“The measure of a poem’s ‘immortality’ is the later life it has in other poems. Imitation, appropriation—dismemberment and regeneration—by new poets give the old poem its purchase on life.”
—J. D. McClatchy, from The Poet’s Notebook: Excerpts from the Notebooks of 26 American Poets, edited by Stephen Kuusisto, Deborah Tall, and David Weiss (W. W. Norton & Co., 1995)
“A poem needs disguises. It needs secrets. It thrives on the tension between what is said and not said; it prefers the oblique, the implied, the ironic, the suggestive; when it speaks, it wants you to lean forward a little to overhear; it wants you to understand things only years later.”
—J. D. McClatchy
Resignation
I like trees because they seem more resigned
to the way they have to live than other things do.
—Willa Cather
Here the oak and silver-breasted birches
Stand in their sweet familiarity
While underground, as in a black mirror,
They have concealed their tangled grievances,
Identical to the branching calm above
But there ensnared, each with the others’ hold
On what gives life to which is brutal enough.
Still, in the air, none tries to keep company
Or change its fortune. They seem to lean
On the light, unconcerned with what the world
Makes of their decencies, and will not show
A jealous purchase on their length of days.
To never having been loved as they wanted
Or deserved, to anyone’s sudden infatuation
Gouged into their sides, to all they are forced
To shelter and to hide, they have resigned themselves.
—J. D. McClatchy, poem appeared first in The New Yorker, September 24, 2007
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