Poetry and Rain

I remember the poet Alicia Ostriker saying, “We poets are lucky: we have something to do.” It was during a poetry workshop at The Frost Place in Franconia, New Hampshire, and though I don’t recall the context for that comment exactly—perhaps we were talking about where poetry comes from, the Greek word poiesis: to make, or do—I never forgot it. And it’s true, there’s always something for us poets to do, always a new poem to work on, or an old poem to tweak, revise, breathe new life into. I’ve found myself quoting Ostriker lately when people ask me how I’m doing in the time of COVID. I’m lucky, I tell them, I have something to do. “Oh, are you working?” they ask. Well, no, I got furloughed in March. I’m not working. I’m playing. I’m making poems, I tell them. And they usually don’t know what to say to that. Unless, of course, they’re making poems themselves, in which case they say, “Send me some.”

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When we were kids, playing was our job. Go out and play, the grownups said. We lived to play and played to live. We’d call up a friend and ask: Wanna play? And if they couldn’t come out and play, we’d play alone. We were good at playing back when playing was our job. But now that our job is working, many of us have forgotten how to play. Even the fortunate ones among us, those whose job it still is to play—artists, actors, musicians, athletes, and, arguably, writers—now tend to think of it as work. We even call it work. We talk about admiring each other’s work. We talk about sending new work. But for me, writing has always been, and will always be, play. It’s how I get my playtime as a mature adult hominid in the early Anthropocene, one whose day job (yes, I’ve kept my day job all these years just in case the poetry thing didn’t work out, which it hasn’t) doesn’t allow for much playtime. Some people play golf. Me, I make poems. We learn to love the things we love from others who loved them before us: before I started making poems, my mother read poems aloud to me. She loved poetry and wanted me to love it, too. And when I learned how to read, I started reading poems. I didn’t love all the poems I read, but I loved some of them. Maybe ten percent. And I started imitating them. Ten percent doesn’t sound like a lot, I know. But over a lifetime, I’ve read a lot of poems, maybe a few hundred thousand, maybe a million. Ten percent of a million is one hundred thousand. That’s a lot of poems to love.

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But people who love poetry are like people who love the rain. We’re in the minority. Most people hate rain. They look out their rain-streaked windows and scowl as though faced with a long and difficult poem. Or they blink beneath their umbrellas and shrug as though under the penumbra of an inscrutable poem. And sometimes it isn’t raining exactly, but sort of misting. Or sleeting. Or spitting. It’s kind of like that with poetry. Not exactly, but sort of.

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There’s a poem by Marie Howe called “The Copper Beech” about a child climbing a tree and leaning against the trunk midway up in the branches, where she can “practice being alone.” Then it starts to rain. Hard. “Darkening the sidewalk . . . And I was happy, / watching it happen without it happening to me," the canopy protecting her from the downpour. I love that poem. And I love walking in the rain. I don’t love getting wet, mind you, but I love being out in it, in my raincoat, rain pants, and rubber boots, staying dry on the inside, watching it happen without it happening to me. These days, in quarantine, you’ll find me at home working on poems, or reading poems (“Reading and writing: twins of the same conversation,” as the poet Thomas Lynch puts it). Often, I’ll be looking out the window, thinking about something a little off the point. And if it looks like rain, I’ll put down the poem and open the window. And I’ll take a sniff. And if it smells like rain, I’ll get very excited because I know what’s coming. And when it comes, I like to go out and exult in it. As the poet Ana Blandiana puts it: “I love the rain, I passionately love the rain, / the mad rains and the gentle rains, / the chaste rains and the rains like unbridled women, / refreshing rains and endless, boring rains . . .” I, too, love the rain. And I love that there’s no need to worry about social distancing when I’m out walking in the rain. Because I’m usually the only one out walking in it. No one else, it seems, has enough sense—or they have too much sense—to come out in the rain. Maybe they are like the people who have too much sense to spend an hour or two—or three or four or five—making a poem.

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But the earth needs poetry as much as it needs rain. Even people who hate poetry and rain will grudgingly, grumblingly, admit this meteorological fact. They would just prefer that the poetry and the rain occur someplace else, someplace where the people who love poetry and rain can dance around and exult in it and the rest of us can take it in in smaller doses, in bottles, or, preferably, teaspoons. And then there’s the smell of the rain, which is not unlike the smell of the poem. The smell of the rain before the rain is practically a poem itself. And the smell of the rain after the rain is reminiscent of poems about poems. There are poets who never write poems about poems and would just as soon not have to read them. They are like the people who come in out of the rain and fold up their umbrellas and briskly wipe off their shoulders and arms and sit back down to the task at hand. But then there are poets who love poems about poems. They write them often and love to read them. And they are like the people who come in out of the rain and their shoes are filled with the noise of it, and they do a little dance and give a little shout, and they leave their umbrellas open to dry on the floor like big, black, articulated flowers, which the cat eyes from a distance and is soon emboldened to approach and sniff and sit beneath and contemplate and lick.

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I don’t have an umbrella—I have a raincoat—but when I’m done walking in the rain and I come home and peel off my raincoat and rain pants and rubber boots and leave them dripping near the fireplace, my cat likes to lick them. I like watching the cat lick the rain. In fact, I will sometimes stop writing the poem in order to watch the cat licking the rain. And what usually happens is after the cat is done licking the rain, he will be inspired to start licking himself. And he really gets into it, spreading it around, spreading the taste of the rain all over himself. Which reminds me a little of myself when I’m under the spell of the poem. For then, I’m totally focused, like the cat: one, two, three, and maybe one, two, three, four accented licks to the forepaw, then a rub to the ear, which is where the true focus of all those dripping syllables lies, the licking a kind of calibrated flow from a faucet, the softly repeating hook to the ear a kind of chorus, a kind of Q-tip, a kind of hook that has distracted me from my life, from myself, from my focus on myself, the way the cat suddenly stops, looks up, listens, his mouth half open, his ears changing shape like a hat that is changing heads on his head—listening intently for something else to focus on. And, not finding anything out there more compelling than this, he returns to it, and gives himself over to it. Utterly.

PAUL HOSTOVOSKY

Paul Hostovsky’s latest book is Deaf & Blind (Main Street Rag, 2020). He makes his living in Boston as a sign language interpreter. He has won a Pushcart Prize, two Best of the Net awards, the FutureCycle Poetry Book Prize, and has been featured on Poetry Daily, Verse Daily, and The Writer’s Almanac. His website is paulhostovsky.com.