Resurrecting Tossed Art Is Poetic Justice

I found some poems the other day, torn up and scattered in a gutter outside a neighborhood church.

You don’t normally find poetry in the gutter (although a lot of it possibly belongs there). You’re more likely to find discarded shopping lists, business cards with naked ladies promising gratification for $8 per telephonic minute, the occasional dead cat. I once found a rain-stained letter written by one elderly lady to another, detailing all the mishaps, illnesses and tragedies that had befallen various family members and acquaintances. It was her annual “Merry Christmas” missive.

But these were poems, hand-printed by three anonymous writers (judging by the different lettering), strewn with the dead leaves along a curb and under juniper bushes. Junk of the heart. I collected them immediately. The very fact that they had been thrown away, I felt, imbued them with certain merit. It possibly suggested humility on the authors’ parts, and the understanding that their utterances probably weren’t terribly important, in the grand scheme of things. (What’s so grand about it, anyway?) Any poet worth his/her salt has a firm grasp on his/her insignificance.

Or it might have suggested, I suppose, that someone’s poetry teacher (yes, some people claim to teach poetry) had a firm grasp on the poets’ insignificance.

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In any case, I preferred to think of it as a kind of extravagant gesture by the authors; that, consumed by the futility of existence or a fit of self-loathing, they simultaneously tore up their art and flung it to the fates. Now that would be poetic.

My conjecture about their state of mind might not have been far off the mark, either, given the tortured sentiments on the scraps of paper. A sample:

I beat myself with dreams of death/patiently listening for words of my last breath/a castaway in a sea of decadence/a child born free of innocence/now is the season for this madness/the reason why I feel no sadness.

Hey, now that’s one troubled poet. Frankly, I rather enjoyed it. It showed clear understanding of the poet’s relationship with life--and it rhymed. Sorry to be un-hip, but I enjoy rhyming poems.

And although I admired the author’s focus, sincerity and sensitivity, I couldn’t help but hope that he or she feels a little better soon. I found myself imagining that he or she, after trashing the verse, walked around the corner to Baskin-Robbins and had a scoop of peanut butter-chocolate ice cream. It’s not much, granted, but I doubt that life gets much more pleasant than peanut butter-chocolate ice cream.

The other bits of abandoned expression were chock-full of equally colorful images. To wit:

Into the night we swim for safety/holding on tightly to loose constellations/the chaos beckons our souls/a silent scream felt by thousands/the key to all locks/running away only to return again. . . .

This mysterious outburst came from poet No. 2. Poet No. 3’s work existed, fatefully enough, only in fragments. Still, excerpts perhaps evoke the general tone: We shall cross the galaxies/swimming in cosmic auras of wet . . . a burning star sliding through dark . . . caterpillar to butterfly . . . change with me. . . .

Well, sure, I’m in favor of change, too. I once stopped smoking.

This is not the first time, I should point out, that I have spared a work of art from certain obliteration. I’m a poem-rescuer from way back. My old man, who I think was a wonderful writer, periodically crumpled up his profundities and stuffed them into the trash. One of his shorter “word works,” as he called them, that I retrieved as a child (which he later gave to me), went like this: The Nile, like sacrificial sheep--/augury-packed and read/by History-Priest--tells nothing./Dumb patterns of repeat/are dead and books poke necrophilic/into centuries slain/by what we know.

It scared the hell out of me as a kid, and in a way, it still does. Here’s another of his that I saved, one of my favorites: In my veins the blood of oaks/and sycamores; my feet are ferns,/I flow within like vegetable;/I am a grass--I who was amoeba/know I ate the air/before there was a meat./My brain and soul/lie asleep in coal.

Now, I know that rescuing these creations will not change the course of literature, or history. I also know that there’s nothing new about artists destroying their work. Brahms scuttled much of his early music. Steinbeck burned everything he did not want to survive. My friend Bernie, who I do not mean to compare to Brahms or Steinbeck (except, perhaps, in the area of the goatee), used to regularly tear up pages of heartfelt, intensely wrought stuff.

Bernie’s late poems sprang from his Olympia typewriter in the city room of the old Valley News and Green Sheet, where we both worked. The verses, I suspected, were produced partly as his stress reaction to being director of the consumer advocate “Action Line.” (I recall one especially taxing episode in which Bernie was asked to facilitate removal of an elderly man’s goiter.) I would read the pieces with keen interest, return them appreciatively, then watch as Bernie ripped them into oblivion, an ironic smile beneath his long, Wild Bill Hickok mustache.

I did manage to snatch one opus right from his hands about 18 years ago, when he was 23. It began with a pithy reference to Ophelia’s father in “Hamlet”--you know, the guy who made that either wise-or-foolish “neither a borrower nor a lender be” speech. An excerpt: The Redoubtable Polonius/with his advice most felonious/was skewered like a rat./Shakespeare’s sword/cut low that fatherly soul/who sought to lead his son behind the arras . . . . And later: Primrose Polonius, tell me what path to take/To the stars, to the stars.

I’m glad I kept this poem--and, frankly, a great many more of Bernie’s incisive ponderings that he later mailed to me (mailing them being another form of throwing them away, I suppose)--although I’m not sure Bernie’s glad about it. I’m also glad I’ve fished my own rare attempts at poetry out of the garbage. Here’s one, inspired by a friend who told me of a dog she admired. The dog, Ubu, stood eternally on guard--on top of his doghouse. It goes: Noble Ubu the dog/barrel-chested/seldom rested/astride his house/rain, snow, and sun/what does he watch for?/Does he watch out of duty?/Or doggie DNA?/Does he seek the poetry of existence/Or cats in the distance?

You’re right, it probably deserved to rest with the banana peels and coffee grounds. But I saved it for a reason. Did I think it would endure through the ages? Not exactly. Did I want to leave imperfect work behind so scholars could pore over my incipient genius? Ha! I threw it away not as perverse defiance of the temporal nature of existence, but because no one was going to publish it, and I had no more interest in it. I salvaged it because I thought it might give my dog-admiring friend a laugh. And it did.

Which brings up a point. I don’t think the poem belonged to me. I tend to buy the attitude that, once completed, art doesn’t belong exclusively to the creator; that it is the right of the appreciator to interpret it harum-scarum, any-which-way. Or, as my old friend Scott Wannberg, who just published his third volume of poetry, “Amnesia Motel,” puts it: “I haven’t destroyed any of my poems because I figure there will be enough people in line to do that otherwise.”

I applaud Wannberg’s humility and artistic generosity. Nonetheless, I suppose I should apologize to three anonymous poets for publishing their forsaken ruminations. But then, a gutter is about as public domain as you can get. In other words, if you insist on casting your art to the fates, be advised that one such fate might take the form of a wayward writer out for an evening stroll.