Donald Caswell

wasn't a poet that I was familiar with until recently. I made a trip to the "leave a book-take a book" shelf outside our campus library, which I peruse often and am ashamed to admit take stuff from without leaving anything in return. You see, I am a collector of literature which means I have two problems---that I don't like to give away books, and that I can't pass up books that are free (for instance, I found a copy of "Guns, Germs, and Steel" on that shelf the other day and I grabbed it, despite having a copy already). Anyway, whether that makes me a horrible person or not, among the many gems that I've found on this shelf were several old copies of Poetry, an academic journal that publishes single poems by various writers every month. Upon flipping through one of the journals I came across several poems that had a red check mark next to the title--marginalia from one of the journal's previous owners--and decided to read each one. After a while I closed the journal and moved on to another one, and then shoved them all back into my bag and walked back up to housing. I have only opened them one or twice since, but there's one poem in specific that kept lingering in and out of my memory, so today I started flipping through my various, multi-colored copies of Poetry in search of it. Here it is:

How It Works

When I step into a brook
I become a brook. Fish
cannot burrow
into the soft rock
of my feet. Lying on a hillside
I become the hillside. Rain
runs from the hill that is me
and into the valley I will be
if I move. Window,
door, pathway, light: it's all
a matter of positioning. I am
always becoming
the world. We
create it every day. You know
this is true
and will always be true
whether I write these words
or go to sleep.
Whether we make love
or argue late into the night
about things
that do not matter
that will not matter
that cannot matter
unless we argue.

* * * * *

"I am always becoming the world"
"We create it every day"
This is an excellent poem because, for me, it's about so many things that I admire. It's about new perspective, and creating your own life, and the truism that we create our own world. The last few lines where the writer uses repetition are very effective, and happen to be the reason why I remembered the poem. It wasn't the successful use of repetition alone, but also the context. The last bit deals with something I find myself questioning when I'm in an argument with someone that I love or when I see two people who care about each other get into an argument about something that seems very frivolous. We sometimes fight and we sometimes argue because we care. Anyway, that's a bit about my personal understanding of the poem and why I like it.

I did a little more research on this poet, and I found another piece of his work that I really enjoy. I think it provides a really good depiction of Caswell's own personality and the personality found in his writing.

Why I Am a Poet

I am a poet. I am not a carpenter. Sometimes I think I would rather be a carpenter, but I am not. For instance, Gene, my carpenter friend, is building a house. I drop in. He gives me a hammer and says, "Start pounding." I pound; we pound. I look up. "Where's the roof?" "I'm not that far, yet," he says. I go and the days go by and I drop in again. The roof is up and I go and the days go by and I start a poem. I am thinking of stars and I write a poem about stars. I grab a typewriter and start pounding. Soon there are pages, acres of words about stars and the coffee is gone, so I go to a restaurant. And I buy a beer and the woman next to me tells me how she was raped by her stepfather when she was twelve, so she ran away with an ex-con who got popped again for cocaine and left her pregnant, so she married a GI and moved to Germany, where the baby died of kidney failure, so she came home to live with her mother. And I drink a lot of beers. Then I go outside and lie in a vacant lot looking up at the stars, thinking how many they are and what a wonderful poem they would make. And I fall asleep with a beer in my hand. In the morning, the beer, the stars, and my wallet are gone, so I go to see Gene, and the house is finished. A family is living there, and they show me their dog. There are flowers blooming; cabbage is cooking in the kitchen. So I go home and write another poem. And one day Gene drops in. He looks at the poem and now it is twelve poems, all neatly stacked and ready to be read and he asks, "Where are the stars?" And I say, "I'm not that far yet."