#5: Dill

(poem, commentary)

Before getting to this week’s offering, a bit of housekeeping.

1. This Substack thing is taking shape, albeit haphazardly. I’m sticking with the once per week mailing. It feels right. Does it feel right to you? Also, I’ve been thinking about sequence. This started with a new song. Then a poem. Then a revision and a small piece about typewriters. So maybe I should regularize that order: song + commentary, poem + commentary, then a wildcard in position 3. That way everyone (me included) has a better idea of what to expect.

2. Facebook and Twitter. I confess I’m using those two platforms to funnel traffic to this space whenever possible. FB is clunky and doomed. There are other problems as well. Ditto for Twitter, though I find it more agile. But Muskiavelli is insufferable, and should not be encouraged. Yet I remain. I’m hoping this site will be the antidote.

3. Paid vs. free subscriptions. This is still free for all. However many people have pledged various levels of support. Once I decide to go paid (and I will), those pledges will kick in. I’m so grateful - to everyone, whether you’ve pledged or not.

4. Poetry. My idea right now is that this site be my primary outlet. I will not be submitting poems to journals, reviews, etc. Not that there’s any great demand or anything, or that there’s anything wrong with submitting to poetry journals. They do great work. The world would be a much poorer place without them.

5. Music: YouTube, Spotify, Apple. It’s a circus out there. And I have vertigo. A little space like this one seems much more manageable. So what if this becomes the primary source for new RS music? Maybe I’m missing something, but from a tech point of view, I see no impediment. That doesn’t mean I won’t make a limited edition CD, or special digital downloads to be sold first to this group. But otherwise, what if I just abandon the wide game?

So that’s it. Now onto the stuff...

Dill began life in the 2nd person. There was only one pronoun in the poem, and it was you. Problem is, English doesn’t give us a way to distinguish 2nd person plural from singular, and this is not a y’all kinda poem. So keeping them straight was causing problems, and no amount of tinkering would fix it.

Writing happens not when the text starts to talk back (it’s always talking back), but when I listen to what it’s telling me. In this case I wasn’t listening. I was sticking to you, when the poem clearly wanted to go in another direction. All week it sat there on the page, arms crossed, waiting for me to get the message.

Poems have a way of interrogating a writer. In this case: given all the syntactical hoops I’d been jumping through, trying to distinguish you from you, why had it taken me so long to see the possibility of introducing a 1st person narrator? Why was I was so attached the narrative voice remaining in the background, anonymous? I won’t say absent, since the 2nd person always implies a 1st. Some one was speaking to that you. But who? From what vantage point? The poem did not say. Why is that?

The first part of the answer has to do with a general concern that the pronoun “I” (either in a song or poem) will be assumed to be autobiographical (not that it isn’t sometimes, or to some extent). It’s just that it isn’t always a straight line between I and I. But boy do they look alike! And there are times when I don’t want to be in the poem, as if it were possible to sit one out. And that’s also the point. It’s not possible.

I’ve written dozens of songs in the 1st person. Some are persona songs. Others are straightforwardly autobiographical. But poetry is another kind of animal. It seems to demand more of the writing self, or at least a more articulated, critical understanding of how that self exists in relation to the text. I’m not at all comfortable with it yet. I suspect I never will be, which might also be the point.

“I” began as a way to solve a problem of intelligibility, as if it were just a matter of craft. But it had an unsettling effect. The appearance of a 1st person narrator meant, curiously, that a bit of control had been wrested away from me. It felt like I no longer knew what “I” was going to say.

As it turns out, I said pretty much what I was going to say, only less confusedly (which, alas, cannot be said for this commentary). The only surprise was the process of coming full circle on the last sentence. Originally it read The dill will be yours again. With the change of narrative voice it became The dill will be mine again. Hard pass on that singular possessive, so mine became plural: the dill will be ours again. A day went by while I thought about who we might be.

---

Window Box


We handled it well, 
startling each other so: 
the one stepping back into the room,
the other jumping across 
to wait anxiously in the rosewood.

After clipping the sprigs,
quickly, and well away from the eggs,
I shut the window. You returned
to brood another week, 
then raise the pair to flying,
while I followed 
through downward slats
so as not to scare them
into an untimely leap.

Now I catch myself 
almost planting my palms 
in guano. Later I will scrape 
and rinse the sill. The soil 
will be richer for it. The dill 
will be yours again.