I'll be posting a letter a day for the next 26 days. This comes from The Weather of Words, by Mark Strand.

A Poet's Alphabet

A is for absence. It is sometimes - but not always - nice to think that other people may be talking about you when you are not present, that you are the subject of a conversation you have not steered in your direction and whose evolution depends on your absence. This is what happens to the famous. And to the dead. They can be the life of the party and never show up. For those neither famous nor dead, at the bottom of their yearning to be absent is the hope that they will be missed. Being missed suggests being loved. True, not to be the active or living recipient of what one craves may seem a sorry fate. But it takes no effort. Hang around and you interfere with the love that could be yours; die and you clear a space for yourself.

B is for before, the acknowledged antecedent of now, the innocent shape of earlier, the vague and beautiful cousin of "when," the tragic mother of "will become," the suicide of "too late."

C is for Canada, the country of my birth, of my earliest memories, where my parents lived out their last years, where they are buried. It was the backdrop to their sorrow and was so big, that every day they lived there, they could count on being lost.

D is for Dante, who has not influenced me, which is too bad. On the other hand, I am not sure what the influence of Dante might be, and I would think it quite strange to read somewhere that one of my contemporaries had been influenced by him. How very grand, I would think. But death, being so much more approachable -- either here or just around the bend -- has always been an influence. What I mean to say is that death is common. If you are having a good time and you conceive the possibility that the good time will end, then you are concerned with death, though in a mild and unremarkable way. But what I want to get to is something else: that death is the central concern of lyric poetry. Lyric poetry reminds us that we live in time. It tells us that we are mortal. It celebrates or recognizes moods, ideas, events only as they exist in passing. For what meaning would anything have outside of time? Even when poetry celebrates something joyful, it bears the news that the particular joy is over. It is a long memorial, a valedictory to each discrete moment on earth. But its power is at variance with what it celebrates. For it is not just that we mourn the passage of time but that we are somehow isolated from the weight of time, and when we read poems, during those brief moments of absorption, the thought of death seems painless, even beautiful.

E is for endings, endings to poems, last words designed to release us back into our world with the momentary illusion that no harm has been done. They are various, and inscribe themselves in the ghostly aftermath of any work of art. Much of what we love about poems, regardless of their subject, is that they leave us with a sense of renewal, of more life. Life, on the other hand, prepares us for nothing, and leaves us nowhere to go. It stops.

F is for fashion, literary fashion, which marks the writing of a period or an age, and which is virtually inescapable, as inescapable as its sister Death. Even originality will be only what a period accepts as original, which means that it has been anticipated to a certain extent by what it desires to separate itself from. There is no way around it. And if we believe we are oblivious to a contemporary style, we are only more likely to embody its standards. And if we think to distance ourselves from current fashion by finding another fashion from which to fashion ourselves, chances are it will be the one that current fashion predicted we'd pick.

G is for garden, but which garden I don't know. Maybe the corner of a particular garden; maybe a garden in which there is a chair that waits for someone to sit. It is not an ideal garden, not a garden of Eden, nor a hellish garden like Bomarzo, nor ordered like the Doria Pamphily in Rome, nor disheveled like the Boboli gardens in Florence. it is not a backyard. It must be what I think when I say "garden' to myself: a green space that is contained and that will contain some of the poem's action, or none of it. Maybe there are trees, maybe the leaves have fallen. There could be snow, and some juncos may have gathered around the base of the mountain ash, which grows there. I don't know. It will be a while before I do.

H is for Hades, which I like to think of as an indulgence because of all places it strikes me as the most poetic. A last resort, a high-walled kingdom, it has one major disadvantage - the weather, which is windy, dark, and cold. Its major advantage is the great amount of leisure time it offers. It is straight down, under the world, and is the immortal resting place of souls. More important: it is where the dead wait for a new life, a second chance, where they wait to be remembered, reborn in the minds of the living. It is a hopeful place. And Thantos, or what we think of as the Greek personification of death, is not really a personification, but a mist or veil or cloud that separates the still living person from life. For the Greeks, who had no word for irreversible death, one did not die; one darkened.

I is for immortality, which for some poets is a necessary and believable form of compensation. Presumably miserable in this life, they will be remembered when the rest of us are long forgotten. None of them asks about the quality of that remembrance - what it will be like to crouch in the dim hallways of somebody's mind until the moment of recollection occurs, or to be lifted off suddenly and forever into the pastures of obscurity. Most poets know better than to concern themselves with such things. They know the chances are better than good that their poems will die when they do and never be heard of again, that they'll be replaced by poems sporting a new look in a language more current. They also know that even if individual poems die, though in some cases slowly, poetry will continue: that its subjects, its constant themes, are less liable to change than fashions in language, and that this is where an alternate, less lustrous immortality might be. We all know that a poem can influence other poems, remain alive in them, just as previous poems are alive in it. Could we not say, therefore, that individual poems succeed most by encouraging revisions of themselves and inducing their own erasure? Yes, but is this immortality, or simply a purposeful way of being dead?

J is for the joy of writing. As if there were such a thing! The truth is that writing is joyless, at least for me, for when I think of my happiest moments, not one occurred while i was writing. J is for jasmine, for the sweet torment of being overcome by its scent. I remember how it was when I was young; when twilight would give way to darkness, I would lose myself among the jasmine's yellow stars. And I would drift in a sensuous version of the galaxy, always further and further away. That was joy, that drifting away.

K is for Kafka, and the authority of his peculiar realism. In the first paragraph of "The Metamorphosis," the inexplicable has happened. Gregor Samsa wakens to find himself transformed into a gigantic insect. Our astonishment is immediately tempered by the narrator's calm as he describes the "new" Gregor, for he is much more interested in having us visualize Gregor than in having us feel anything towards him. Over the course of the story, as Gregor disintegrates, our feelings for him increase - somewhat. But in the beginning we know only that Gregor has undergone a bizarre transformation. It is not just that he felt like an insect or that his waking was an illusion and he was still asleep in one of his uneasy dreams. He was in fact an insect. The story's power depends on our acceptance of this singular truth. If Gregor screamed on first seeing his new body, we would immediately cease to believe in him. It would indicate that he knew or felt the extent of his misforture, when actually his misfortune had only just begun. Kafka's methodical, dispassionate description of Gregor, which sets the tone as well as the terms of the story, makes it very hard for the reader to reverse - even if he should want to - the story's outrageous premise. It would be too much work. The facts insist that whatever doubts we have about what happened are bound to be groundless. We are safer, for the moment, if we believe in Gregor's misfortune than if we did not - for if we did not, what would we believe in? There would be no story, and what is almost as bad - no universe that accommodates the unexpected.

If you're interested in reading Kafka's The Metamorphosis, follow this link:

The Metamorphosis

L is for lake. I prefer the ocean and some of the rivers I've seen, but for writing I like the manageable water of lakes. A lake is a more flexible prop. It doesn't demand the respect of the ocean, which compels us to fairly predictable responses; that is, we too easily slip into feelings of awe or peace or whatever. nor does it tease us with hints of the infinite. A lake can be made to fit what the poem's topography demands. Rivers will generally run through a poem, or carry it along, and they tend to resist formal containment, which is why they are so frequently (but mistakenly) likened to life. They also tend to be shallow, a feature which might be equated with life as well, but not with poetry. So, for a salt lake, where water can be still, where reflection is possible, where one can kneel at the edge, look down, and see oneself. It is an old story.

M is for music, which I listen to through earphones when I write prose, but not when I write poetry. What I listen to again and again are the slurred confections of Delius, Wagner, or Tchaikovsky. Their music is nothing that jeopardizes my need or my ability to concentrate. Yet I am stirred by it, seduced into a vague rhythmic certainty. Everything is better; everything rises to an occasion that exceeds even the jammy excess of the music. I write as if on an endless sea of surges and satisfactions.

N is for Neruda, who was a genius but in whose writing beauty and banality are inextricably mixed. His poems are a sort of wishful thinking. To read him is to participate in the verbal correction of what are universally perceived as social or natural inequities. mundane items, modified by adjectives denoting the rare or celestial, are elevated to a realm of exceptional value. A toad is melancholy, wine is intelligent, a lemon is like a cathedral. He is a cosmetician of the ordinary. When we read him, we are happy because everything has attained to a condition of privilege. The universe is good after all. Neruda's verbal utopia, depending on one's gullibility, is a harmless antidote to a harrowing century. His genial reductions have moved people to simple and accommodating attitudes towards poetry who otherwise would have no use for it. N is also for nothing, which in its all-embracing modestry, is the manageable sister of everything. Ah, nothing! About which anything can be said, and is. An absence that knows no bounds. The climax of inaction. It has been perhaps the central influence on my writing. It is the orginal of sleep and the end of life.

O is for Oblivion. I feel as strongly about it as I do about nothing. Forgetfulness, the fullness of forgetting, the possibilities of forgottenness. The freedom of unmindfulness. It is the true beginning of poetry. It is the blank for which the will wills. And O, lest I forget, O is also for Ovid, II Naso, the first of the great exiles, whose book of changes, whose elevation of changing to a central place in the kingdom of the imagination, has made me wish to mention him, even if he has not directly influenced the poems I write. After all, what could I take from his beautiful telling of Echo and Narcissus or Jason and Medea? How could I duplicate the Song of Polyphemus? Maybe if I worked very hard I could produce a stumbling version of his fluency, and maybe a pale likeness of a few of his monstrous particulars, but never the two together. He was an effortless surrealist, a poet of boundless charm. And all it got him from the puritanical Augustus was exile to the shores of the Black Sea, in a place called Tomis.

P is for the passage of time. It is also for the secret passage that leads out of time into the stillness of what has not yet been named into being, the passage that leads to the birthplace of poems. It is for the passage that is the route of my passing, my having been, and for the passage of places into history, and through history into forgottenness.

Q is for the questionable in matters relating to poetry, lines or images for which no precedent comes immediately to mind and whose virtues seem equally elusive. In time, our wayward lines and images may become our greatest successes, the true signs of our authorship. But when we are more established writers. For that is how we make sure that what we have written is indeed poetry. Eventually, we learn to mistrust what is patently derived, and we cultivate what we first perceived as weakness. It is the oddity of our poems, their idiosyncrasy, their lapse into a necessary awkwardness, their ultimate frailty, that charms and satisfies.

R is for Rilke, whose poems I read for inspiration of a peculiar sort, since what I get mainly when I read him is a sense of uplift, some lavish and ornate attempt to locate being, certain moments of ecstatic insight close to the truth, or what I believe to be true. I feel the unutterable has found a place in what has been uttered. I am thinking of Part I of The Spanish Trilogy, and the ninth of The Duino Elegies, and "Orpheus. Eurydice. Hermes," and "Lament," and "Evening."

S is for something that supplies a vacancy, which I might fill. It has a verbal presence that my own immediate appetite or ambition subverts, misreads, or makes into an appealing void, a space only I can elaborate on. I begin with something as if it were nothing (or nothing as if it were something) because, often, what I have chosen as my starting point makes no sense to others, as when, say, I open up my Wallace Stevens and my eye alights upon "shaken sleep" or "pearled" or "later reason." S is also for Stevens. I have always turned to his poems, reading parts of them, skipping on to others, finding them congenial despite my fickleness, my impatience. I admire Stevens and Frost equally among American poets, but I read them differently. Stevens influences me, but I do not think that Frost does. Frost's diction is given over to voice, a continuous sound that tempers verbal color. In a Frost poem, it is its spokenness that counts, that overrides even those periodic passages of vatic emphasis. Words are submerged into clusters of sense, so that some tonal character can assert itself -- an argument, an extended gesture that relies on the order and direction of what is said. In Stevens, argument tends to be discontinuous, hidden, mysterious, or simply not there. More often, what we experience is the power of the word or the phrase to enchant. The rhetorical design of his poems points to explanation or annunciation. But there is no urgency that constructs "nextness" -- what comes next is a possibility, a choice, another invitation to imagine.

T s for tedium, and by tedium I do not mean the heartsickness of Leopardi's noia, or the deadening emptiness of Baudelaire's ennui. I do not mean those encounters with the void that leave the sufferer in despair or, as we are more likely to say, in a deep depression. by tedium I mean no more than the household variety of boredom, the sweet monotony of daily life. My tedium is a luxury. In its arms, I am passive. I sit around and peruse a book, or check the fridge, or do a puzzle. Pretty soon my laziness palls. I try to extricate myself. I drink some coffee. This gets me working. and I say to myself that it couldn't be done without tedium, most benign of pressures.

U is for Utah, the western surround of my indispensable tedium and, in many ways, its inspiration. Utah is everything that my life before moving there was not. It is slow, which gives my tedium its requisite lack of energy. Charles Wright says somewhere, "There's so little to say, and so much time in which to say it." Well, Utah gives one that feeling in the dryness and harshness of its terrain, in the largeness of its sky, in its yellow-and-redness

V is for Vergil, who took what was a fleeting bit of background music in Homer, that strain of elegy, and made it the central, inescapable condition of the Aeneid. All those exquisite passages of lament and exhaustion, of time passing and life lost, all that elegiac grace that seems to make of the Aeneid a long lyric, mark Vergil as the first great gardener in the landscape of grief, and the father of pastoral elegy. Is it a negligible irony or not that our vision of pastoral elegy derives so much from the beauty of the Underworld? I know only that any description of landscape has within it an elusiveness, an unobtainableness that goes beyond the seasonal cycles and what they mean, and that suggests something like the constant flourishing of a finality in which we are confronted with the limits of our feeling. We end up lamenting the loss of something we never possessed.

W is for what might have been or what I might have written. Can I be influenced by what I might have done but didn't?--as if the choice to write what I couldn't or didn't were still before me. It is not as if what I might have written exists, even as a possibility. Still, I sometimes say to myself that if I hadn't done this, I might have done that, even if I don't know what that might be. What I might have written stands in shadowy, sober judgement of what I have written. It gathers whatever self it has and comes, unbidden, to visit me. W is also for what I would never have written because I could not have, even in a thousand years. A conceivable source of unhappiness, it is in fact a relief. Think if I had written the first hundred or so lines in Book XIII of the 1805 Prelude, what a great poet I would be. I would have to destroy everything else I had written to keep people from saying, "What a falling off there has been in Strand's work." So I wouldn't be me, and I would not have my poems, and I would have nothing to worry about. W is for Wordsworth, who wrote what I didn't and couldn't and won't.

X is for crossing out, which is hardly an influence. It is, however, a sobering activity, one that I wish, I did less of, but which my detractors probably feel I should do more of. But crossing out is not so bad. A canceled line looks a lot less precious than it did before the drastic measure was taken. One can grow to like getting rid of this or that. It is like dieting. On the other hand, lopping off an arm or leg is not a satisfactory way to lose weight.

Y is for why. Why is the question we ask ourselves again and again. Why are we here and not there? Why am I me? Why not a goldfish in a fish tank in a restaurant somewhere on the outskirts of Des Moines?

Z is for the zenith, the ultimate influence. It is the highest point in the sky directly overhead; it is what some hats point towards, yet what umbrellas deny; it is the eventual extreme of highest thoughts, and the divine refutations of earth and earthiness; it is the utmost point of contact with utmost otherness; it is the final resting place and celestial terminus of poems worth having.

Bump.

This is soo cool!!!

Thanks again Cher!

You're welcome, Luke. I'm glad you're enjoying it.

Cher

Thanks Cher, for posting this, and for continuing to post to it. Strand is so good. I'm so glad Stephen turned us on to him.

so lovely.
thank you, cher.
d

F ..... Yeah baby! So profound it hurts.

Yeah, buddy, yah got THAT right.

Anna, I thank Stephen every time I read Strand or Ammons. I don't know that I would have ever discovered either one of them if not for him.

d., I'm glad you are enjoying it.

Cher

N... A soaring piquant de-estimation of Neruda!

*bump*

I think Q is my favorite so far. . .

Well, guys, I hope you have enjoyed this poet's alphabet. Looks like tomorrow's the last day. It's been fun sharing this with you all.

Cher

i loved this so much, cher. thanks for taking the time.
d

cher,
thank you for all of the beauty you bring to us here.

I really like U. Any mention of the mentioned U things waters my eyes.