FOR YEARS I WORKED on a manuscript of poems called That Honorary Coxswain of the Heart. I either couldn’t let it be or it wouldn’t let me go. When I started work on it, I wrote in a purple notebook consisting of 150 9.5” x 6” college-ruled sheets, a notebook that also contained addresses, phone numbers, lists of words to look up, course schedules, names of hotels in Seville, Granada, and Cold-Spring-on-Hudson, as well as meeting minutes, train schedules, film times, love letters, book lists, collaborations, and lines culled from writers I was then reading.
The following, for instance:
“If your nerve deny you – / Go above your nerve” (Emily Dickinson)
“My tongue is a curve in the ear. Vision is lies.” (Basil Bunting)
The earliest use of the notebook was probably sometime in August of 2004, the latest was little more than a year later. In an entry dated 3/14/05 I find the first version of the phrase that would become the book’s title:
By that logic even the most insane of Jesus’ preachers would check the tickers. Trade the trucks for a more modest sense of sponsorship. A larger collar or longer health food store. All media amass at the edges of the communiqués. And so God bless your layers, loser. Your mother senses a whole. Plastic motif of iris, daisy. On so much used-to-be, once-was. By which I designate decorum, déclassé. And for that, I’m sorry—sorry it didn’t, I mean, work out as you’d intended. Some people subsisting, e.g., the honorary coxswain of my heart, a string quartet, you get the picture. Once we grow enough it’s possible, in mind, to know even the most abstruse person is a friend, the opening of some piano piece, or the brief musical phrase as it pokes its head just over conversation. I was the first one here by far and I’ll tell you not to look, to stare, i.e., to ogle. Once, when this book was smaller, it was filled with ludicrous facts; now it’s all pages, leaves in the sense of tickets blowing about the concrete, browned with age; who’s to say we’d rather have the time stand still, rather call the boy. Rather paint the miserable situation some other shade of purgation. No I mean there are so many possible reds & greens & scarves in those colors. We should figure out a team like “hey” and try to catch the wishes.
Today, I find this text almost impenetrable, but if, as Eileen Myles has said, a poem is a way to balance one’s inside with one’s outside, then you can say that the writings in the notebook—culled from conversations in a bright, airy café—were poems. I sorted and sifted as I listened to old and new cadences pushing their way through the rhythms of our speech. The text on the notebook pages, however, does not in the very least resemble the text that, after five years and dozens of drafts, I abandoned. That text became in part the condensation of those conversations, but, once gathered, the language took on a life of its own. It produced associations, invited digressions and divergences. That Honorary Coxswain of the Heart was never—not even in its earliest drafts—simply a transcription. The language was a riddle that invited solutions—solutions, however, I never found.
For now, I can say that the final versions of these poems were likely better than they had been at the beginning and that by the time I turned thirty I never wanted to see a single one of them again. If Coxswain had begun as an act of love or revelry, it ended in a kind of malaise. Entropy enveloped the poems at a rate as astonishing as the one at which I had written them. Two poems split in half to form a third—the discarded halves tossed into the recycling bin—or three into shards to form a fourth. The poem was a hydra. Everywhere I slashed a new fixation emerged. Each line was a problem, and I tinkered the book into oblivion. Thousands of lines of verse became little more than a handful on each page; sometimes a single line or a couplet was all that remained. On one hand, five years of drafting left me with the marrow. The only problem was that the poems were, to my eyes, cruelly, hideously deformed. I simultaneously wanted nothing to do with them and, as I looked at them, thought that if I only rearranged a little more here, pruned a little more there, I would finally have it.
Eventually I realized that there was no end to the poem. My Coxswain seemed destined to call with some regularity, urging me to propel it forward a few more inches. Unless, that is, I was able to come up with some more definitive solution.
Then one day, we were having lunch, as we sometimes do, at a Mexican place not far from home. We spoke mostly in hoots and grunts, and as we were finishing our meals, I heard the woman at the next table ask her husband whether he had heard about the local man who had inherited some hundred thousand dollars from his estranged father, the owner of a small tire shop in the area. At first, she said, the man was elated. He paid off a few debts. He planned a long trip. He put a down payment on a new house. And then the shit hit the fan. Everything you could imagine might go wrong did. His wife became violently ill on the trip. She died not long after they returned. The house he had bought was in a particularly dangerous part of the state for wildfires. It burned down. Finally, one of his father’s associates came under investigation for racketeering, and the son himself was embroiled in a lengthy lawsuit with the IRS. One day it hit him. Everything that had come about had been because of his inheritance. His father had been an unhappy man, a vindictive one, and the son became convinced that his father had put some sort of curse on the money.
He decided to get rid of it. First, he tried donating lump sums to charities, but the charities, because of his legal situation, didn’t want a dime. He offered it to family members, but there, too, and for a variety of reasons, he made little headway. He thought about gambling it all away, but he hated the oily, metallic smell of casinos. After several months, he began disposing of the cash in tiny bundles. Much of it he buried. Some of it he left in public bathrooms, in rest areas. He threw neatly bagged bundles out of his window as he drove down the highway. Two boys found a $5,000 bundle along the side of a creek. A single mother of four found three grand on her lawn one morning when she went to get the paper. Sometimes it seemed he even had a sense of humor about it. A retired man browsing the mysteries in a used bookstore one day found a wad of crisp $100 bills behind a book whose plot revolved around a complicated scheme for extortion. The police only figured out who was responsible when a carefully hidden squad car saw a small bundle fly out of the driver’s side of a silver pickup speeding down a country road late at night.
By then, Elias was getting sick of his high-chair, and we had to leave before the woman finished her story, but, after a long winter, the March sun was warm and we had some time before we needed to get home. We walked around the rather capacious parking lot and eventually wandered our way over to a culvert near a cluster of corporate hotels. This would be the perfect place, I thought. Shaded from the road by a small stand of evergreens, and, though probably visible from the nearest of the hotels, it was distant enough from the parking lots. And anyway what hotel guest would be looking out at a culvert?
The first thing I did when I got home was to print out what remained of That Honorary Coxswain of the Heart. Condensed in such a way that many poems were printed on the same page, it took all of six sheets of paper. But now that I had the poems, how to finish the job? Disposing of them in a single shot—these little nuggets of language that had accounted for a large fraction of my mental life in previous years—seemed a little discourteous. Pert, even.
Renunciation can also be a feast, I thought.
For several days I cast about for a solution until, eventually, I came across a box of old jars in the garage. They were of a uniform size and shape—baby food jars I had kept for some reason. I immediately remembered my grandmother, my mother’s mother: how she prepared her preserves—setting each jar on the table when she was finished with it, until they had grown into quite an orderly collection.
I must, I thought, put my poems in these jars.
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