Fan Letter

December 22, 2010

Dear Michael,

I’ve been reading your books—just finished Like Happiness—and trying to decide how to tell you how much I like them. Finally I tried to imagine how I’d like someone to respond to my book; thus this letter.

I’m writing this by the campfire in Collier Seminole State Park, listening (unfortunately) to the teen girls behind our campsite singing loudly and talking even more loudly. I’ve been thinking about how you camp away from people and wishing we were doing that now. It is a big step, though, from never camping to full-out-primitive-pack-it-in-pack-it-out, and this seemed like a necessary intermediate level.

Anyway I don’t imagine you reading this actual scribbled piece of paper—my handwriting is atrocious (the only subject I got a “C” in during my grade school years), and deciphering it would no doubt be more frustrating than any reward in content.

First off let me tell you that I really did fall for your poems just from hearing you read at the Other Words conference. I knew then that I wanted your books, but an odd shyness (hard to imagine, I’m sure) overcame me and I decided to order them when I got home. I knew I loved your most recent work best, so I ordered Flock and Shadow and pre-ordered Like Happiness, and looked up anything of yours I could find online while I was waiting for my packages to arrive.

And what I found just whet my appetite, and confirmed that you share a peculiarity I had suspected was mine alone: the certainty that there are whole worlds inside us, landscapes both natural and fantastic, better and worse, lighter and darker than our outside selves, more mysterious, more real, truer.

Maybe other people feel this. Maybe a lot of other people. But they don’t seem to talk about it, to think about it the way I do—and you do. Well, of course not precisely—these are your poems we’re talking about, your particular wisdom gained (it seems to me) from the kind of mindfulness I’m just taking my first steps towards.

And so: Flock and Shadow. I read the new poems first. I mentioned to you already how I had to catch my breath after “Sky Full of White Birds.” Some parts I want to be the speaker: “In the middle of the night large creatures pulled themselves from the ocean and settled down near me.” And some parts I am, even if I’m not sure I want to be: “…would we stand still and inhale, or would we walk on, safe in our smaller selves, free of that feeling that takes us beyond and leaves us abandoned, out of breath and hungry.” And all this building on more ands, more images I know at the heart level (“the guts and groans of horses in glittering fields”) up to the final word, “sing.”

(I love the surprising ways singing comes up in your work, the mysteries and apt motif: “the world is always singing,/that’s just what the world must do to stay intact.”—but I digress.)

So after I read the new poems, I started section 2, your work from the 1980s. And it was instructive to see where you’d come from—I felt like I was peeking into a photo album. As I read through the whole middle of the book, though, I had to sometimes spell myself with a trip into the last section—the second-most-recent poems. Some of the older poems are starker; some of them hurt more to read; they feel not more lost but less content with being lost, more frantic about it, sometimes almost bitter about it. I know I presume too much, but some of them felt less far along the path to enlightenment than your recent work; and so they were closer to my own anxious musings, and therefore a bit unsettling.

And then I finally received Like Happiness. And yes, I felt happiness reading it, but really because it never gave in to easy definitions—after all, happiness can only be talked about in simile: might this be like it? Might that? What if these things we remember as weird or difficult were, really, more like happiness than like anything else? Counting, for example. Fraught, yes—but also a measure of happiness? A happiness the speaker wouldn’t experience as happiness, but that he wishes to try to understand, even honor.

Even in the speaker’s wisdom, though, in the closer-to-enlightenment feel of the book, there is still yearning. “…wondering how/they survive, such creatures, hidden in places//where nothing might venture for months, or a year,/and how they prepare themselves, when they hear us in the distance,/finally moving towards them.” How do we survive with all this yearning? How do we prepare ourselves, waiting for whatever will bring us the sustenance we need?

So I don’t know if it’s flattering or offensive to be compared to other poets—if that old critic’s phrasing of “a modern-day _________” is really just lazy and dismissive. I don’t mean it that way when I say your work makes me think of Mark Strand (who said at a conference I attended, “I’m a fantasist, not a surrealist”). And James Wright, whose collected poems would be my “take to a desert island” book, who claimed he was always just trying to be clear, and whose clarity was green and beautiful and grounded in the earth (“I wish to God I had made this world, this scurvy/And disastrous place. I/Didn’t, I can’t bear it/Either…”). And a bit of someone wilder—Gary Snyder, perhaps—in the way you see things about the human animal and our less domesticated counterparts that require us to let go and love what we love.

So anyway—this was rambling and sometimes random, a thread with knots and beads at odd intervals, an attempt to explain how and why your beautifully crafted words mean so much to me. I am grateful your poems are in the world, and I feel lucky to know you.

Your friend,

Katie