that I've switched my allegiance from content to handling of content, that whatever intensity I've mustered has become increasingly aesthetic. Or, rather, there should be no evidence of this, just the poem standing for itself, tinged with the residue of a style, hopefully in some way distinguishing, if not distinctive.

For the record, the grandmother memoir finally got written, late that summer, as a poem. Much of what I've been musing about here went into the writing of it. In order to get started, I needed to veer into it, take it and myself by surprise. I'll not go through the many drafts of this poem, the many tinkerings and rearrangements, except to say I'd been thinking about the Buddhist saying, "If you meet the Buddha on the road, kill him," and began with it, then discovered that it needed to be withheld until later. Buddhism, in fact, would play a minor role in the poem, yet it was the beginning of some narrative latitudes not available to me had I stayed strictly with my subject. Purposefulness, that enemy of invention, suddenly had a harder time getting its way. I was free to let one perception lead to another perception, the facts of the matter now merely the cargo, not the engine. What was at stake were ways to be true to my poem while being true to my grandmother's secret, and I confess my allegiance quickly tipped to the poem, as I've indicated it should, because only attention to the poem qua poem makes its contents significant. (The poem appears at the end of the essay.)

Writing poetry is about giving yourself permission for what you've found yourself to be doing. It follows, therefore, that it's an act both promiscuous and self-regulating, and that's how I like it. (Perhaps my avoidance of the memoir form was that it wasn't promiscuous enough.) My first wife used to say I wanted two of everything. It was a conservative estimate. But what I wanted and what I ended up doing were often vastly different, as they are in poems themselves – matters of compromise and adjustment. Of course I want to be who I am and many things I'm not. Drizzle man wants to be thunder man, and thunder man wants to conceal the lightning that caused him. My wishes, however, may not matter.

By early September, I'd reverted once again to the exigencies of my temperament. I remembered the pleasures of light rain and muted colors. The lure of subtlety. A measured response. Auden, Frost, Williams, Donald Justice – my mentors, unbidden, were tapping me on the shoulder. And, as ever, there was Apollo insisting I clean up after the fabulous party that had spilled into the street. Might as well dance a Danse Russe whenever I can, I concluded, might as well bend a few birches.

The Telling of Grandmothers Secret

                         Belle's story was that she came over from Prince
                         Edward Island to Boston when she was sixteen
                         to be a nurse's apprentice, but that wasn't exactly
                         true. She got pregnant, had the child – oh it's a
                         long story. The truth is she was sent away in shame.
                                                             — Aunt Jessica, age 87

             Trying to desire nothing, be content
with motion, I walked up Gravel Hill Drive,
then back, the day after Jessica's call.
But I was clear proof that Zen
is just flirtation and avoidance unless you sit
very still, do the necessary work.
My disquiet wouldn't be quieted.

   Still, nice to know there was a religion you could fail
without worrying about eternal damnation,
a conundrum troubling you instead of a precept.

         Nice also to ramble toward your subject,
sensing nobody cares about it but you,
feeling those first narrative latitudes,
the narrowings as you go. Already the secret
had visited my sleep, sat down with me
at breakfast, rubbing the dark from its eyes.
What confidence it had. Imagine,
this suddenly unlocked thing
believing it was irresistible as is.

             "I'm the only one left who knows,"
Jessica explained, then couldn't stop herself.
With each call the secret grew larger,
and I'd carry it out into the vagaries
of late October — one morning a clear view
of Savage Mountain, the next a cold mist —
aware that every story needed atmosphere
in order to exist.

             And then the surprise of atmosphere
in collusion with memory, grandmother's silence
coming back to me, and her kindness, for the first time,
feeling like an achievement. There she was,
cooking our meals, running the house,
my ill mother barely able to assist.
And there was her secret, pressing in
on her and down, asking for release.

That she was impregnated by her teacher at age fifteen,
that the teacher married her and on the wedding night
disappeared forever, that she gave the baby to a relative
to raise, that she'd been sent away — not over —
to America, where she converted shame into silence,
married again, becoming a bigamist, that her husband
and daughter and my brother and I never knew,

          all this speaks to the awkwardness of exposition
and of a concealment so gifted
it's impossible to know the degree
to which it also was tragic — a life denied,
a child left behind. As family secrets go,

                       nothing for the tabloids, no one
beaten senseless, or murdered in bed.
But for me things to walk off, and toward,

           about which two dogs from the house
atop Gravel Hill had something to say.
Protective of what they hardly understood,
they charged, barked — good dogs, really,
their tails giving them away, and I turned,
started back, the secret seeming less and less
mine, part landscape now,
part the words used in its behalf.

     A man in a pickup drove by,
his two raised fingers signaling, what?
That unlikely comrades were possible
in this world? That we share a code?
But he'd come so suspiciously
out of the narrative blue.

     If you meet the Buddha on the road,
kill him, Buddhists say, worried
about anyone bearing indispensable news.

        Lucky for the man that he didn't stop,
I might have had to eliminate him.
Instead, something grandmotherly —
it must have been grandmotherly —
insisted I just let him be a man
making his way home.
Open a door for him, said that something,
now close it so he's safe within.

                I descended the hill,
the dogs still yapping as if certain
they were the cause. Up ahead,
the sudden sun through the trees
had speckled my driveway,
and, at its end, where gravel gives way
to macadam, there was the circle

                   that allows things
to be dropped off at the front door.
It was all shadowy and clear,
and moving toward it I felt
the odd, muted pleasure that comes
when you realize you've only just begun
to know how you feel.

The Georgia Review
University of Georgia

Editor: T. R. Hummer
Associate Editor: Stephen Corey
Assistant Editor: David Ingle
Managing Editor: Annette Hatton
Business Manager: Brenda Keen


Copyright © 2005 by the University of Georgia.
All rights reserved.
Reproduced by Poetry Daily with permission.

---

Poetry Daily / Amazon.com

Selected books available by Stephen Dunn:
Everything Else In the World — Hardcover
The Insistence of Beauty — Paperback

Search Poetry Daily / Amazon.com for other books: