My Father Before Me

by Chris Forhan

  Nowhere else in my life—save, perhaps, in late-night conversations I was having with Kevin—did I feel that this splendid bemusement, this sacred astonishment, was honored. Only in poetry, only in poetry. Of course, the poems I was writing were horrible: inadvertent hodgepodges of the styles of whichever poets I had fallen for lately, with so many disparate, wispy ideas swirling about and sinking within them that they were muddles—incomprehensible to anyone but myself. But I was not aware of their faults. I was an initiate, blind with enthusiasm.

  I was also incapable of being as wholly loyal as my brother was to this path. Without being entirely aware of it, I was beginning to forge my own way between my brother’s and my father’s, maybe a way that would prove impossible. I was writing poetry, but I was not making the activity central to my life. Like my father, I would go to college, then immediately enter a conventional career, the kind that had nothing to do with poetry, the kind that, in years to come, I might mention with breezy assuredness to strangers, and they would nod agreeably, with genuine interest, and not knit their brow and purse their lips anxiously.

  What career would I enter? What would I be? I thought of these as identical questions. I decided I would be a television newsman. I had always liked watching the news and thinking about it—not just the stories but the way they were presented. I had spent an August evening four years before pointing a microphone at the television, recording the coverage of Nixon’s resignation on a cassette tape. I had joined the staff of my junior high newspaper, writing up the exploits of the basketball team and the hiking club. Thinking it would be cool to be on the radio, I had turned high school into a three-year broadcasting apprenticeship. Without planning to, I had been preparing for a career in broadcast journalism. A TV newsman: that was an authentic, respectable thing to be, wasn’t it—a fixed identity in which to cloak myself? Poetry felt essential to me, but it was private; it came alive in the off hours, in the dark, and, because its rewards were altogether internal and its pleasures unmitigated, it felt a little wicked. I would keep it to myself.

  I decided to attend Washington State University, an easy choice. The school was far enough from home—three hundred miles away, on the other side of the Cascade Mountains, surrounded by the rolling wheat fields of the Palouse—that I would feel truly on my own there, as I yearned to do, and WSU had a good broadcast communications program. Also, I could afford it. I didn’t have money to attend a private university or an out-of-state school; at WSU, I would pay in-state tuition, and I’d have a little extra money every month from scholarships. I would also receive an accidental gift from my father: because he was dead, the Veterans and Social Security administrations would send me a small check every month.

  Beyond that, though, I needed a little more cash. I needed a part-time job. As soon as I arrived on campus, I auditioned to join the staff of KWSU, the university’s National Public Radio station. I was hired. Within a couple of years, I would be back working the shift I knew from high school: I would be the early-morning announcer, hosting the local segments of the national Morning Edition program.

  As a communications major, I learned to write crisp, clear news copy; I learned to edit audio- and videotape; I learned about the Fairness Doctrine and landmark Supreme Court free-speech cases. With my cassette recorder in tow, I interviewed professors of veterinary medicine and geology for the radio station. When an eccentric local postal employee and his accordion were hoisted by crane one hundred feet in the air, where he played a polka while hanging by his ankles, I recorded the reactions of pleasantly baffled bystanders. For the student cable television channel, I yanked on my big boots and slogged through the snow with a cameraman to interview a pig farmer; I knotted a necktie, pulled on a sweater and jacket, and co-anchored the weekly newscast, becoming practiced at reading from a teleprompter and sitting without slouching.

  But two buildings away, I was taking English classes—more of those, finally, than communications courses. The summer after my freshman year, I stayed in town and signed up for an early-morning class in British Romantic poetry. It was taught by a young, silver-tongued Welshman who arrived every day bleary-eyed, stray locks of dark, unwashed hair plastered on his forehead, wrinkled black vest askew on his shoulders, thermos of steaming coffee gripped tightly in his hand. How long had he stayed up the night before? What had he been up to, and what had it to do with the words he recited to us so gravely, nearly in a whisper?

  Huge and mighty forms . . . were a trouble to my dreams.

  What the hand dare seize the fire?

  For he on honey-dew hath fed,

  And drunk the milk of Paradise.

  Late at night, hunched over my desk, studying a page illuminated by a tiny downturned cup of lamplight, I felt romantic, too. Here I am, alone but not lonely, reading poetry, the poetry of the great dead, poetry ready to reveal to me the big secret, if I can only find it. With a ruler and a fine-tipped red pen, I underlined slowly, deliberately, the lines I felt I would need to return to. A sense sublime / Of something far more deeply interfused. Where but to think is to be full of sorrow.

  On my own, browsing the shelves of the university bookstore, I stumbled upon Charles Bukowski and began writing skinny little poems about flies and grimy undershirts. I found Sylvia Plath, and my poems became outlandish, compact, and explosive; they borrowed her energy but none of her control. The “secret heaven-zoo” I mentioned in one addled rant of a poem—what was that? I know that I was thinking of a girl back home whom, just before leaving for college, I had befriended and ineptly kissed. What I imagined she had to do with secrets and heavens and zoos, I haven’t a clue. In another poem, I knew whom I was thinking of when I wrote, “It’s you face down in a / saltwater marsh, / your barrel smoking,” but I let Plath do the talking: “God, Daddy, it’s you.”

  Were my poems really poems? Were they good? I sent some to my mother, and she wrote back, “I like your poems. They are so somber, though. Do all poets have to be sad or philosophical?” Kevin was encouraging about my writing, but he loved me; he was obliged to be nice. There had to be a poetry professor somewhere on campus. I decided to track him down.

  Alex had arrived at WSU only a year before I did. He was quiet and serious and young, still in his thirties, with one book of poems out from a small press. He had studied at the most prestigious MFA program in the country, the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, but he was ambivalent about the notion that the writing of poetry could be taught. One day, in the poetry-writing course I had enrolled in, halfway through class he paused. He leaned back in his chair. “Look,” he said, “I can’t do this anymore. I don’t believe in this kind of class. It’s over. No more workshop.” In the silence that followed, we all looked at one another. Was he kidding? He wasn’t. Alex proposed that, class being over, we should repair to a nearby pub for drinks and sandwiches, so we did.

  Poetry, he was reminding us, is too important, too wild and weird, to be institutionalized and commodified. Its origins are secret, its powers inscrutable. How could one teach such things? This, I thought, was the teacher for me. He was confirming what I had already begun to feel: that poetry is a delicate and deadly serious matter, a gift that vanishes in the hands of any who would trivialize it. It is not just a subject of study; it is a way of perceiving, a way of understanding, a way of being alive in the world—or being alive to the world. I hadn’t enrolled in Alex’s class in order to prepare for a career. I had enrolled because I couldn’t help myself, because I felt that I might choke on the backed-up sludge of my own being if I didn’t. I needed to be with people who understood my odd urge to write poems, people who would give me permission to keep doing so.

  The next week, we students showed up in the classroom at the appointed hour, and Alex was there. He made no mention of the previous week’s announcement. Maybe he had changed his mind; maybe the dean had changed his mind for him. I was relieved. I wanted to continue meeting with these people; I wanted, every
week, to hand Alex the latest poem I had labored over; I wanted to walk to the English Department office the next day and pick up the ditto—the typed copy of the students’ poems that the department secretary had made. I loved seeing all of our poems collected together in blurry purple ink, our names below them. The ditto was a little weekly anthology, a publication. Its readership was small—just us—and the poems were imperfect: that was the point. But we were treating them as poems, as acts of language worthy of being shared and contemplated. For those of us who had until now kept our writing private, this was no small thing.

  In the poetry class, I was a different person from the one I was in the Communications Building, where my peers were people who called each other bunghole and disco-danced at frat parties and looked blank or vaguely panicky if I told them I wrote poetry. We fledgling poets were a ragtag band of misfits who’d found a temporary home together: Ruth, brainy and amiable, a women’s studies major; Carl, of the trim dark mustache, sardonic and provocative, who devoted his first semester to composing a winking misogynistic lyric sequence entitled “Women as Automobiles”; Patrick, who parodied him with “Woman as Bathtub,” in which an intimate relationship with either one involves “a ring afterward”; Michael, a graduate student, older and taller and wider than the rest of us, with patchy whiskers and thick-rimmed glasses, who favored Ginsbergian odes to inner-city bus stations; Yvonne, dark-eyed and serious, who wrote in the sorrowful shade of the other poet in her family, her dead older sister; and Jed, bearded and gentle, probably the best poet among us. “Out of which lilac”: which of us wrote that line? I remember only that the rest of us agreed it was one of the best of the semester.

  It was not I who wrote it. After all, as Alex pulled me aside one day to say, my poems lacked music. “Have you read Wallace Stevens?” he asked. “You should read Stevens.”

  In the campus bookstore, I bought a paperback copy of Stevens’ selected poems. Thumbing through it, I could see—I could hear—what Alex meant: the language was sumptuously insistent with music. I understood maybe half of what Stevens was saying. No, one quarter. But it didn’t matter; the vowels and consonants lured me in—the sound of the whole voice, the whole mind, of the poems. The lines seemed piercingly funny and sonorously oracular, sometimes simultaneously. Traveling home to Seattle for Thanksgiving break, crossing the state on a Greyhound bus, I kept Stevens’ poems open on my lap. The meandering ride would take nine hours: I had nowhere else to be, nothing else to do. The hours passed, the bus wheezing into one small town, then another, then another. The autumn sunlight dimmed and disappeared. I clicked on the overhead light. I was deep into the long poem “The Comedian as the Letter C.” The title had seduced me first, and then the first sentence: Nota: man is the intelligence of his soil, / The sovereign ghost. I would need to read that again. Then again. This poet was philosophical; I would have to use my head to keep up with him, but I was game for the challenge. I kept at the poem, through imperative haw / of hum, through The book of moonlight is not written yet, through exit lex, / Rex and principium, exit the whole / Shebang, through Mere blusteriness that gewgaws jollified. In my seat at the back of the bus, blackness encircling the narrow column of light in which I read, the muffled groan of the engine the only sound, I felt extravagantly alone: filled with the sounds of the poem, filled with its thoughts—as far as I could follow them. And I was following them, mainly. Probably. Maybe.

  When, at last, I stepped off the bus, weary and invigorated, I felt like a different person. Or I felt, for the first time, fully myself. I felt that the world within me, my private mess of gladness and grief and tentative, intense impressions of truths to trust, had been confirmed by another, by a stranger, by a dead man, in a language of lush uncertainty. I felt that what a poem communicates might not be meaning, exactly, but something larger, something more like a sense of absolute authority—a sense of openness, of receptive attention to a life that enchants and baffles.

  Around this time, in a class on modern poetry, I sat among a group of students puzzling over Stevens’ “The Emperor of Ice-Cream.” Here was an exceedingly odd poem that seemed subversive and wacky and chilling and true, even though I couldn’t quite put my finger on what that truth was. With the professor guiding us, line by line, through the poem, we stalled on the lines Take from the dresser of deal, / Lacking the three glass knobs. . . . Why were these knobs missing, and why were there three of them? “Stevens makes the point,” the professor said, “of saying that there are three missing knobs. Now, of what else might the number three remind us?”

  I raised my hand tentatively. “The holy trinity?”

  “Yes, yes, interesting,” said the professor, after hearing the answer she had led me to by the nose, but what intrigued me more was the rumbling, giddy noise the poem was making: Call the roller of big cigars, / The muscular one, and bid him whip / In kitchen cups concupiscent curds. Why was that voice so appealing and right? And how could one begin talking about it? Maybe one didn’t need to. Maybe one only had to say the lines aloud, over and over again.

  With Stevens in my ear, my own poems began to sing a little. I wrote one about an unidentified “you” who I imagined was some version of my father, floating among ls and os:

  A moon zooms northward

  through the boiling blue.

  You, in the pool, refuse

  to move . . .

  On my visits home to Seattle, I checked in with my brother, nervously reciting my recent poems to him. Were they poems? Did they have potential? Yes, Kevin kindly said, forgiving their trespasses. Kevin, who had been busy finding his own poets to love, read me Ashbery’s “The Instruction Manual.” I loved it because he did, and because the poem seemed so delighted to exist, so delighted in existence—an extended act of imaginative liberty, with hints of something sadder in it (What more is there to do, except stay? And that we cannot do). Kevin read me a few of the riddling, jagged, heartrending Dream Songs of John Berryman—Berryman, who was eleven when his father, one early Saturday morning, put a gun to his chest and fired.

  That mad drive wiped out my childhood.

  ———

  I’d like to . . . ax the casket open ha to see

  just how he’s taking it, which he sought so hard.

  ———

  Also I love him: me he’s done no wrong

  for going on forty years—forgiveness time.

  55

  Was it the fact of being the son of my father—son of a dead man, son of a man who, alive, I remember touching my mother with affection exactly once—that made me, in matters regarding the opposite sex, generally bungling and bashful? Thankfully, my timidity didn’t matter to Lauren, a dimpled, auburn-haired, petite and brainy broadcasting major who decided she liked me. From the beginning, I could sense, even amid her high spirits, something worldly-wise and weary about her. At first we knew each other merely as pals within a group of pals. Then, one day, sensing that we were becoming friendly in a different kind of way, Lauren said, “Sit down. I have something I want to show you.”

  She unbuttoned her left sleeve and rolled it up, then lifted her wrist toward me. Around it, like a fat pink rubber band, was a scar. “A couple of years ago,” she said, “I was working in a cannery. My arm got stuck in the machine, and it cut off my hand. The doctors were able to reattach it. But I can’t move all of my fingers, and there’s a lot of numbness.”

  I am not proud to say this: I was heartsick on Lauren’s behalf, but the ghastly and veiled nature of her injury made her more interesting to me. It seemed a badge of seriousness, a sign of her authenticity as a feeling, suffering person, and I was flattered that she considered me serious enough to share it with. For the next two years, we were a couple.

  Lauren had recently returned from a year in Germany, where she’d had a German boyfriend. She had liked Dieter, she said, but their union was imperfect: his penis was bent. Debilitatingly so. His self-co
nsciousness about it was the worst thing, she said; his dysfunctional member made him feel unworthy of her.

  A few months into our relationship, Lauren warned me that Dieter had called her: he had flown all the way from Germany. “He wants me back,” she said. “Don’t worry. You’re my boyfriend. That won’t change. But I feel bad—he’s come halfway around the world to try to win me back. He wants to talk with you.”

  “With me?”

  “He’s being gallant. He thinks the honorable thing to do is ask that you step aside.”

  “I don’t even know him. Do I really have to talk to him?”

  “Well, no, not if you don’t want to. But he’s traveled a long way. Would it hurt you that much?”

  Dieter, as threatened, tracked me down. He knocked on my apartment door; I invited him in and offered him a seat.

  “Yes,” he said, leaning forward, pressing his palms together. “I have come to tell you and to tell Lauren that my penis is straight now. I am okay. I have had the surgery. I am ready to be Lauren’s boyfriend again. I am asking you to give her up.”

  “Um, I’d rather not,” I said. “But it’s not up to me. You’ll have to speak with Lauren. It’s her choice, her life.”

  Dieter returned to Germany, disappointed. With him, I had held my own. But with Lauren’s family, whom I met when we traveled through her hometown, I felt flummoxed and insubstantial. Sitting on a high stool at the kitchen counter, I heard Lauren, her parents, and her older brother speak freely and openly, launching into passionate, friendly debates, breaking into peals of laughter at old shared jokes. Where were the tense moments of wordlessness, of silent judgment? Where was the satirical, self-protective teasing? These people did not seem to be speaking in code or censoring themselves; they seemed to feel safe saying what they thought, as if there were no risk in it. In such a household, in such a conversation, I could find no footing. I hadn’t the training.