Biographies of Poets
You love reading them, but not the beginnings.
The beginnings bore you. All those names,
The paternal and maternal grandparents,
The eventual births of their mother and father,
Their courtship and their unpoetic professions,
All must be gotten through before, finally,
On, say, page 114, the poet is born.
Then you must make it through childhood,
A death or a teacher who might become
Significant later, or might not, formative
Summers spent at a lake or on an uncle’s farm,
The first predictable dawning in them of a love
Of language, all this must be endured before
On, say, page 177, the first poem is written.
And it’s bad, the poem. Now you must trudge
Through the apprentice years, must read the letters
And journal entries in which they doubted
Their talent, must change majors with them,
Accompany them while they disappoint parents,
And all in vain. You alone seem to know that
They will go on to write the great poems.
After all, this is why you’re reading the biography
In the first place. You flip ahead to catch a glimpse
Of the famous stanzas adrift in all that prose
About their affairs and alcoholism and prizes
And their late, unlikely happiness. And then
You go back to the place where you left them
To see how they did what you want to do.