So, you think I can come up with a coherent Wobbly every two weeks, along with everything else I’m doing? Today on Wobbly I offer you my ramblings about nothing in particular. Sometimes that’s all I have—
Who will defend the country against itself? That’s what I started with today, but then I realized I don’t have any answers, and it all feels forced, so I abandoned that.
I must be thinking poet-things. Or, as a friend said, “Poet as Babe.” [Photo by Beth Trepper]
Something about today’s poets vs. yesterday’s: Look at the book jackets! Today’s poets are posed like models, or like people trying to look like appearance doesn’t matter, messy hair in the eyes. I don’t know how to look when you’re trying not to look like a poet, or trying to look like you don’t care how you look, or if you’re trying to show you can be both gorgeous and also a poet. When I was chosen Delaware’s poet laureate, suddenly I was a “poet,” standing on my deck posing looking out for the photographer across the trees supposedly thinking poet-things. When people say you’re a poet, isn’t that what they mean? Thinking poet-things, and you best be left to whatever it is poet-things are.
In those days there was no webpage, no Facebook, Bluesky, Instagram, LinkedIn, Tiktok, Snapchat. Barely any computer. You had to be a poet on your own. Not to imagine it was any better. No matter how many Zoom workshops, you’re still on your own, the words have to make something of themselves. You don’t know what you mean until you write it. You have a haunting fear you don’t mean anything, so you strain against the words to see if they know better. It is no picnic, this. If you’ve written 20 books, it’s still the same. You are trying to be authentic, but the very trying is messing it up. Authentic means the real you, but the real you has no idea how to write a poem. The real you is willing to be a fake for the sake of the poem. The real you has gotten used to being the clumsy Flexible Flyer the real poem rides downhill on, almost out of control, pulling at the crossbow bar for dear life, getting only a little help from it.
The Flexible Flyer.
I looked this up: kids say almost unanimously that the best sled today is the L.L. Bean tube sled with handles on the side. It goes faster and farther than any other. Sometimes I think today’s poem is so slick it slides like a plastic sled over the top of the snow, unlike the ones with runners that dig in and can get stuck. Getting stuck is not always a bad thing. The route downhill may not be the goal. What is the goal of a poem? I’d say it is the flying, which is fleeting and ecstatic. It is not the beginning and not the end.
The P.S…..
Doctor of the World has arrived! It’s a tiny jewel of a thing compared to my bigger books. That’s why it’s called a chapbook. Don’t be alarmed, dear hearts, but they’re prose poems. They don’t look like what you’re used to, but listen to them. They should ring out to you like a poem.