0281 A Mid-Atlantic Voice

It's said in Indian circles that the years of retirement are the time when men choose the occupation of their next life. So I'm sitting here on a fine Sunday in a quiet London suburb, the very day when the geraniums have decided that they and the sun are into a long-term relationship, sitting wondering whether I'd like to be an American poet next time around. It seems on the surface very tempting: for economic survival, teaching creative writing in a medium-profile college where I guess they get on well with their students and discuss in a class of about twenty-one Pamela Anderson's implants and their removal in an urbane, witty, jokes-and-depth way; they live with a happy family in a happy house and rejoice - as poets, unacknowledged legislators of mankind - in the safety, the relaxed glory, of being typical Americans yet with full liberal license nay duty to criticise or reject or even fulminate against the American Way of Life. They write as they live, a relaxed, underplayed (you should be reading this at that unhurried pace) free verse, (short lines if as Levine claims, his cat sits there and claws him if the line goes on too far, otherwise about four-five slight stresses to a line) as appropriate and becoming for a writer of sincerity and integrity; while under their urbane but sharp observation of natural detail and human fallibility and institutional absurdity and the life of the less fortunate, strong emotions are at play, expressed with a wry, broad-minded and life-affirming balance. They are at ease with themselves, and us. They may run to rhyme for comic and children's verse but otherwise have surrendered the grand statement that clunk-clicks like a doorlock, with perfect rhyme and 'meter'; however that doesn't mean you can't easily tease from the occasional reference that they've read the greats. In depth. In fact they're radio-sharp on every event, every cultural reference, and their relaxed eye and mind and decent heart mixes family, brand names, politics and the afore-inspected Pamela Anderson to make poems which aim at the very heart of America in a very independent American way; in fact you could say although of course I'm not the one to say this, that they are the real conscience of America, the heartland of the united state of mind, and with what - if they used the phrase, 'feelgood factor' - they would play with, using all the subtleties of a fly-fisherman in the river of thought. Even their reviews are enviable: 'a wildly refreshing, necessary poet'; 'writes with an honest man's happy discontent'; 'everything is touched by his hand'. They are appreciated. They are that blessed species of human being - useful. And loved. Yes, it's tempting to put in an order to the drive-by at the cemetery gates for a new life as American poet. Were it not that we who have lived into a wariness of metaphysical speculation must balance in the world of the unproven the consideration that time-lapse between embodiments may make all this a fruitless dream in a hideous world of swords, not ploughshares; guns, not pens. And that - Walt, Jack, Pablo, Hank - would be another ball-game.