How Poems Are Made: A Discredited View
Letting go
in order to hold on
I gradually understand
how poems are made.
There is a place the fear must go.
There is a place the choice must go.
There is a place the loss must go.
The leftover love.
The love that spills out
of the too full cup
and runs and hides
its too full self
in shame.
I gradually comprehend
how poems are made.
To the upbeat flight of memories.
The flagged beats of the running
heart.
I understand how poems are made.
They are the tears
that season the smile.
The stiff-neck laughter
that crowds the throat.
The leftover love.
I know how poems are made.
There is a place the loss must go.
There is a place the gain must go.
The leftover love.
by Alice Walker
from Her Blue Body Everything We Know
Harvest Books, 1996
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KARL KRAUS WROTE THAT EVERYTHING FITS WITH EVERYTHING ELSE. Maybe. Maybe everything in an artist’s corpus, no matter how incongruous, reflects, repeats, rhymes. Yet this is not the case for Percival Everett. No thematic or formal schema is suitable. He climbs the stairs sideways. His patently ridiculous conceits seem like challenges to his own mischievousness, bids to marry his uniquely sweeping curiosities to a bardic impulse. Charmingly, he’d never admit as much. “I know nothing,” he said in a recent New Yorker profile. “I’m just a dumb old cowboy.” Sure. It remains a considerable feat for Everett to have remained eccentric in the increasingly rational and prefabricated business of literature. He has his prevailing modes—racial satires, Westerns, crime procedurals, retellings of ancient myths, despondent autobiographical metafiction—but all of them are in flux, appearing in different admixtures. It’s hard to imagine another author pulling off, or even attempting, Glyph (1999),a novel about a toddler with a farcically high IQ; in Everett’s hands, the gambit is hilarious, bone-dry, and tragic. Erasure (2001), a canny parody of writers and racial fetishization, is even more affecting as a portrait of senescence. I Am Not Sidney Poitier (2009), a hysterical abuse of Ted Turner, the media, and various social structures, is also a repudiation of Everett’s previous work. (About Erasure, the author-character, Percival Everett, remarks, “I didn’t like writing it, and I didn’t like it when I was done with it.”) To apply superficial categories is to miss the point; Everett understands that each person is witness to a series of absurd debacles, and his fiction poses the question: What, if anything, is there to be made of our continued looking?
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