#293

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After the anticlimactic, pathetically comic personal regression straight back into alcoholism that yesterday’s DS 292 immortalizes, a failure which he emerges powerless to stop, this one—about the book itself—provides an interesting counterpoint because the book encompasses the person and his failings. This book the poet has created is about to be sent out on her own, part of him for not much longer, and containing in her flesh a legacy of all his buffoonery and humiliation, but aloft with it all somehow anyway. But the book is also testament to his hard work, accomplishment, and talent, and probably to a crazed manic drive as well, an uncompromising commitment to make something out of the mess the poet swirled through in his life. It’s a bizarre turn. He’s hardly the first doomed alcoholic to make a literary name for himself. I’m just sort of shaking my head at the whole thing at this point.

What gall had he in him, so to begin book VII

or to design, out of its hotspur materials,

its ultimate structure

whereon critics will browse at large, at Heaven Eleven

finding it was not old cliffhangers or serials

but according to his nature

Lots going on there, including a moment of sneering at critics—who do indeed browse on the work to this day—and the characterization of the material as “hotspur” material. Hotspur is the nobleman, Henry Percy, who rebelled against his former friend, King Henry IV, and was killed at the Battle of Shrewsbury. He was declared a traitor and all his family’s land were forfeit. It’s obvious that The Dream Songs are hotspur material, in open rebellion against literary convention during a historical moment (late 50s and the 60s) where rebellion and a shattering of convention and stale decorum were the modes of the day. The tactic he used walks a line between courageous admission of human frailty on one hand—no friggin’ author-hero here—and shame on the other. Yesterday’s DS 292 is as remarkable an example of poetic shame as I’ve seen in the whole series.

But the book is “sturdy, beautiful, & she will do”, he says with undeniable pride, unless her head gets turned by all the attention she will garner. Well, “her” head won’t get turned since this is all a metaphor anyway, which he seems to be forgetting for the moment. His head gets spun around easily enough, which maybe is what leads him to end the poem with a long anthropomorphism of the book. His head is turned and

hypmotized by the Little Baby, who has ears only for Diana & the Beast,

& mommy, & admirers, & her Mir, instead

of brothers & sisters coming on like swine.

Diana is the Greek goddess of the hunt, but also of childbirth and wilderness, associated always with uncontrollable nature and the wild. The book is thus characterized as this kind of wild, dangerous, haughty, narcissistic toddler-goddess who will one day grow into a woman of genuine power. Any father would be proud of her. But this is a girl the father knows he will have to let go of sooner than he might want to because she’s already showing signs of being faster, stronger, smarter, and more resourceful that he will ever be, with Diana her model and fearsome mentor. The feeling there is a mix of pride in what he’s helped bring into being and a shameful recognition that his own power is ebbing away. Love is normally the corrective to this, but the book is as much beast as goddess and doesn’t love back. Off she goes, wreaking her splendid havoc, the author shaking his head as much as the reader. But “Mir” is peace, too. What she’s wrecking needs to be wrecked in a shamefully dysfunctional world, and we’ll all be better off for it. His buffoonery turns out to have produced a savage legacy, which has been the point of it all along. Such a legacy does not arise out of ease and health. In the end, his satisfaction with his life comes out of a father’s grim exhausted pride in the ravishing, and ravishing, daughter he has set loose on the world that only deserves what she’s about to bring it.