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What is Wild and Unpredictable

Writer's picture: Melanie SennMelanie Senn

This morning, like most mornings since I turned 50 nearly four years ago, I made coffee and stretched and wrote and read a little. Never drawn to poetry much as a youth, I try to read a poem a day now, and doing so since I started this routine at 50, I have read hundreds, and I do it not because I think it is good for me but because it is often surprising, moving and inspiring. A couple weeks ago, I started an anthology, The Voice That is Great Within Us: American Poetry of the Twentieth Century.

 

 

It begins with several poems by Robert Frost, who lived 1875 – 1963, and who was born in San Francisco but who moved at age 10 after his father died to New England. He eventually became the region’s—indeed one of America’s—most renowned poets. He was not an overnight success and had various jobs (school teacher, newspaperman) until he went to England in 1912 and met Ezra Pound, the  person I consider most responsible for the success of T.S. Eliot, especially "The Waste Land.” I reviewed those edits as a graduate student 23 years ago and thought, My God, we wouldn’t have "The Waste Land" were it not for Pound. (I just discovered that Lithub has images of the original Waste Land poem with Pound’s edits if you're interested.) As it turned out, we might not have had Frost either without the support and backing of Ezra Pound, controversial though he is.

 

Would it matter for us to have not have Frost? Without Frost’s short poem “Nothing Gold Can Stay,” would the book and thus movie The Outsiders have had the impact they had? I read that Frost poem earlier this week, and then in this last Sunday’s New York Times Book Review the “By the Author” interview featured S.E. Hinton. She talked about finding the poem randomly in her high school English class: “I was wandering around my creative writing classroom when I came across the poem in a magazine. I thought it fit in the novel I was writing, went home and wrote it in.” The sources you need might be at your fingertips. She wrote The Outsiders in a high school class while she was supposed to be doing classwork, starting at 15 and publishing it at 17. Oh, what I could write if I allowed myself to be that rebellious?!

 

More serendipity: So far all the Frost poems I’d read thus far were set in New England. Then this morning, there was a poem titled “Once by the Pacific.” I had woken at 5:45 a.m., made coffee and was stretching when I read the poem. A few lines that struck me:

            Great waves looked over others coming in,

            And thought of doing something to the shore

            That water never did to land before.”

 

And then

           

            It looked as if a night of dark intent

            Was coming, and not only a night, an age.

            Someone had better be prepared for rage.

            There would be more than ocean-water broken

            Before God’s last Put out the Light was spoken.       

 

That felt ominous. We arrived at the beach and looked out. Strong off-shore winds, not my favorite conditions. Hemming and hawing and then paddling out. Within minutes, this:

 



When it happened, paddling into a wave and then losing control of my board and going over the falls, I thought the thing ocean-broken was my nose. I put my hand up to my nose and saw blood. I took a wave in. Later I thought, If you are going to love what is wild and unpredictable, you’re in for both the serendipitous joy and pain. My only sadness was that this happened at the beginning of a session and not the end. This afternoon, I ran into a good friend, and when I told her the story and showed her the photo, she said, Good. You are doing Tough Girl stuff.


Amen. She knows who I am and what I need.



 



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