A STORY. 25. A MESSAGE TO YOU, THE READER

I’m not ready to go back to the story. I’m thinking of all the poems I’ve written, and that I gave no attention for years.

What is this all about? What got this book to start in my head?

I know one big reason. I’m trying to bring you along into enjoying my poems, into these moments. But I’m living, you’re living, we’re living, in a society with little space for poetry. Most people don’t look at them, except when they appear in greeting cards.

Valued by academics are mainly poems that are hard to understand.

That’s not what I’m moved to write. Instead, it’s: Here is a moment. How best to put it into words? The Warmth Within. The Bluest Bluest Blue. Up Against a Wall.

But how to bring you along when it’s not a well-trodden path, when it’s not the usual thing?

What you’ve been reading, if you’ve come along so far, is what’s come up from inside me from this big question: How do I bring you along?

I have the sense that I’m a bit like a guide, as I have been for my students, college students, with The Wars, a book that was too unusual for most of them otherwise.

So I’m welcoming you along. May this journey suit you.

__________________________

And then the words come again, more insistent. But what is this all about?

An image of Jane Austen has just come to mind. In her last months, when she knew the end was coming for her, she began a last novel. She had rushed her previous novel to completion. One can feel the rush toward the end. There’s a draft of the ending, where you can see she was heading toward more chapters which would have led to a richer fuller slower ending. But she skipped them. She didn’t have the time to write them.

There was another novel she urgently wanted to write. So she started that final novel. She could not finish it. Others have written how they imagine the book would have gone. But we are missing most of Jane Austen’s own novel.

I have this time. It is my time to put my poems together, and my other writings.

__________________________

I think of my father. In his last years, my father pulled his poems - maybe 20 years of poems - together into one manilla file after another, a whole long cardboard box of them. After his death, my sister pulled them all further together, also downloaded the files just before his old computer crashed completely, as if waiting for her work, that last downloading, to be done.

There are 2 boxes, 2 sets of his poems. I have one of them.

I put 9 of those poems online. Over and over, they are about longing, yearning - Sehnsucht. They get thousands of views every year.

All my father’s other poems are still in the cardboard box.

__________________________

This is my time. I don’t have novels, like Jane Austen, all of them published. I don’t have poems in a box, like my father.- which may, most of them, never find an audience - and which have very very few people recognizing him, the author, not just his poems.

This story - A STORY - is part of my way of caring for my poems, my writings, my gifts to the world.

To be continued . . .
A STORY. 26. WHAT NEXT?
https://elsaiselsa.substack.com/p/a-story-26-what-next

A STORY. ALL THE CHAPTERS ... UP TO NOW
https://elsaiselsa.substack.com/p/a-story-table-of-contents-up-to-now

Posted April 3, 2024