To Helen Vendler and Jorie Graham at Harvard
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James Cummins [The Paris Review, Fall 2000]
I. I love the way the self-appointed save us. I love how love enables all those good not-great minds to decide we don't get it. The seeing of the not-there in the there is virtue in a poet, less so in love love fails to see anointing is itself a fallacy about creation, death . . . We marvel at love's righteousness, its cheek. The finger pointing at the moon is not, I've heard, the moon. What does anointing teach, but the anointer's hope? (And were there oils involved? A powerful vibration, hum?) We know this need is self-love in disguise will no one rid us of anointers, then? II. The wrong new ones won out at century's start: the Woolfs were at the door, Carlos, Old Ez. Felicities of self instead of phrase would be the new measure, the new lockstep, replacing Vanity with vanities. It took a while, enforcement of the new these democrats, these haters of the Jew. A nod to Stevens, and the field was theirs. The poem on the page is still a mirror gives back the one who made it, in its frame gives back the one who reads in it a truth beyond his ken. (Or hers.) Now self is all: thus we become the darkness that we love to talk about, claim we're the product of.
