You Made It, Dave

for David Bottoms, whom I never called Dave.

My poetry teacher has died. In his memory, I am going to write about poetry, but don't be deterred. I know most people don’t read poems. You were forced to read Shakespeare’s sonnets and John Donne and a flock of other old coots in high school, and it was a chore. You were taught to dissect them like frogs until the heart, dried up like a raisin, was pinned to a board. You didn’t read Anne Sexton in high school, whose poems are the messy guts most of us discard, blood smearing the floor. Or Sylvia Plath, whose poems she dissected for you, the limbs and innards in reverse. And you didn’t read David Bottoms, whose metaphors were clean, tangible, and required no dissection at all.

My list of favorite poets is diverse, but I’m from Georgia and have a special place in my personal canon for the narrative poems written by American Southerners. They're stark as an oak, the cicadas buried under the oak, a nest in the branches of an oak. It's only an oak, but a lot happens in an oak, and we can make sense out of a tree. A poem can fall right out of one.

Or, rather, a good poet makes it seem that easy—poets like David Bottoms, whose first book was titled Shooting Rats at the Bibb County Dump. This is not your 11th grade teacher, Mrs. Hudson's poetry.  These are poems written by calloused hands, dirt under the fingernails, stories folded into poems at the end of a hot, hard day, slow as molasses, as we say in the south, where culture dwindles, and worms thrive. Hands of poets which have been praised in Boston, but remained unpolished and immune to academia, despite their oak-stoked egos. Hands that were also, apparently, humble and unsure: The first day of the poetry workshop, Bottoms mentioned when James Dickey was dying, he went to see him. Dickey expressed concern he’d only be known for his novel, Deliverance. Dickey wanted to be remembered as a poet, as opposed to, I assume, the famous line “squeal like a pig.” Dickey asked, “Did I make it, Dave? Was I a poet?" As we shifted the tables and chairs for the workshop, Bottoms chuckled softly, "And, I told him, yes Jim. You are a poet. You made it.” Here was David Bottoms, casually sharing a personal story about one of my other favorite poets, James Dickey. Dave? Jim?!

We’d rearranged the room into a small rectangle at which he sat at the head. Slouching in the chair, he tossed his legs on top of the table, and crossed his ankles. He announced that class would be starting an hour after the university schedule because he had a long drive. It's Saturday, anyway, he said. "Does anyone really want to be here for five hours? We have better things to do. Ok!” he clapped his hand on the desk, "let’s talk poetry.” This was a small, coveted workshop. I remember some students were annoyed, but I delighted at his irreverence, which was aimed not at us students, but toward the university’s rules.

We’d bring in our poems on typewritten pages, hand one to him and to each student in the class. We were to read them silently, but we’d sneak glances at him, thumbing his beard as he read, turning each poem into a stack on the table until his hands were empty.  All of us wanted to be chosen, and none of us wanted to be picked.

"What's this one about?" whipping a sheet from the stack.

If the poem was yours, you read aloud to the group, and then Bottoms would read it, which made the poem sound better than it was. His voice was quiet, lilting, like driftwood. Usually, he’d whittle away at it, but every now and then, he wouldn’t. He’d push his eyeglasses down his nose and look over the rims at the author, “Wow. This works. You made a poem." I still think of that class as a place where we carved wood.

I remember the first poem of mine we workshopped. I’d written terrible, angsty poems since I was twelve, but I’d recently begun the work of crafting them and had no idea if I was any good. The massive Hale-Bopp comet was visible in the sky for a record 18 months, and I’d written a poem about the night my mother and I went to the mountains, waking at four in the morning during a full moon to see it. He repeated a few lines, “see what she did there?—the long, winding line and then it stops. Staccato. Four words.” I was, to be trite, over the moon. I’d written a poem, he announced. After class, he suggested that I submit it to a literary journal. “Drop my name—I mean it,” he said.

I don’t think he meant for me to submit it to Poetry Magazine, the most elite of them all, but I was 20 years old and arrogant. I realize now it wasn’t the poem’s merit, but out of respect for David Bottoms that the rejection I received wasn’t form. Somewhere I still have the handwritten postcard from editor Joe Parisi. I was thrilled. Don’t ask me where my poems have been published. Ask me where they weren’t.

David Bottoms taught me how to read poems. How to dig for them in the mundane. How to coax them out of a tree and onto the page. Most importantly, he taught me about titles. The title isn’t a generic summary stuck at the top, he said. The title is part of the poem. He meant this literally, but I apply this lesson outside of poetry too: our titles don’t sum us up, but the stories we collect.

Here is one of my favorite poems by a poet who accumulated many titles and honors, among them, Poet Laureate of Georgia and The Walt Whitman Award, but he collected and told stories. Among my own honors is being one of his Saturday morning students, waiting for him to sit down and sigh. Let’s do poetry.  This is the poem I send to friends who insist they just can't understand poems. You can. Poetry is worth your time. No one needs to force a rhyme but Seuss and Silverstein. Try this one on for size. It’s about birds, specifically the species we most revile. Once you decide it’s about angels and the circle of life, shrug it off. Return to the boat drifting under a tree. Poems aren’t riddles trying to trick you. This poem, no matter what you have been taught, is nudging you to see things as they are. Nothing more. That’s all there is to metaphor.

Put your feet up on the table. Don’t dissect a thing. Let the poem change your shape.

With gratitude to David Bottoms. You are a poet, Dave. You made it.