Near the freeway you stop and wonder

*(Photo: Philip Levine by Charles Amirkhanian, OtherMInds.org, radiom.org)*

Near the freeway you stop and wonder

I don’t always get it. But that’s the best part. You don’t have to. Sometimes the sounds and beats are enough. Just let it all wash over.

Near the freeway
you stop and wonder what came off.

But when you do stop and you do wonder, that’s called poetry.

And a happy National Poetry Month to you, too.

Even if it is a Chamber-of-Commerce mockery of poetry’s holy power and our unholy national diffidence — cruel, almost, as Eliot’s April. Which I’ll confess I’ve never read. The Waste Land, not in its entirety. More than three pages of versifying, I get antsy. Diffident. “April is the cruellest month” — I know that, but not a lot more. It’s a big character flaw, especially for a writer.

I use poetry like I used to use drugs. To pry my brain. Light my pilot. Step outside the spacecraft. To wake up — like others with coffee — and grease the chute. When I’m struggling to get a piece going, a chapter or a post — my Waste Land — I scroll the Kindle for the poets. Most often, these days, who I click is Philip Levine.

Him, I get. Him, with his Motor City goth and all night Hamtramck and early-rising men in “heavy canvas gloves.” With the “Ford plant downriver blowing / its black breath in the face of creation.” With the blind jazz god Art Tatum talking Jackie Robinson to a bass player in the rain. With “iron and fire” mashed into Cadillacs and Terraplanes. And, in the street among them, his Russian-Jew “granpa” in a horse-drawn bottle wagon. News of the World, he called one collection. That’s poetry I get. Sometimes.

But I said “use.” That’s wrong, right off the bat. Especially for a writer. Talk about Chamberpot of Commerce! Poetry’s meant to be useless, gloriously so. Not to pump out your turds.

But I get antsy. Waste Lands are waiting. Need a hit of fog and shiver. Need the poet’s hope. The nonetheless reaching. The overreaching. The nudity. The religion. Northwest Passage to Mount Wisdom, Channel Tunnel to Transcendence. My crutch. My secret weapon. My fix. Just one quick line of iambic, and I’ll be ready to take on that page.

And happy NatPoMo from Philip Levine:

COMING HOME, Detroit, 1968

A winter Tuesday, the city pouring fire,
Ford Rouge sulfurs the sun, Cadillac, Lincoln,
Chevy gray. The fat stacks
of breweries hold their tongues. Rags,
papers, hands, the stems of birches
dirtied with words.

Near the freeway
you stop and wonder what came off,
recall the snowstorm where you lost it all,
the wolverine, the northern bear, the wolf
caught out, ice and steel raining
from the foundries in a shower
of human breath. On sleds in the false sun
the new material rests. One brown child
stares and stares into your frozen eyes
until the lights change and you go
forward to work. The charred faces,
the eyes boarded up, the rubble of innards, the cry
of wet smoke hanging in your throat,
the twisted river stopped at the color of iron.
We burn this city every day.
_____