I don’t want to return Dana Gioia’s Can Poetry Matter? even though I’ve renewed it six times and the library says I have to give it back. Six times is the limit, I get it, but the essays were dense and also I was reading approximately 36 other books at the same time. Mostly I don’t want to return these Essays on Poetry and American Culture because they are a source of radiating pride sitting on my desk, as if I am my own MFA. I am a program designed to make me into the writer I want to be, but for free and through the public library, isn’t that beautiful symbiosis?
I would like the challenge of an MFA without the costs or the presumptions or the panels of well educated men judging my work based on its publishable merit. I want to write better and be made to write better so for now I am making myself do the best I can, which means eventually returning Can Poetry Matter? because they don’t award real or imaginary MFAs to the kind of people who steal books from the public library – or do they, perhaps those are exactly the kind of people who should be awarded – “I needed this slim out-of-print Robinson Jeffers so badly that I pocketed it and paid the library” – as if I lost it, as if in the grand chaos of our pandemic household it slipped below the surface behind the padded headboard.
Because I alone will treasure this tiny book of exquisite words; I alone have walked through the Pennsylvania woods and on the Florida key boardwalks mumbling aloud from poems, Jeffers’ words about hawks and the bloody wars he can predict but not understand. I too have birds of prey and my generation’s inexplicably bloody wars.
Who will summon this book next – and who last called it into existence – for don’t books languish on the shelf until they are shaken awake like jinn, manhandled, woman handled, dragged out of doors, tucked into the waistband of an ill fitting pair of jeans whilst on a hike with toddlers, to fulfill their very purpose? Once, book covers left a record of possession, a small grid stamped and slipped into a paper pocket. I did once steal that paper record card from a Dorothy Sayers’ novel, a small act of larceny that makes me feel connected to the past, as though if I rubbed the card she would appear for tea and a brisk chat. These days, these impossibly modern days, a book’s memory is stored in the cloud, but this is not the same cloud my head is in when my nose is in a book. Since I have no poetry degree I will gleefully mash together my metaphors.
If a book sits in a forest with no one to read it, can poems really matter?
Yet the biggest question of all, beyond the merits of an advanced degree in poetry, beyond Robinson Jeffers and the red tailed hawk and why there are hardly any women writers profiled in Can Poetry Matter? – and I believe everyone is white, I’m sorry to say – the question rising up above the hemlocks and beyond the sea cliffs, the one question that will never be addressed in all the Essays on Poetry and American culture before or since: can I matter?