The Cost of Poetry-Life

All morning I’ve been thinking about the cost of poetry. You might think this is a foolish thing, like thinking about the price of sunlight, something fanciful. I agree. Then again I don’t. I’ve now lived for poetry for over 40 years. I gave up early success, lived in other peoples’ homes, even wrote in my parents’ basement. I probably won’t have enough money for retirement. I joke some days that I will likely die while teaching a class, and the students won’t notice. But right now I’m alive in the dreamy whereto, ignorant of fate. I prefer this place. I’ve always liked these lines by Sara Teasdale who is now largely forgotten:

 

Spend all you have for loveliness,

Buy it and never count the cost;

For one white singing hour of peace

Count many a year of strife well lost,

And for a breath of ecstacy

Give all you have been, or could be.

 

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One way to think of poetry is to see it as ingenuity. Nowadays engineers and business leaders talk a lot about ingenuity. One may define it as taking what you know and extending that knowledge. Give all you have been, or could be. As a praxis, a Horatian chestnut, one can scarcely find anything better than this advice. But what I really like about Teasdale’s stanza is her wisdom about exchange (the poem’s title is “Barter”).

Strife is behind you. Count it as an ingredient in ecstasy. Then raise the ante, the emotional ante as the poet Marvin Bell would call it. Imagine what’s before you, the abstract future air, imagine it as a field, a place of reception, karma if you will, where you may submit what you’ve been and what you may still become. Submit in terms of alchemy—your thoughts have provenance and abiding possibilities, grand ones. You know…

 

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The buying and selling, the storms of desire, regrets, the busted wings of toys and choices…The bride becomes a victim, the victim becomes a ghost. The dear house of fortune falls into disrepair and then ruin. The cost of love is steep and the cool shade of the tomb beckons. Who can muster love for this danse macabre? Ah, for one white singing hour of peace. What a line! 

 

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My one good eye hurts. I can’t read. Its barely one pm and I need to lie down. Blindness has its damasks, poetry has its corresponding and shining stem ware. I raise a tall, thin glass to strife well lost and a breath of ecstasy.