Poet Retires

What were all those poems actually about? As plainly as possible, here's what I got.

I’ve retired as a poet. This is something I mentioned here and there. But I wanted to be direct and talk about it.

To retire from poetry may seem extremely frivolous, even to me. I’m a middle-aged father of young children with never enough money. These days my every move would appear to be dictated by some easily identifiable necessity.

To publicly announce this retirement may seem even a step more frivolous. There’s no employer to tell, and very little audience waiting on new work.

So why bother?

In my adult life, I’ve made an Irish exit from a great many subpar situations. I’ve come to count the quiet departure as a sign of maturity and wisdom. But it’s also a withdrawal of care. And I’m starting to discover within that supposed maturity an indifference gnawing at the parts of my life that I do care about.

So I’ll retire the other way when it comes to poetry - out loud, and at some length.

Poetry has taken up large portion of my life and some of my best efforts, going back to when I was fifteen years old until I was forty-three. I’ve written and hundreds of poems and published hundreds of them publications around the world, along with a few book-length collections. There’s more to retiring than I first thought.

I’ll explain why I’m retiring in another essay. And I’ll explain how I’m going about this retirement in yet another. This one will take a flying leap at the question:

What was I doing?

What has that all been about? I was trying to create art.

By art I mean a piece of work that can tolerate and reward the reader’s entire scrutiny and possibly exceed the energy and depth of their contemplation. These works, furthermore, deliver new ways for the reader to enter and exit reality.

Overwhelm and apotheosis

A work of serious art - literary or otherwise - succeeds if it can match or overwhelm the contemplation a willing participant can bring to bear.

These masterpieces are often hard to take. More than an hour in the Metropolitan Museum of Art is likely to give you a headache. They don’t play Mozart’s Requiem in Starbucks.

These works have power that outlasts their immediate setting. This is probably why rich people used to sit for days and weeks for a good portrait. Even among rational merchant princes, having Rembrandt paint your ruddy face was a form of apotheosis.

The final work of art

Art at this intensity is a kind of magic. It has power beyond its subject, its patron and finally beyond its creator. To try it is a bold ambition, one that few would maintain and fewer would admit.

But it’s not the boldest ambition. The ambition of an artist can reach beyond making a powerful object or even a magical or semi-divine one. An artist begins to strive toward making a final object, which exceeds all contemplation, encompasses all contradiction, answers all doubts.

The obsessive grandiosity behind trying to make a final object is a kind of mania. It may seem like a rare and recent development, some rarefied concern of a few, high-modernist high rollers like James Joyce or Mark Rothko. It may sound like the marginal fantasy of a guy you never heard of reflecting on the end of a two-decade poetry career on Substack.

But it’s an ancient aspiration, and one that comes with warnings.

Graven images in craven days

The second of the Ten Commandments speaks to the subject.

“Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image, or any likeness of any thing that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth. Thou shalt not bow down thyself to them, nor serve them.”

My nine-year-old daughter couldn’t believe that one cracked the top ten. But there it is.

This commandment, originally carved in stone, has informed incredible geometric art in the Middle East and Spain and the mass beheading of statues in German churches. Explaining the Second Commandment to a fourth grader with magic marker on her fingers is a tough job. Explaining it at all is no picnic. You have to go back before Moses.

Babel

A few years ago I was working on a novel about daily life in the communications department of the Tower of Babel, and I was reading a lot of Midrash and commentary on the Torah. I was trying to get at the exact divine problem with the Tower itself.

Where was the offense? Where was the lesson?