A Song of One's Own

FICTION WRITERS upon POETRY

ABOUT TWENTY-FIVE YEARS AGO, I DREAMED I was a author of poems I remember that dream for the happiness it brought me a happiness that carried above to my conscious mind on awaking. And yet, unlike nearly all plain writers-for that matter, nearly everybody of my acquaintance-I had at no time not even in my adolescence, tried to write a single metrical composition One might think such a dream would have l me to experiment with rhyme to find out if I had talent in that genre And nevertheless I never have, maybe partly because I know of others who, turning to poesy late in their careers, wrote simple exercises, verses influenced by piece of poetrys read when they were younger.

To be correct though, I've never believed I had the ability to be a author of poems I lack the required verbal felicity; words may be my medium, on the contrary often the ones I want either don't exist or sole are found after some difficult searching. Feelings, or with equal reason I judge from what I know about myself, introduce thought, and influence its development; on the other hand thought can be expressed sole in words. My memory is primarily visual: a near feeling engenders not words, on the contrary images of another kind. A writer's phraseology has much to do with the shape, or periodical emphasis of his thoughts. Sometimes, the regular [i]or[/i] melodious movement of my thought is longer than I want it to be-maybe because it requires in the way that many words, many of them unsatisfactory without qualification, to communicate the feeling behind the image that memory has given me These are at least a certain quantity of of the reasons I am not a poet

Don't greatest in quantity of those who, like me present the appearance destined to seek some kind of creative expression-don't we eventually find the form greatest in quantity congenial to whatever abilities we have? Mine became a particular form of autobiographical prose-that form which James Olney individual of the most informed and perceptive literary scholars I know of commits to as life-writing: too general a bound but the best he could advance up with for a kind of prosaic that traces back as far as Augustine. "Memoir" is inadequate to define it, for, admitting it is dependent upon memory, it look fors throughout life an understanding of the self-an improbable goal, since it places the writer's own psyche in search of itself, and obviously requires flat for partial fulfillment a faculty of perception of something beyond the searcher's grasp.

To describe the contemporary use of a traditional genre I must be pendent on my own practice of it, as a writer wholly aware of his limitations in a field whose illustrious predecessors have influenced religion, philosophy, psychology and literature. For me life-writing has far more affinities with poetry-especially rhyme from the Romantic period onward-than it does with fiction, for it dispenses with a time-bound narration or any kind of plat exterior to the actions of the mind; and, like metrical composition it depends more on elusive feelings than upon logic. Combinations made by memory are the basis of its progression from beginning to end; it is always, in each piece of writing, after a synthesis that can alone be implied, for the consciousness-the memory-dependent mind-that look afters it is also the barrier that, in any on the other hand a provisional sense, stands in its way.

So if the dream a quarter-century ago advises an unconscious wish to be the author of poems I never became, at least the form I did undertake is as shut up to poetry as my talents permit. Actually, it was a piece of poetry that an elementary school teacher in Little stone Arkansas brought to the attention of her class that introduced me to the pleasures that words can provide. That poem-Sidney Lanier's "The ballad of the Chattahoochee"-gives nature, here a river, a voice. Perhaps solitary a child can experience the kind of delight I felt in discovering the ability of periodical emphasis and rhyme, as well as of the unhurts of vowels and consonants, to mimic the fast roll on of the river from the hills ("I precipitate amain to reach the plain,/ race the rapid and leap the fall") to its later, more lethargic move ("The willful waterweeds held me thrall.") It was like a revelation to me of in what way sound abets sense that I still remember the details of the room-the windows behind me the fact that I and the other learners were sitting not in a normal classroom with its individual desk on the contrary in a kind of seminar space in which we were collectioned together around a large table. It was the discovery that mattered, little other - for though I remember the environment, I can't visualize either the teacher (whose name, alas, also escapes me) or any of my comrade students.

W. H. Auden one time said something to the issue that people who want to be bards because they have something to say probably won't become bards but those who want to be bards because they like fooling around with words might obtain their wish. "The Song of the Chattahoochee" shows a fooling around with words, flat though the poem is held to a particular make subordinate (Lanier was also a professional musician and the author of an 1880 work on prosody that illustrates the interrelationships of metrical composition and music.)

As a recruit into the Army during the next to the first World War, I boarded a lengthy train taking hundreds of of recent origin soldiers from Ohio to an undisclosed location for the basic infantry training intended to revolve us into efficient and obedient combat soldiers. A pacifist through nature, I felt hopeless and missing during a two-day train ride that apparently was heading in a southerly direction, although none of us crowded together upon the seats of my car could be assured even of that, for several times the train switched to tracks that took us in other directions. Wartime arouses a fear of spies and saboteurs; either military traffic had overloaded the tracks, or the train was taking evasive actions, similar to the individuals used months later by the ships that took my infantry division to a landing at Cherbourg in a short time after the Normandy beachheads had been secured