It’s mid-June, and I concede that my New Year’s Resolution to “write more poetry” has been broken. The net result has been two complete poems and about ten pages of scribbled verse and rhyme in my notebook, lost amid bits of prose and diatribe, French vocabulary, interesting facts and quotes, and long repetitive lists of wedding-related tasks.
I read once that most New Years Resolutions are not successful, but the ones that are involve trying to do something (exercise, learn a new skill, volunteer, spend more time with loved ones) rather than trying not to do something (smoking, eating, drinking, engage in jerky behavior). But poem composition is a unique case. I think I would have written more poems had I made a resolution not to write poems.
In the past, a poem will come to me suddenly, divinely, as if it had been stewed in the nether regions of my brain and now wished to emerge like a fully-clad Athena. But the Resolution drove me to scoop out premature dribs and drabs, to force profoundity and squeeze out stanzas to result in appallingly bad poetry. I would sit down with a pen and paper and wrack my brain for nuggets of recondrite wisdom, only to end up clipping my toenails, exfoliating my hands, tweezing my brows, or trimming my split ends. What was it about poetry that makes me want to seek refuge in personal hygiene regimens? Is it that poetry is ultimately the intellect’s vainest pursuit?
So, I’m officially withdrawing my New Year’s Resolution, and I’m taking a lesson from my poetry god Wallace Stevens, the American Modernist who worked most of his life as an insurance executive in Hartford and once wrote that “The Poem must resist intelligence.” When I first read “Disillusionment of Ten O’Clock” in college, I thought it was woefully esoteric. What is the importance of the colors? Who does the sailor represent? Is the tiger a metaphor? But Stevens is not a poet who deals with symbolism, but rather he finds imaginative ways to perceive reality. In a very beautiful way, Stevens is saying exactly what he says: In their private lives, most people are normal and boring, but there are exceptions.
“Disillusionment of Ten O’Clock”
The houses are haunted
By white night-gowns.
None are green,
Or purple with green rings,
Or green with yellow rings,
Or yellow with blue rings.
None of them are strange,
With socks of lace
And beaded ceintures.
People are not going
To dream of baboons and periwinkles.
Only, here and there, an old sailor,
Drunk and asleep in his boots,
Catches Tigers
In red weather.
Wallace Stevens
