Something borrowed, something new
IN 2010, on his 79th year, the critic and teacher Harold Bloom published a collection of “last poems.” Not all of the 100 poems were literally the last poems the chosen poets had written or published before they died. Some merely seemed—to Bloom or to the poets themselves—to be a good note on which to end a poetic career.
For more than a decade now, I’ve ended each year by emailing friends (and in recent years, posting on Facebook) a poem to start the New Year with. I know it seems both juvenile and pretentious, but one of the many gifts of growing older is that you truly learn, when it comes to doing the things you love, not to be held hostage by the (sometimes fickle or unkind) opinions of others. It’s liberating.
This year’s poem got plucked out of Bloom’s anthology (“Till I End My Song,” published by Harper Perennial) with fewer than 20 hours before the day’s (and the year’s) end. It is “In View of the Fact” by the American poet Archie Randolph Ammons (1926-2001). In it, Ammons traces the rituals of growing old, including the way visits to hospitals and funerals, without warning, begin to nudge out of the way the birthdays and weddings and baptisms one used to have to find time for. “We have already lost so many,” Ammons wrote, “brushed the loss of ourselves ourselves.”
I can no longer remember why this tradition got started. My best guess is that some lines must have stood out in my reading that they demanded to be remembered or were simply too good not to share. Like all New Year’s Eve traditions, this offers no guarantees. But it does no harm either. It’s just one more way to celebrate the New Year, potentially as meaningful as eating 13 different kinds of round fruits or wearing polka dot fabrics or putting on new underpants. At least I think it’s more meaningful than jumping up and down or repeatedly pinching one’s nose at the stroke of midnight. Those last two have never been known to make anyone taller or possess a finer nose, but a few good lines can lift one’s spirits.
Consider this part of Ammons’s poem: “Until we die, we remember every / single thing, recall every word, love every / loss: then we will, as we must, leave it to others to love, love that can grow brighter/ and deeper till the very end..." It is a lovely sentiment, even if it may not be entirely right. We cannot remember everything. (Can you imagine how exhausting that would be?) In fact, Ammons himself writes of walking downstairs and then forgetting what it was one stepped down for. We have to choose which memories to harbor and which ones to forgive ourselves for; which grievances to nurse and which ones to ignore.
The year now behind us held so much uncertainty and discord, so many painful shocks, that it would be naive to think we’ve put all that behind us just because we get to turn the page today. But we do get a fresh start, of sorts, as well as the chance to build on whatever personal or collective accomplishments we managed last year.
We’re here on borrowed time: that is a fact. This New Year, may we find all the inner resources we need to keep despair or boredom at bay. All the best in 2017!