Eric Pankey
I grew up in a tempest of a household. Not the magical and comedic realm of Shakespeare's island, but a stormy place always on the verge of violence. My parents drank, and their drinking led to arguments, and an argument might send a plate of spaghetti flying across the room or overturn a table.
So at twelve,
with a freedom I took as my own to take, I slipped out of the house and
onto my bike and pedaled to self-exile at the local library. The aisle
straight ahead as I entered was formed on one side by the 700s and on
the other by the 800s, so I would grab an armload of art books and another
of poetry books to wait out my parents' drama. I passed hours gazing at
the great art of the world, reading randomly and with a hunger whatever
poems to which luck had led me.
One poem, Richard Wilbur's "Junk," captivated my imagination
at once. Here was a poem made of the "cast-off," the "gimcrack,"
the "jerrybuilt," which seemed so much a part of the shambles
I had left behind at home. Yet from this hodgepodge, this bric-a-brac
detritus, Wilbur weaves something whole and bristlingly beautiful
(not unlike another poem, Hopkin's "Pied Beauty," to which my
sortilege soon led me). Its lines, its taut melodic surface and hammer-dressed
clarity, were unlike any of the poems the grade school's teachers has
shown us as they taught us all to fear poetry and its opacity. The secret
of poetry, I learned that day from reading "Junk," was to get
under the spell of its incantation and believe in the ordinary magic of
words.