“After Experience Taught Me ...”

By W. D. Snodgrass 1926–2009

After experience taught me that all the ordinary

Surroundings of social life are futile and vain;

I’m going to show you something very

Ugly: someday, it might save your life.

Seeing that none of the things I feared contain

In themselves anything either good or bad

What if you get caught without a knife;

Nothing—even a loop of piano wire;

Excepting only in the effect they had

Upon my mind, I resolved to inquire

Take the first two fingers of this hand;

Fork them out—kind of a “V for Victory”—

Whether there might be something whose discovery

Would grant me supreme, unending happiness.

And jam them into the eyes of your enemy.

You have to do this hard. Very hard. Then press

No virtue can be thought to have priority

Over this endeavor to preserve one’s being.

Both fingers down around the cheekbone

And setting your foot high into the chest

No man can desire to act rightly, to be blessed,

To live rightly, without simultaneously

You must call up every strength you own

And you can rip off the whole facial mask.

Wishing to be, to act, to live. He must ask

First, in other words, to actually exist.

And you, whiner, who wastes your time

Dawdling over the remorseless earth,

What evil, what unspeakable crime

Have you made your life worth?

Source: Selected Poems 1957-1987 (1987)

Biography

W. D. Snodgrass is often credited with being one of the founding members of the "confessional" school of poetry, even though he dislikes the term confessional and does not regard his work as such. Nevertheless, his Pulitzer Prize-winning first collection, Heart's Needle, has had a tremendous impact on that particular facet of contemporary poetry. "Like other confessional poets, Snodgrass is at pains to reveal the repressed, . . .

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