Intimations of Immortality from The New Yorker Book of Poems (1925-1969)
I once was a girl with an inkling of fame
if a table of contents might feature my name.
I read The New Yorker and savored it all:
Hughes, Nemerov, Simpson, Shapiro, and Hall.
My poetry heroes would guide me along
(I thought) to discern my original song.
How little I knew of the harrowing path
set forth by Kees, Kennedy, Kumin, and Plath.
Rejection? I felt it. But blow after blow
increased my devotion to those in the know,
canonical poets who’d earned their respect:
Reid, Auden and Merrill, Nims, Wilbur, and Hecht.
I waded in deep, though I felt at a loss
to fathom the poems of Merwin and Moss.
By stretching my study might I understand
devices of Sexton and Stafford and Strand?
The detours were many, the editors terse
who savaged the hopes that I had for my verse.
I found better friends in the Formalist lane–
Espaillat and Stallings, White, Gwynn, and Balmain,
who brought me along on their metrical road,
who lifted my spirits and lightened my load.
And I but a gosling behind Mother Goose
loved Parker, McGinley and Larkin and Seuss.
I’ve piled up some poems and published a few,
with nary a Pushcart or New York review.
My lifelong reward is the paths I have crossed
with Dickinson, Shakespeare and Hopkins and Frost.
Now ficklesome fame’s made a cultural shift
to rappers and slams and the lyrics of Swift.
New Yorker ambition? It faded away,
with Thomas and Teasdale and Yeats and Millay.
O Muse, Where Art Thou?
Enticing your Muse to play ball is like calling a cat.
You know she is curled up in hiding, complacent and fat.
The wadded-up pages of poems that litter the floor
Give evidence she has been willing to tease you before.
Yet however plaintive your tone, how persuasive the game,
She will not acknowledge whatever you think is her name,
And keeps to herself in a wily and secretive place.
Don’t worry.
She’ll show up at midnight and sit on your face.