Last night I cleared out about twenty pounds of paper. Most of it was easy--paid bills from 2004, warranty slips for things I don't even own any more, that sort of thing. Some of it was harder. I have a file of magazine clippings that I've been carrying around (and adding to) since, I don't know, 1995 or so. So I went through it, pruned what I could. One of the things I kept--easy choice--is the following poem by Melissa Montimurro from Literal Latte, Volume 7, Number 5, and first prize winner in the Food Verse Contest, and it gets me every time:
Why Onions Give Us Their Tears
Because they are secretly afraid of the dark.
Because they are homely and humble and cannot bear the sadness.
Because they've held all of the hopes of the lily yet will never pose wanly in a vase
but be tamed in a kettle instead.
Because the garden was a long lush dream above them.
Because once for a moment they felt the sun on their maiden heads
and they knew then what the others knew
cabbage and chard and sugar snap
that it was the hot kiss of the galaxy
and they had misspent their entire lives.
Because they would drown in the waters of their own weeping.
This news made me just unfeasibly happy. I first came to Snyder almost exactly twenty years ago, in an early edition of Donald Hall's excellent Contemporary American Poetry. I'd just dropped out of college and was hitchhiking across the country on my way to Alaska, bought a couple of books in a used bookstore in Seattle before jumping on the ferry, and that anthology was one of them.
I already knew a few of the poets inside--Lowell and Bly, maybe Stafford, maybe Ashbery--but most of them were new to me, and they made me crazy with pleasure and desire, the whole crowd: Duncan and Nemerov and Dickey and Levertov and Logan, Ammons and O'Hara, Kinnell and Merwin and Wright and Kennedy. Creeley and Wilbur were crack to me--the feeling that whole countries were there, and that maybe, if I was just a bit smarter, if I really read the shit out of those poems, I'd be given the visas, have earned them. John Haines felt like a brother-in-arms, because, hey, poems about Alaska, exactly where I'm going right this very minute!
And of course Gary Snyder as well. I like what Margaret Soltan has to say about him here: the man knows how to listen to the world, has hearing most of us can barely imagine. Sitting there on the deck of that northbound ferry, skirting Canada, sun on my face but not in my eyes, reading "Milton by Firelight" and "Hay for the Horses," I'd have given Snyder a hundred grand right then and there, if, you know, I'd had a hundred grand, and hadn't been on a ferry. Thank God Ruth Lilly has my back.
