The Origins of Poetryfrom "HOME/WORDS"Jack FoleyI have a clear memory of the moment at which I became a poet. It must have been about 1955 or so, when I was 14 or 15. I had begun to write seriously, but I had no interest in poetry. My prose was modeled on that of Thomas Wolfe-as Jack Kerouac’s early prose was-and I had written a few songs, which involved rhyme. Someone-probably a teacher--suggested that I read Thomas Gray’s 18th-century poem, “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard” (1768). I have no idea why the teacher thought the poem would appeal to me. At the time, I thought it very unlikely that I would have much interest in it, but I looked it up in the library and took it home. The Curfew tolls the knell of parting day,The first stanza has a very important word in it: the word “homeward.” It was a word I had encountered in Thomas Wolfe’s novel, Look Homeward, Angel. (Wolfe later wrote a book called You Can’t Go Home Again.) The ploughman goes “homeward,” but the speaker of the poem remains “outside,” in a country churchyard. As the poem suggests, the churchyard is a sort of “home,” but it is a home in which there are nothing but dead people. Somewhere at the edge of my consciousness, perhaps-encouraged by my reading-was the thought that my “home town,” Port Chester, New York, was a home of the dead, a living necropolis. But I had no way to formulate that thought. Look Homeward, Angel concludes, ...at a distance life awoke, and there was a rattle of lean wheels, a slow clangor of shod hoofs. And he heard the whistle wail along the river.You Can’t Go Home Again (which I had not yet read) is even more explicit: ...at the end of it he knew, and with the knowledge came the definite sense of new direction toward which he had long been groping, that the dark ancestral cave, the womb from which mankind emerged into the light, forever pulls one back-but that you can't go home again.The message was clear: One had to leave home, and, once one had left home, one could never go back again. Yet home was all one knew. The speaker of Gray’s “Elegy” is not at home, though presumably his home is not far and, like the ploughman, he could go there if he wished. He is in a state of distance, a state of what he calls “darkness.” The landscape is “there,” but it is not overwhelmingly there-he does not have to react to it: “Now fades the glimmering landscape on the sight, / And all the air a solemn stillness holds.” For him, that “stillness” contains the possibility of thought, meditation, poetry-of writing. Let not ambition mock their useful toil,Note the word “homely,” used here in a positive way. Nothing the poet is saying is new, though he is speaking in a deliberately “elevated” tone. We all know that “the paths of glory lead but to the grave.” Yet the poet’s position is of considerable interest. He is standing outside the town, thinking about its people. And the elegant resonance of his language is enormously powerful. I surely thought that, caught in my home town, with all its limitations and ignorances--its deadening aspects--I was wasting my sweetness on the desert air, that the town had far to go before anyone in it “fathom’d” my particular “ocean.” Later, I learned the virtue and usefulness of the “homely”-of slang, for instance. At this point, I needed to learn how to distance myself from that, needed to learn that elevated, “poetic” language like Gray’s allowed me to touch on what I knew-on what everyone knew-and yet be removed from it. Gray is, precisely, not at home; yet home is his subject. His language even glances at sexuality-certainly an issue for me at that time: his rose “blushes” and, virginal, “wastes its sweetness”; he writes of “the dark unfathom’d caves.” Moreover, his primary theme is death, and, like most adolescents, I was very interested in death. Adolescents are very aware that their strategies for dealing with the world-strategies which they have developed as children-are no longer going to be possible for them; they understand that they will have to “grow up,”behave like an adult, find new strategies. For them, death is not so much the end of life as it is the perception of a radical change in themselves, the perception that they must change their mode of being. Like all transformations, such change involves the conclusion of something-a kind of death-as well as the beginning of something else. For the adolescent, the “paths of glory” not only “lead...to the grave”-to death-they also begin with “death.” Of course none of this was very clear to me on the day in 1955 when I read Gray’s elegy. All I could tell for sure was that the poem seemed to me the most beautiful sound I had ever heard. I kept repeating Gray’s lines aloud. The poem affected me so deeply that I wanted it to have come out of me, not out of Thomas Gray, and I immediately sat down and wrote my own Gray's “Elegy,” in the same stanzaic form (“Sicilian quatrains”) and with the same rhyme scheme as the original: I see the night-the restless, eager nightEtc. Unlike Gray, I took myself as the subject of my elegy. But its mournful tone and words like “mem’ries” were directly traceable to him. I understood the state of mind named in Gray's “Elegy” to be the state of mind of poetry itself; and in reacting so deeply to it, I understood myself to be a poet. It was by no means a simple state of mind. It had to do with the enormous power of words not merely to reflect or express but to create a “reality,” a “mood” which moved me away from the daylight world in which I ordinarily functioned and had identity: “I see the night....” I mentioned the sexual implications hinted at by some of Gray’s lines. Speaking the words aloud let me experience them physically, with my own breath, coming out of my own body. In this situation, mind and body seemed not to be at odds: Thought seemed sensuous, sensuality seemed thoughtful. Self and other were joined here too. Thomas Gray was a long-dead poet of the 18th Century. It was his mind that was being expressed in his elegy. Yet his poem seemed to be expressing my own inmost thoughts. It was almost as if Gray’s passionate words allowed him to be reincarnated in my body. There was of course a “real” Thomas Gray, a man who actually existed and who did a number of things beside write poetry. The Gray I was experiencing was not that person but Gray the poet, the bard. Aspects of both our lives seemed suddenly to fall away, to be of little consequence. What did it matter who the man Thomas Gray was? What did it matter who I was-born in New Jersey, growing up in New York? My powerful reaction to Gray’s words allowed me to recognize not only who he was but who I was: I “was” a poet. And to “be” a poet meant to be transformed, to move away from the person who lived at 58 Prospect Street and who was 15 years old and who had a mother named Juana and a father named Jack. Poetry offered me another identity, that of the poet; and, in so doing, it offered me another “home”-that of words. The life I led “at home”-“in my house”-was one thing; the life of words was another. But a person with two homes can be understood as an exile-or perhaps an immigrant. Writing moved me into a world of words. It was not a world I could touch or taste or see, as I could touch or taste or see the world I was used to. But it was not a “fantasy” world either. It was a world which words caused, which could not exist without the words, but it was no less real for that. In that world, words were the substantial “reality,” and at that moment in 1955 I took the word-world (which interested me in ways that the other “real” world did not) to be my true “home.” Writing became a “home” which allowed me, in good conscience, to leave my (other) “home.” I might perhaps have been able to find a better balance between these two “homes,” to have felt less like an exile as I moved from one to another. But the pressure I felt from Thomas Wolfe and others was too great:
“To lose the earth you know, for greater knowing; to lose the life you have, for greater life; to leave the friends you loved, for greater loving; to find a land more kind than home, more large than earth-- For Wolfe, as for his great disciple Jack Kerouac, the writer is “on the road”--outside, in motion, an exile, an immigrant.
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Jack Foley