I am reading a fascinating and also funny essay by a scholar who spent most of her life working on the poet of my book manuscript on hiatus. It recounts the misadventures that work on this poet – who might be a shade, might be a vampire, might be an arsonist or a murderer, or might genuinely be someone just like the expatriate who wrote this year a comment on a YouTube video from his region, así:
“Manuelito, me has hecho llorar mucho, recordando a mi padre, un profesor jubilado, huamanguino, guitarrero, estudioso de Tárrega y por supuesto de música huamanguina, hoy muy feliz vive en Huamanguilla, saludos desde el U.K.”
– as I was saying, the misadventures that work on this poet will create in one’s life. I recognize every contortion and I am laughing. I just knew it would take a long time to write that book. We will read a poem on the order of things:
She sang beyond the genius of the sea.
The water never formed to mind or voice,
Like a body wholly body, fluttering
Its empty sleeves; and yet its mimic motion
Made constant cry, caused constantly a cry,
That was not ours although we understood,
Inhuman, of the veritable ocean.
The sea was not a mask. No more was she.
The song and water were not medleyed sound
Even if what she sang was what she heard,
Since what she sang was uttered word by word.
It may be that in all her phrases stirred
The grinding water and the gasping wind;
But it was she and not the sea we heard.
For she was the maker of the song she sang.
The ever-hooded, tragic-gestured sea
Was merely a place by which she walked to sing.
Whose spirit is this? we said, because we knew
It was the spirit that we sought and knew
That we should ask this often as she sang.
If it was only the dark voice of the sea
That rose, or even colored by many waves;
If it was only the outer voice of sky
And cloud, of the sunken coral water-walled,
However clear, it would have been deep air,
The heaving speech of air, a summer sound
Repeated in a summer without end
And sound alone. But it was more than that,
More even than her voice, and ours, among
The meaningless plungings of water and the wind,
Theatrical distances, bronze shadows heaped
On high horizons, mountainous atmospheres
Of sky and sea.
It was her voice that made
The sky acutest at its vanishing.
She measured to the hour its solitude.
She was the single artificer of the world
In which she sang. And when she sang, the sea,
Whatever self it had, became the self
That was her song, for she was the maker. Then we,
As we beheld her striding there alone,
Knew that there never was a world for her
Except the one she sang and, singing, made.
Ramon Fernandez, tell me, if you know,
Why, when the singing ended and we turned
Toward the town, tell why the glassy lights,
The lights in the fishing boats at anchor there,
As the night descended, tilting in the air,
Mastered the night and portioned out the sea,
Fixing emblazoned zones and fiery poles,
Arranging, deepening, enchanting night.
Oh! Blessed rage for order, pale Ramon,
The maker’s rage to order words of the sea,
Words of the fragrant portals, dimly-starred,
And of ourselves and of our origins,
In ghostlier demarcations, keener sounds.
Axé.
coldhearted scientist وداد 
Sometimes I think that only poets understand the world and that to parse their words is to make something totally alien to what they have said. Why can’t we all be poets and forget this other stuff? Okay, someone probably does have to explain. Do you get it now? It is so frustrating.
I am delurking and reading what you have said, especially about scholars and the way ‘higher education’ has been co-opted by big business. Substance and commodity so intertwined now that it is hard, so hard to find emotional truth and intellectual integrity. Give me the poets!
Dear Professor
Halfway through the rise and fall of the rhythm of that poem I felt a familiar angst. I stopped reading and scrolled to the end….”Ah ha!” I knew I recognized the deja vu of my first experience with “That Poet.” Sophomore Creative Writing with Peter Meinke (I loved and adored him until that moment). How could he dare ask me to swallow these verbal pebbles! I had the most unsettling reaction to “That Poet.” Over the years, I have begrudgingly developed somewhat of a, sort of appreciation for his work. But there is still that visceral mindjerk which occurs when I read him which I cannot explain.