Well into November, after a good two weeks of nighttime frost and freezing, a stubborn holdout of bright impatiens — those most delicate of annuals — remained unblighted in our garden. They were ensconced between two great old spruces, overseen by two stone angels, and overspread the graves of two beloved cats. There was something slightly miraculous about their survival, when far tougher plants lay blighted and dead all around them. The entire surrounding region had moved on toward winter, yet in this one defiant refuge, this pocket of resistance, the older season, the older way of things, persisted.
As in gardens, so in poems. Let them offer refuge to the old sensibilities, sanctuary from the frosts of modernity. Let poems be rooted in rock, archaic bedrock, lodged among ancient trees, watched over by ageless angels. Poems indifferent to vagaries of style and cultural climate. Poems emerging from earth, oriented toward stars, bound in archetype.
Curmudgeonly poems that dig in their heels, resist the tide, and drive all stylistic purists and puritans from their door with a stick. Poems that insist on their own integrity, their own autonomy.
Of my hobbling old poem, The Mermaid, Frederick Pollack wrote: “. . . this one is powerful. You’re looking way back, stylistically – at Hopkins, the Symbolists, Trumbull Stickney. Well, why not? – if it’s done well and can integrate new realities and new emotions? . . . You can use anything you want – abstraction, even cliché – as long as it is somehow recontextualized, revitalized.”
