I just discovered that I have written about the idea of posterity through art already. In a sense, I have not yet finished talking about this topic. Jeffrey McDaniel’s last insightful blog on The Best American Poetry 1919, nicely reminds us of the stark reality about what remains and what is lost in time. I am reminded that there is a tension between the immediate and the idea of posterity that might actually lend itself to good poetry. But before I say more, I have to vent a little bit. I just can’t believe that Patricia Smith called me out like that in her latest blog. I mean, she used my name in the title of her blog! This is very unsettling, and I don’t know what she is playing at…
Okay, that worked. You clicked to continue to see what other wickedness I have to say about Patricia Smith, but I have nothing. Just thought I would steal her little trick.
Now back to the matter at hand.
Many poets have confessed that their indulgence in poetry is merely a way for them to extend their life. The idea is a simple one: write poems to last and last, and they will outlive you. If your poems outlive you, then you will, in fact, not die. No one will ever be able to test the logic of this belief, this tenet of faith. Death is necessary for this to happen, and, well, if you are dead what do you care? After all, who says poets, when dead, and experiencing the richness of heaven, will care what people think about them here on earth? They ought to be too busy trying to persuade God to change his mind about the ban on marriage in heaven. There will be more pressing things to deal with in heaven.
Yet, despite the vanity of the idea, the thought of longevity through verse is a stern motivator for many of us. We do want to leave a trace of ourselves in this world. Good books will outlast even the kindest of memories. Just think of some ancestor of yours from a century ago. What do you know about her? I mean really know about how she thought, what she felt, the things she saw and the way she reacted to them? Do we even think about her as one who lived a full life, faced each day with new thoughts, cried, laughed, feared, shouted and whispered, made love, cursed? More often than not, we have a picture and a few legends of her ways. But it is easy to see how we can reduce people to an entry on the family tree.
A year ago, while visiting my sisters in Jamaica, I found a diary written by my grandfather. He was my father’s father. He died almost twenty years before I was born. I can’t say I had thought a great deal about his personality. I knew he was a missionary for years, an avid cricketer, and a great teacher. But as I began to read the diary—the diary of an aging elementary school teacher—I discovered the personality of a man deeply preoccupied with the details of his accounts, a meticulous visitor of the ill and the shut-in, an efficient preacher who turned to poetic phrases to capture elusive meaning, a father who kept a record of every illness of his children, a husband who employed passive aggression to tame his wife. I wish he had written poetry, though. Then I could meet him in the way that I met my father long after he was dead. Indeed, my father left me with poems that I have since found to be even more effective about telling me something of his deeper self than even his letters. His poems prompted the conversations that we did not have—conversations about art, about what a poetic line should do, about why the image of a boy sprinting through trees and howling is a moment of sublime revelation.
Of course, poets want more than a family’s memory. Poets want to last as long as Chaucer, Shakespeare, Cervantes and Homer have lasted. Such vanity. So some poets write with the hope that future generations will see their greatness and praise them. It is pure futility and perhaps exactly the thing that will generate quite terrible poetry. The true irony the best poets stay with us because of their commitment to the moment—their timeliness—not so much their timelessness. It is those works that are so grounded in their present reality, and seem nonchalant about posterity, that somehow manage to last.
There is, though a tension in me. I want to write poems of pure immediacy, poems for my time, poems that contend only with the present. And yet I know that poems will be seen by others when I am gone and can’t explain away or cover up the untidy parts. The tension must be a healthy one, but ultimately, I would be a fool to try and write for the ages. The pleasures of verse are immediate. I must relish them now. If others will enjoy them later on, then I give thanks. Otherwise, I must write in the moment like my father did long before I was born, or like my grandfather did in his diary before I was thought of.
