I don’t know if I have ever lived with a poem as much as I did with “City Night,” my piece that appears this week -- for the first time in a very long time -- in the Journal of Radical Wonder. Yes, I have taken my time on poems since then, and some have even gone years between first draft and completion. But that process is typically an on-and-off one, punctuated by returns to the writing desk and dozens of slashes and revisions. “City Night,” if I remember the early 2000s well enough, came out in a single draft, but it was a painstaking process in which every line or phrase peeled out when the time was right. If Jack Kerouac had gone at a similar speed to type On the Road, the scroll that he ran through his typewriter might have had permanent curvatures from having sat in place so long.
When I wrote “City Night,” I was 21 — an age when poets can be wildly inspired or embarrassingly foolish. I am not sure which category this poem falls in, but more on that in a moment. “City Night” started with an inspiration: One night, I was driving home in the rain from the Los Angeles Times, where I worked part-time during college, and found myself thinking of a young fellow staffer who had left a bit before I did. I hoped that she had made it home safely, then began imagining her journey in the past tense. (As it turned out, she did return alive to the Times the following day.) As journalists, we often live among police blotters and man-bites-dog stories, and the world seems full of horrors. So the opening lines heralded the miracle of my colleague’s return home: Somehow, another made it home tonight. / Somehow the connection wasn’t missed… That was all I had for a day or two, and then more lines came: …out in the dark street where engines hissed / and moaned, packed together close / in the frozen lamplight… I added to the poem in the lecture halls at UCI, in my dorm room, probably at the Times and maybe even in my car. After a few lines, I thought of Robert Frost’s “After Apple-Picking,” which has uneven line lengths and no regular meter, but in which every line rhymes with another line somewhere in the poem — a merging of order and chaos. That fit the concept of a poem whose subject makes an orderly journey through a chaotic cityscape, so I had my format set. “City Night” ended up being 40 lines long (20 scattered rhyming couplets), and the title made its way into the sentences that end both stanzas. I was particularly proud of the final lines — Deliverance, in the city night, is just a door / with one strong chain — and when I dotted that last period on the poem (perhaps I was in line at the DMV or somewhere by then), I was convinced that it was the best poem I had ever written. Since I had only written about three legitimate poems by then, the competition was not intense. But, as Frost wrote in another poem, nothing gold can stay. After I finished writing “City Night,” recited it proudly at a few UCI readings, and finally included it in Thief After Dark, my chapbook that came out from FarStarFire Press right before I graduated, I found my wonder diminishing. Part of me still felt that the poem was brilliant; part of me now wondered if it was pretentious and overwrought. …where doors draw back and payphones are forbidden / and men pray to women in bright-lit windows — by the time I finished graduate school, I was done writing lines like that. “City Night” didn’t appear in any of my subsequent books, not even the retrospective Tea and Subtitles in 2019. I stopped including it in my set lists at readings. Today, I certainly wouldn’t rank it as my best poem, or even in the top 20 or 30. And yet… And yet I may not be the judge. Artists create art for others, and the audience ultimately decides whether something resonates or not. What the author considers profound, the reader may find dull or preachy; what the author fears is over-the-top may perfectly skirt the top for the reader. Just recently, I finished reading Moby-Dick in its entirety for the first time. I found it arch, self-indulgent and monotonous -- so perverse that I felt like Herman Melville was deliberately tormenting his readers. That novel has been hailed as a masterpiece by countless people for more than a century. By contrast, one of my favorite Bob Dylan recordings is "I'm Not There," whose lyrics consist of a series of fragmentary, slurred phrases, apparently since Dylan never finalized the words. The song makes no sense, but sets a haunting mood. There is no accounting for what will please an audience. Lawrence Ferlinghetti once described poets as "constantly risking absurdity." That is a risk that all artists take, and absurdity is not a terminal condition. So absurdity has been risked, and "City Night" appears this week in the Journal of Radical Wonder. Perhaps it really is the tour de force that I imagined two decades ago, perhaps not. Enough time has passed that I don't care. The poem exists in finished form, and it now belongs to the world -- there for readers to ponder, forward, repost, or simply ignore. Like the woman who inspired it, it has reached its destination safely. My 21-year-old self would have been relieved.
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This is the blog of Michael Miller, a longtime journalist, poet, publisher and teacher. Check here for musings, observations, commentary and assorted bits of gratitude. Archives
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