October Notebook

Abstract

October Notebook Daniel Poppick (bio) A folk song about counting.A folk song about imitating a police siren.A folk song containing the lyric, "I only love my bed and my mama, I'm sorry."A folk song containing the lyric, "The only tune that the fiddle would play was 'O, the Wind and the Rain.'" I travel to rural Ohio, where I've been invited to give a poetry reading at my alma mater."How do you write poetry that's true but that also isn't overly personal?" asks an undergraduate after the reading.I don't know how to respond. Were I a painter, I might say that art is an invented canvas full of real bullshit. But I am not a painter. parable of bloodlines After the poetry reading, I ate dinner with R., a beloved former religious studies professor. R. is one of the gentlest men I've ever known, possessed of a gentleness verging on genius–inquisitive [End Page 66] but never hectoring, polite but genuinely so–there exists a spiteful politeness in the Midwest–thoughtful but silly, grave but cheerful, meandering but focused. In the class I took with him in college, called "Meanings of Death," a survey of death and mourning rituals across world religions, one of the assignments was to write a eulogy for someone we loved who was still alive. To this day there is a bit of this assignment in every poem I write, premature nostalgia being something like my calling card.R. is now retired. He has many close friends in town but so far as I know has never married or had children. At dinner he gleefully described his retirement plans–writing a murder mystery set in a seminary, a story based on events that he witnessed as a young man that I would recount for you here if I remembered.Our dinner ended and we said our goodbyes, hugged, wished each other well. The night was open before me in my old stomping grounds where I too might have been inspired to write a murder mystery, if I could only witness one. But at present I am too old to hang out with the students and too young to pass the evening with the professors, who all go to bed early anyway. It was a beautiful fall night, the rest of which passed without incident. I slept poorly.I woke before dawn to catch a shuttle back to the airport in Columbus. A man about R.'s age pulled up in a sedan in the dark and introduced himself as D.I disliked D. immediately. He chatted with me in the car like a genial prison guard, in a tone that made no secret of the fact that he didn't care at all what I said in response. Conversation in this context was a kind of disinfectant spray against intimacy. He was unwilling to hazard the exquisite awkwardness of sitting with a stranger in silence, which I cherish, but also seemed unwilling to talk about anything that actually mattered to either of us. [End Page 67] He asked me what I "did," and when I told him that I was a poet, he asked me what sports I liked. I asked him what he "did," and he told me that he was a retired math teacher. He lived in a nearby community with his wife. I asked him how he had liked teaching at the local high school, and he told me that it "had a good reputation." At this point I was already completely exhausted, counting the seconds until I could get out of the car. The cornfields rolled out in the darkness like an infinite bruise."So what's your poetry about?" he said.At this point I should really have an answer to this question, but I do not. I gave him my stock answer: "Most of it doesn't rhyme." But then I remembered that there was a lot of internal rhyme in my recent work, and added, idiotically, "But recently a lot of it does."D. didn't care, of course–this contentless answer was exactly the kind of adventure...