All water has a perfect memory and is forever trying to get back to where it was. Writers are like that: remembering where we were, what valley we ran through, what the banks were like, the light that was there and the route back to our original place. It is emotional memory—what the nerves and the skinr emember as well as how it appeared.                  

—Toni Morrison, “The Site of Memory”

Where critical theory is concerned, the only impulse to rival our collective inclination to categorize works of literature—and just about everything else—would seem to be the counter-impulse to insist that a work defies categorization. We want to believe that the world can be ordered and organized and, at the same time, that we ourselves are unique. Both perspectives seem to me equally valid and fatuous, but beyond acknowledging that, I’m disinclined to dignify deconstruction by devoting more time and attention to that process than to the works under consideration themselves.
        That said, though more often applied to philosophers than to poets, the term existentialist describes a preoccupation with the human condition—our experiences and responsibilities; the meaning and purpose of our lives—which seems as apt a label as any to attach to my work and to that of my primary influences, including poets and philosophers alike. Søren Kierkegaard, widely regarded as existentialism’s founding father, was instrumental in promulgating the notion that it falls to the individual to overcome despair and live with passion and purpose in spite of the innumerable psychological, spiritual, and practical challenges presented to them, including the unknowability of God.
        Existentialists distinguish themselves from more academic, analytical philosophers by dwelling in the realm of the concrete, material world, as does the poetry sprung from this tradition. By this means, if by a considerable mental stretch, existentialism can be linked to pragmatism, one of whose own proponents, William James, represents another looming figure in the development of my intellectual sensibilities. Pragmatism hinges on the linking of theory and practice, much as existentialism does the linking of metaphysical and lived experience. For the poet, one’s theories—both philosophical and aesthetic—are put into practice on the page.
        Like many of an introspective temperament, Kierkegaard was a devout keeper of journals, and though I myself have not maintained the practice in recent years, the journals of others have long been of much interest to me as evidence of the self-interrogation which marks the existentialist and, in many cases, the poet. It was in Kierkegaard’s journal that he wrote, in 1835, at the age of 23, “What I really need is to get clear about what I must do, not what I must know, except insofar as knowledge must precede every act. What matters is to find a purpose, to see what it really is that God wills that I shall do; the crucial thing is to find a truth which is truth for me, to find the idea for which I am willing to live and die.”
        I was 16 when I first encountered May Sarton’s Journal of a Solitude, viewed as a ground-breaking achievement in its depiction of one woman’s search for meaning in solitude, relationship, and the creative life. It was around this time that I determined that love and art were the concepts and, importantly, the practices, for which I might be “willing to live and die.” It would be another five years before I would read the lectures of William James that became The Varieties of Religious Experience, but even then I shared James’s sense that the only beliefs of import are those that prove useful to the believer. “A mute conscience is a false conscience,” as Elie Wiesel put it in From the Kingdom of Memory.

         These dual motives—to identify a purpose and to live in the world accordingly—have been the driving force behind most everything I have written, most all of the writing I admire, and most everything I aspire to write, though within this context the work has taken many forms, including prose and poetry, lyrics and narratives, the sacred and the profane.   
        In his essay “Finishes: On Ambition and Survival,” from the collection Ambition and Survival: Becoming a Poet, Wiman contends that “the way a poet thinks about the relation of poetry to his life will have a great deal to do with the kind of poetry he writes.” For existentialists—those seeking insight into the human condition—the creation and intake of art and literature become a means to that end, much as might the study of biology or religion for the scientist or theologian. And “though no one poem ever brings that longed-for “‘cascade of light,’” (as Wiman cites Seamus Heaney as having described epiphany in his poem “North,”) “there is a promise of revelation in the life devoted to practicing the art.” And, I would extrapolate, a comparable promise associated with a life devoted to reading.
        Of course, I have rarely been overtly conscious of the prevalence of existentialist themes in the literature I’ve found most compelling or in the poems I’ve written. More often, I’ve simply responded, viscerally and mystically, to something I was reading or moved to write, and it is only in retrospect and through deliberate examination that existentialism reveals itself as a common denominator. In this regard, it might be considered that I am engaging in a sort of forensic critical contextualization here, in an effort to determine the probable cause of my reaction to, and composition of, certain works after the fact. As the poet W. S. Di Piero is quoted in the Fall 2011 Copper Canyon Reader as having said, “I discovered something that I should have known: when you’re writing poems, you’re not aware, quite, of the kind of poet you’re becoming until after you’ve become it.”

         Over the past twenty years, I have encountered numerous works of art and literature that have moved me in one way or another, for one reason or another. I have also encountered a number of works that I recognize as significant in canonical terms but that have not had such a powerful effect. True love—of a work of art or literature or of another person, for that matter—is like memory in that it is equipped with an exceedingly complex criteria and filter all its own. We do not choose what we love any more than we choose what we remember. We can make an effort, of course, but, ultimately, certain works and words will resonate and haunt and comfort us just as certain people will, and others no less “important” or objectively accomplished—and sometimes considerably more so—will not, just as certain historical events will not make so grave an impression on our hearts and minds and psyches as other, lesser moments and more personal experiences have made. In this respect, literary influences are like a family: they are neither chosen nor earned, but they are ours, for better or worse.
        When I draw up an impromptu list of the dozen poets that have been most significant to me it includes Richard Hugo and his “Port Townsend, 1974,” William Butler Yeats and his “The Song of Wandering Aengus,” Jim Harrison’s “Letters to Yesenin” (especially the third and the twenty-first), Louise Glück and her “Retreating Wind,” Rainer Maria Rilke and his “Archaic Torso of Apollo,” Matthew Arnold’s “Dover Beach,” Li-Young Lee’s “From Blossoms,” Jack Gilbert’s “Failing and Flying,” Jane Kenyon’s “Otherwise,” W. H. Auden’s “September 1, 1939,” Mary Oliver’s “Wild Geese,” and “The Journey,” and W. S. Merwin and his “For the Anniversary of My Death,” and “The River of Bees.” A comparable list of prose writers would include Sarton and James, Proust, Montaigne’s “On Some Verses of Virgil,” and Lawrence Durrell’s Justine.
        The most systematic way to go about discussing the critical context of my work would seem to be to discuss these influences chronologically, according to the order in which I encountered them.

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Some Poems I Have Loved

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And what can I do with heroes, my brain fixed on so few of them?
--Jim Harrison, “Letters to Yesenin”

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         Like many girls, I developed, at a certain age, a deep sympathy for my father, who seemed to turn from the sternest and most absent of parents to the most present and devoted around the time I was 12. He had recently been diagnosed with non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma as a result of exposure to Agent Orange in Vietnam, and, after nearly twenty years of an exceedingly difficult marriage, my mother had moved out. So intense was my tenderness toward my father at that time, that I began to identify with other middle-aged men who had had what seemed to me similarly challenging lives, especially the poets Richard Hugo and Jim Harrison. Of course, this was not hindered by the fact that the majority of my first writing teachers, mentors, and idols also fit this description and were proponents of such work. At Interlochen Arts Academy, the boarding school in northern Michigan in whose creative writing program I was enrolled, there were whole courses devoted to the work of Jim Harrison and the world-weary Midwestern ethos I took as my own.
        The first individual poem to seize my attention in this way was Richard Hugo’s “Port Townsend, 1974,” from his collection White Center. It struck me like a proverbial bolt of lightning, leaving me stunned and sobered, inspired and in awe. I quite literally did not know what had hit me. I do not remember being “taught” this poem. Most likely I stumbled upon it while perusing a list of recommended authors or books. Given the virtual impossibility of finding a copy of this particular poem online, it seems “Port Townsend, 1974,” is not one of Hugo’s best known or most highly regarded works, but something about it arrested my attention like no other.
        “On this dishonored, this perverted globe,” begins Hugo, “we go back to the sea and the sea opens for us.” In these first two lines (to say nothing of the title, which invokes the year of my birth and so plays to my hunger for significance), Hugo captures both disillusionment (“dishonored,” “perverted”) —my father’s, my own, and the poet’s—and the prospect of redemption: The sea “spreads a comforting green we knew as children.” It takes us back, prodigals that we are, when our dreams have been defeated and we weep as children, “replaying some initial loss.”
        “Aches of what we wanted to be and reluctantly are,” writes Hugo “slip back placid to the crashing source.”) Depicted here again are both longing (“aches of what we wanted to be”)—the pain of desire—and the resolution afforded by resignation and defeat: “The sea releases our rage,” Hugo continues, but also “makes fun of what we are,” amplifying our worst selves. The pathetic human condition is at once validated and put in perspective by the grandeur of the natural world. “We are absurd,” Hugo confirms, and yet “The sky widens / in answer to our claustrophobic prayer,” and “The sea believes us / when we sing.” The sea, like a good father or God himself, sees us for what we are, but benevolently so.
        Having myself been named after a man with whom my father sailed, and my father having always taken solace from the water, Hugo’s use of maritime imagery affected my sympathies still further. To this day, I can picture my father’s misty eyes and far-off gaze each time Little River Band’s “Cool Change” came on our car radio, as we drove down the highways and country roads of northern Michigan in the 1980s. By this means, I began to understand how imagery and emotion could be linked, how “the world is emblematic,” as Emerson put it.

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*      *      *

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         In a poetry workshop the second semester of my sophomore year at Interlochen, we were charged with memorizing a poem each week. I can still l remember bits of Robert Frost’s “Mowing” and Osip Mandelstam’s “Black Earth,” but it is Yeats’s “The Song of Wandering Aengus” that has stayed with me verbatim all these years; its recitation has become my one and only party trick. “Aengus” describes the shared impulse of all restless minds to escape themselves, in this case into the natural world: “I went out to the hazel wood / because a fire was in my head,”—and to make themselves useful by performing some practical task: “and cut and peeled a hazel wand / and hooked a berry to a thread,” only to be transfixed by the beauty of dusk. “And when white moths were on the wing / and moth-like stars were flickering out, / I dropped the berry in a stream / and caught a little silver trout.”

         No sooner has the speaker of the poem been transported, however, than the imagination re-asserts itself: “When I had laid it on the floor / I went to blow the fire aflame, / but something rustled on the floor / and someone called me by my name.”

It had become a glimmering girl

With apple blossom in her hair
Who called me by my name and ran
And faded through the brightening air.

And suddenly we are brought full-circle, returned to the interior world of the mind/heart:

Though I am old with wandering
Through hollow lands and hilly lands
I will find out where she has gone
And kiss her lips and take her hands

Until the two, the physical and the metaphysical, merge:

And walk among long dappled grass
And pick till time and times are done
The silver apples of the moon
The golden apples of the sun.

As with Hugo’s synthesis of imagery and emotion, Yeats demonstrates the relationship between the mental and the material worlds, as well as between craft and content. The lilting cadence of “Aengus” makes it a song indeed, and its rhyme scheme lends both musicality and credibility to the lyric. Because the rhyming words “match,” we are assured that they are not arbitrary, and in fact deliberate and exact. In this way, I began to understand poetry’s capacity to both capture meaning, and to create meaning where previously there may have been none.

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*      *      *

         My father’s mother killed herself when he was 30 and I was 3, and so the specter of suicide has loomed in our lives for as long as I can remember. I first encountered Jim Harrison’s “Letters to Yesenin,” a series of poems addressed to the Russian poet who hanged himself, years before my father’s younger brother, with whom I had grown up, shot himself in the head my first year away at college; but even then I was compelled to read these “Letters” aloud to my father, in a corner of my high school cafeteria, when he came to visit me there. Because the poems directly address an individual, they seemed to demand that I, too, read them aloud, share them with someone else. In this way, Harrison’s “Letters” were among my first experiences of poems as an aural medium, and as a form of communication with an understanding-other, both of which poetry has remained for me ever since. This reconceptualization has been key: conceiving of poems not only as artfully organized interior monologues, but as cries and calls for commiseration, as occasions for communion with, among others, the dead. In the first of Rilke’s “Duino Elegies” we are asked, “Who, among the choir of angels, would hear me if I cried?” and the answer, it would seem, is we the readers.
        “I wanted to feel exalted so I picked up Dr. Zhivago again,” writes Harrison in the third of these letters, and here we are taught yet another use for the notoriously useless medium that is poetry: as can the natural world, poetry has the potential to move us to exaltation—and, by extension, away from despair. “Beauty takes my courage away this cold autumn evening,” Harrison proclaims, sharing the weariness of his predecessors (Yesenin, but also another venerable poet invoked by Harrison: John Berryman, who jumped to his death from a bridge over a frozen river in Minnesota). The beauty of poetry takes away the courage that would be required of the speaker to kill himself, as does the beauty of his year-old daughter whose “red robe hangs from the doorknob shouting stop.”

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*      *      *

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Rilke’s “Archaic Torso of Apollo” is an ekphrastic work—that is, a poem composed in response to another work of art, in this case a piece of sculpture. Like the natural world, works of art have the ability to draw us out of ourselves, forcing us to focus our attention externally and thereby liberating us from the shackles of self-absorption—momentarily, at least. “Archaic Torso of Apollo” is an exemplary exercise in seeing, in paying attention and observing detail, which seems to me another among poetry’s chief concerns, for it is in describing what we see that we are seen, and come to see ourselves. Writes Rilke of this headless torso “suffused with brilliance from inside”: “here there is no place / that does not see you. You must change your life.”

         James Wright’s poem, “Lying in a Hammock on William Duffy’s Farm in Pine Island, Minnesota,” is, too, an exercise in seeing—and hearing—turned into an existential indictment:

Over my head, I see the bronze butterfly, 
Asleep on the black trunk,
Blowing like a leaf in green shadow.
Down the ravine behind the empty house, 
The cowbells follow one another 
Into the distances of the afternoon.
To my right,
In a field of sunlight between two pines, 
The droppings of last year’s horses 
Blaze up into golden stones.
I lean back, as the evening darkens and comes on.
A chicken hawk floats over, looking for home.
I have wasted my life.

Here, the senses become conduits of insight into our human condition and confirm that it is by no accident that we are given bodies and exist in the physical world. Not only can nature provide an alternative to the interior, emotional, and psychological landscapes, it can also serve as a mirror and offer unending metaphors for the ineffable, what cannot be said and expressed head-on, such as our profound sense of inadequacy and the unfathomability of God.

         Poetry can also give voice to the voiceless, as Louise Glück’s “Retreating Wind” gives voice to none other than God Himself:

When I made you, I loved you.
Now I pity you.

I gave you all you needed:
bed of earth, blanket of blue air—

As I get further away from you
I see you more clearly.
Your souls should have been immense by now,
not what they are,
small talking things—

Through the Creator, Glück articulates the human failure: “Your souls should have been immense by now, / not what they are, / small talking things—” by which invective poetry itself is implicated, poetry being a form of “talk,” and therefore a blasphemy against the great silence, from which we spring and to which we will return.

         As former U.S. Poet Laureate Billy Collins has it (in an interview with Barnes and Noble

Review Editor-in-Chief James Mustich):

the shadow of death falls across the pages of much lyric poetry, in that good lyric poetry exists—if it can be reduced to one single purpose—in order to remind us of our mortality. The abbreviated message of lyric poetry is basically that life is beautiful, but you’re going to die. Nabokov, when he started teaching at Cornell, said he knew only two things: one, life is beautiful, and two, life is sad. The reason life is sad is that it’s going to be over. When asked about the meaning of life, Kafka said that the meaning of life is that it’s going to end . . . the common perspective of looking at life through this lens of mortality. The message of carpe diem is urgent, but it’s also a poetic convention.
(http://bnreview.barnesandnoble.com/t5/Interview/Billy-Collins-Ballistics/ba-p/758)

This “lens of mortality” would seem the primary common denominator amongst the poems that have moved me since entering adulthood. Li-Young Lee, in his “From Blossoms,” celebrates beauty and the sensual pleasures of this life, all the while intimating that they are fleeting:

There are days we live
as if death were nowhere
in the background; from joy
to joy to joy, from wing to wing,
from blossom to blossom to
impossible blossom, to sweet impossible blossom.

         And Jane Kenyon, in her “Otherwise,” too, honors the every-day, which will not always be: “I got out of bed on two strong legs,” she writes, “It might have been otherwise.” And at the end of the day: “I slept in a bed / in a room with paintings / on the walls, and / planned another day / just like this day. / But one day, I know, / it will be otherwise.”

         In acknowledging the reality of death, we are faced with the imperative found in W. H. Auden’s “September 1, 1939,” composed at the outset of World War II. That is: “We must love one another or die,”—famously revised, in later years, to read “We must love one another and die.” But while death is an inevitability, love (as an act as opposed to an emotion), is a choice, a responsibility.
        It was with this in mind that, when I married at the age of 21, our wedding bands were engraved with the letters “L.U.B.T.” taken from first line of the last stanza of another wartime poem, Matthew Arnold’s “Dover Beach”:

Ah, love, let us be true
To one another! for the world, which seems
To lie before us like a land of dreams,
So various, so beautiful, so new,
Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,
Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;
And we are here as on a darkling plain
Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,
Where ignorant armies clash by night.

In the face of death, love is the only consolation. And, as Jim Harrison has it in the twenty-first of his “Letters To Yesenin,” “We don’t get back the days we don’t caress, don’t make love.” By this means, love and death become twin gods on whose altar all poems are offered, and in this way poetry has reinforced my religious sensibilities. Having been raised in a largely secular household, I have spent my life in search of an object of devotion, but poetry teaches us that, as with love and death, it is the devotion that lies within our power, not the object.
        W. S. Merwin concludes his poem, “For the Anniversary of My Death,” another reverie on the theme of dying, by “bowing not knowing to what.” Poetry is, likewise, a way of praying “not knowing to what”—like marriage, a spiritual discipline that often exceeds the abilities of our feeble human hearts.
        That being said, “Everyone forgets that Icarus also flew,” holds forth Jack Gilbert in his requiem for a marriage, “Failing and Flying”:

It’s the same when love comes to an end,
or the marriage fails and people say
they knew it was a mistake, that everybody
said it would never work. That she was
old enough to know better.

“But anything / worth doing is worth doing badly.” According to this school of poetics—Jack Gilbert’s and mine— we must persist, even in full knowledge of our limitations—persist in love, and in art, and in prayer—for life is to be experienced as a process: “How can they say / the marriage failed?” asks Gilbert, and in turn, responds: “I believe Icarus was not failing as he fell, / but just coming to the end of his triumph.”
        Or, as Merwin concludes his “The River of Bees”: “We were not born to survive, / Only to live.” A sentiment shared by Mary Oliver, who begins her poem, “Wild Geese,” by insisting, “You do not have to be good.” And continues, “You only have to let the soft animal of your body / love what it loves.”

Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting-
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.

         And so it seems I have found my place in the family of things—or in the family of poets, at least. But it is not a fixed place. Rather, it is a place in the procession, in the long line of existentialist poets on a pilgrimage, “The Journey,” as another of Mary Oliver’s poems is called:

One day you finally knew
what you had to do, and began,
though the voices around you
kept shouting
their bad advice—

—a journey we continue because we hear another voice:

which you slowly
recognized as your own,
that kept you company
as you strode deeper and deeper
into the world,
determined to do
the only thing you could do—
determined to save
the only life you could save.

         Whether still and small or loud and resounding, the voice of poetry—my own and others’—is a reason, for me, for being, a means not to end.