[Main Index of Oscillations] [Next entry: "A Walk Around My Neighborhood"]

05/18/2002 Entry: "A Published Poet"

Dear Weblog,

For some reason this program encourages you keep putting URLs in you entries (like it automatically puts in wherever you were browsing from) so here goes: Fakelangpo.com :: Yes, I was excited about the Butterfly, but first I had to get out of a small town in Pennsylvania Is another site of mine. It is meant to be humorous but it also seeks serious collections of poetry to link to.

Now to my main story (the story of Blanket Man may have to wait a while, some others have interposed themselves and anyway two homeless stories in a row in the beginning would have been a bit much....) This is the story of the Published Poet of Broadway (also known to haunt the Village).

For many years now, I have skirted a folding table which is occasionally seen on the sidewalks of my neighborhood. A sign proclaims, "A Published Poet Sells His Work" and there are poems taped to the table. I never wanted to get too close, because I had the sense -- the correct sense -- that there was a reading fee, and also because I feared contamination. Not of course contamination by vermin -- the Published Poet is clean and well-dressed -- but contamination by failure. This, I feared, was what would happen to me if I failed to make my name in literature and didn't take up a "straight" career. The problem, of course, as readers of Oscillations will some day learn, is that I am incapable of working, not in the characteriological sense like Huck Finn, but medically; the US government even agrees. So obviously I have only one other option, which is to Make it Big. Otherwise, whne I am fifty years old, I will be selling poetry on the street. Oy veh.

This time, in my self-appointed role as neighborhood reporter, I went to look at the poetry. Surprisingly, it was not bad. It was actually good (some of it). I didn't like all the poems, but one or two really hit me. And the identity of the Published Poet began to complexify itself in my mind, as I went up to him and said (after he explained that I could read the poems for a dollar and take one, or buy the book for $3.50 and I agreed. Research costs.) that I write poetry too but my father says it's useless.

"But poetry's the oldest literary form there is, even in writing. I mean, the novel's a young little thing. 16th century. And there were plays before that. And of course the Greeks had their plays in antiquity. But Greek poetry is the oldest written language we have, and it wouldn't have survived so many years and gone through som many cultures if it were useless." The idea that poetry is old and that the Greeks had it is perhaps well-known, but not that many people can name the century when the European novel started, and he was quite right about this and he spoke in an educated voice and I thought maybe I'd misjudged this black man behind a folding table. It would be embarrassing if he were a well known poet I just didn't know.

Then I told him I admired a certain poem, which he said wasn't in his book because it was about a particular woman who had basically failed in life after and early good start (no wonder I liked the poem; that part wasn't explicit in it, but the emptiness it described was an emptiness I knew) and he was afraid she'd be hurt, and he started going on about whether it is better to start out a failure and finally hit your stride in middle age, or the opposite: strat out strong and be felled down by fate.

I wanted an end to this. I told him I'd buy his book. It was the least I could do for planning to write about him in my weblog. So I asked if he had change for $10 and he produced two of the worst-looking crumpled-up, taped together one-dollar bills and then said sorry that was all he had he'd have to go to his apartement for more. He left, and I thought: So this is just the usual type of scam. He's never coming.
back, I thought.

Meanwhile, I looked through the book. It was just a few pages stapled together, with sort of crumpled edgees, not worth three buck but for the story and hoipefully the poems. It did contain two article (one in the New York Times which included some of his poetry) about him as a street figure, neither of which said any more than this one in terms of verifiable facts.

One story said he clung to the old and obscure journals in which he had been published. Well all poetry journals are somewhat obscure, and it's sad if the Published Poet's poetry days were in the past. For this is what I fear. His book has only five poems, plus one he has hand-written. And he has no more old poetry journals with his poems in them. He did tell me he has a poem on the web site www.drunkenboat.com , a highly respected poetry site, but it could be an old poem.

One of his poems, not one I especially like, hints that he may have the kind of difficulties I am familar with though I must be careful not to make assumptions. He says "There are two sides to my head":

...Two parts of me, and the scythe side,vr
seems to win too much of the time. Negative,br>
thoughts bouncing, stalking flower. What am I to do?

Am I to sit down and let my field go dry,

Or am I to fight? What do I need to save me?

A Doctor? A God? Me? The fight, this stalking

Alarms me? Scares? So What will I do?

You can see where the writinng gets loose at the end and it gets even looser as he chooses God. But the sentiment (and I hate to use that word, it's so damning and I don't mean it that way) is so accurate.

The Prublished Poet did come back, with some distincltly cleaner looking money, and a complicated story about how he lived here even though his address is in the Brionx because he's using the address of his brother's shoe store and also the articles say he has a Bronx address. He also said he used to be at Columbia but left a long time ago. If he meant as a student, it's certainly plausible, but he said it as if to mean more, and that I doubt--- or at least I hope it's not true. After all, he was talking about what it's like to fall from glory in middle age a few minutes earlier with me. He apologized for wasting my time while getting the money, and I said, trying to draw him out if there was anything to draw out, "Oh that's ok, I have all the time in the world, I'm on disability."

But then another woman came up and said she wanted to write poetry but she lost it when she faced the page even though she had it in her head before that, and she apologized a million times for interrupting my conversation even though it was kind of over and I suggested the woman use a tape which was a real suggestion but she seemed to think I dissed her, as if I thought she couldn't write. I am sure it had something to do with my whiteness. I thought I would just mnake it worse by sayting I had taught creative writing and that this was a real technique so after trying once to set things straight I left.

As I write this it occors to me that maybe she really wanted to consult the Published Poet, either because she saw him as a real authority or to make a pass at him, and littlke miss white girl in between couldn't have helped. I still don't understand race relations, except that sometimes they matter and sometimes they don't and they mattered to this lady but not to the Published Poet..

The Published Poet waved me goodbye and said he hoped that whatever my disability was wasn't bothering me too much and that I'd be ok with it.

I'll end with a quote from my favorite of the poems:

He then lifted his blue wings

and gently returned to the gray.

I combed my hair

I brushed my teeth

I dressed

I then had my morning lemon

and went off to work

And when the gray had

gone to yellow and from

yellow, to a soft, mellow

brown, I gathered my

things and rushed home

I wanted to see if he had

come again with the evening time

Why?

I could not really say

Perhaps this is what

loneliness can come to

--Donald Green