Though the Sun's Not Up and You Weren't Looking for a Reply

Reading your comment this morning was one of those moments where physical distance just kind of eats away at me. It sits there with its precious silverware and feasts on my heart. Or laughs at me, like a Sphinx. I don’t know the answer to its riddle. What I’m saying, one of the things I’m saying, is it would be damn nice to drink about six hours of coffee with you. Or walk across a city with no bedtime.

First I need to clarify that moment in New York you referenced. I remember the exact point I was trying to make. And I remember that I was never, ever going to be able to make it that evening. I was speaking too clumsily, and you, my friend, were hearing too clumsily. Not that clarifying at this late date will eradicate any of the help or damage of that comment, but all I was trying to say then, for the sake of honest friendship, was that I loved the Novenas and wish there could have been more. I was talking about the way we change – as writers, as people – and saying that I really liked the guy you were when you wrote the Novenas. Probably part of me liked the guy I was when you wrote the Novenas. The guys we were. The place we were in. I mean, nights on bleachers reciting our own poems from memory . . . that was real. So, to come around to it, I wasn’t asking a big question about what you had become as a writer or why you had kept going. I was simply talking about the fact that we can’t write the same poems that we wrote when we were young – and that I liked the poems you wrote when you were young. The comment was probably a little bit selfish, but, in New York City, after 10:00, what isn't?

On, now, to the rest of it. I would put myself in the camp (if there is one) who feels that what you have “done” or “achieved” with your writing is no longer important BECAUSE it has turned you into the man you have become (and are becoming): A deeply good man. A deeply sane man. A deeply funny man. A man who is deeply alive. What’s my proof for this? Just being around you all these years. And I honestly believe that your engagement with language (forget calling it writing poetry or making art – it’s the fact that you roll around in the glorious slop of language every day) has carved you up in body and spirit . . . has delivered you to the world’s doorstep . . . exactly as you are and were meant to be.

You, my friend, are a version of freedom. But let’s go on a little further.

You are also a bundle of questions. Meaning, your freedom will never be without limit. Which makes it moral. I’m laughing now because you can never disprove any of this . . . try as you might, you can never walk down the street next to yourself and get lost in what that is like.

And further… Are you pursuing writing or a writing career? I think you have dabbled in the latter but never, ever waivered in the former. And there’s a cost in that. I don’t think it’s a big, lifetime cost. I think it’s a small, nagging cost. The economics are tricky, and I know you know them well. Art, to be noticed, needs a man in a suit who takes it as his job to sell it. The real artists I know can only wear that suit awkwardly, and for so long. But there are some semi-artists who actually prefer the suit. They look good in the suit. They enjoy its fit. And their small "a" art becomes an extension of the suit. It floats above all the other art temporarily. Because, when the suit dies, the art it held up falls to the ground.

I know I don’t need to explain this to you. I know I don’t need to say that the man who writes, steadily, out of the deepest part of himself, actually builds the day itself. He doesn't hold it up or show it off; he doesn't hock it or talk about it. He actually builds it! And holy shit that is hard and wonderful work. You should know... you've been doing it well for ten odd years.