My Heart Leaps Up: The Collection and What Didn’t Make the Cut

It was harder than I thought to establish a "canon" of my poetry

So, I did it! I finally published a book! Well, almost… I’ve now gotten to the point where I pressed “publish” on Lulu, and now I have to wait for the proof copy to come to me so I can review it and finally approve it.

As I’ve mentioned before, I’m working on publishing a volume of my poetry, mostly for my own personal satisfaction—although I’m hoping it might also be a way for folks to express any appreciation for my writing that they might have… I’ve long moved past the delusions of grandeur I had in my youth about being a famous author and/or poet, and I’ve actually already made most of my poems freely available on the internet via my now-ancient personal blog, but I like to think that maybe a few of you might be interested in supporting my writing here by obtaining a copy of Father Justin’s youthful poetry!

But, besides continuing the family tradition of personally publishing poetry chap-books, I do have a grander objective in mind, eventually. I have tended to use my poetry, over the years, as a way to think through things—and, even when I haven’t been writing poetry to do that, my poetry has naturally been fairly representative, in one way or another, of who I am at the point when I write it—and so, my hope is, eventually, to use some or all of these collected poems as a “jumping off point” for a personal memoir, which I’m thinking of drafting here on this Substack as a series of paid-supporter-exclusive posts. I have no idea whether I’ll have the personal discipline to actually accomplish this goal (There’s a very good reason, quite separate from my ability to write, that I am not a published author!), but, if I do, I already have the title picked out, from the same Wordsworth poem that this initial anthology references:

The Child is Father of the Man.

My heart leaps up when I behold
    A rainbow in the sky:
So was it when my life began;
So is it now I am a man;
So be it when I shall grow old,
    Or let me die!
The Child is father of the Man;
And I could wish my days to be
Bound each to each by natural piety.

                         —William Wordsworth

But this initial anthology, entitled My Heart Leaps Up, is, as a first step towards that goal, mainly an attempt to establish a definitive list of the poems that I either consider worthy of publication on their own or that have remained or have become significant to me in some way, over the years. Given this, I wrote the following “Note about Selection” as an attempt to explain the main principles that guided my selection process:

The main criterion I have used to determine which poems to include in this anthology, besides the obvious subjective evaluation of quality, has been whether or not the poem has become a part of my personal “canon”. In other words, if a poem has “stuck with me” and continued to rattle around in my brain, I have included it, sometimes even if my opinion of its quality is questionable (especially for my earlier poetry).

My intent here is to include, as completely as possible, the words which have most influenced my thinking…

…or at least (as I should probably have qualified) those arrangements of words into phrases and rhymes of my own creation that have spent the most time in my head.

This selection process, however, turned out to be harder than I anticipated, and I think it’s worth looking at one of the poems that almost made the cut—and that, in fact, did “make the cut” in terms of inclusion in an earlier anthology—to tease out in a bit more detail what I think makes a poem worthy of remembrance. Because, if you start to think about how we as a society have selected the poetry we highlight and thus pass down from generation to generation, it starts to become clear that there’s more than just some subjective evaluation of “quality” at work here.

The Unincluded Poem, from Start to Finish

As will already be obvious to those who have followed my writings on poetry here, I’m not much of a fan of “free verse”, despite having written quite a number of free verse poems myself. The poem which I did not deem worthy of being included in my present anthology was one I actually included and circulated in an earlier self-printed anthology (back in the days of dot-matrix printers), and can be seen in its inception, its edited, and its final form in the image below:

You can see in the progression from the initial idea to the poem’s final form a bit about how my mind works. If my poems are often an attempt to work out in words what I understand as true about the world, a catchy play on words that captures and highlights a significant truth tends to stick with me. As you can see from the very first draft of the poem (middle of the image), what inspired me was the apparent contradiction between the poet’s job being “not to make us think” about how clever he is, but, rather his job is “just to make us think.” The movement from a specific informal conversational reaction in the first draft to the more formal “not to make us think / about his new and innovative forms” is an improvement, I think: while I have generally tried to make traditional poetry less formal, as I want to use those “old” forms with our current language, I also go too far sometimes (for example, here in this first draft!), and I think the movement to the more formal formulation gives more precision to this reflection and more power to the word-play. The poet’s job is “not to make us think / about” his own cleverness in coming up with “new and innovative forms”; instead, the poet’s job is simply and solely “to make us think.” Full-stop.

While we’re looking at the development of the poem, I must say that I do rather miss the loss of “novelty” being “the job of the novelists”—but, as yet another dig at “new” poetry being bad because it’s new, I do think the movement towards my mentor Professor Johnson’s point that “form and sense” should “reflect / each other” is, again, an improvement, being more substantive and more precise, and I rather like the word-play on “whole” in “till the pair one whole whole forms.” (What can I say? I’ve always been fascinated by the ambiguity of language—hence my observation that puns are foundational…) And then, in the final line, we can see my struggle with how to make clear my idea that the poet’s job is just/only/solely to make us think—that is, to ensure that the effect of his words is to inspire thoughtful reflection. “Just” becomes “but”, which is then reverted, probably for being too old-fashioned and/or ambiguous, and is ultimately given as much emphasis as possible, in the poem’s final form, by the addition of a colon.

Why Didn’t It Make the Cut?

So, why not include this fine little piece of blank verse on the superiority of traditional forms over experimental poetry in my anthology of largely traditional poetry, especially when that last line really has been rattling around in my head for many years?

I’m not actually sure—and I say that deliberately here in the middle of a piece dedicated to unpacking why certain poems “made the cut” while others (and specifically this one) did not precisely in order to drive home the point that the selection process is ultimately somewhat mysterious and subjective, even to me, the poet who is selecting (or not selecting) his own poetry for inclusion (or exclusion).

But, that being said, I think I can come up with a few reasons which probably drove my decision not to include this particular poem in my “canon”.

#1: Said Elsewhere Better

“Survival of the fittest” is perhaps not an entirely appropriate principle to apply to poetry, but pretty much everything I say here in this poem is something I have said elsewhere in other poems I have written that are better than this one. The latent anti-free-verse sentiment that undergirds this poem is an idea I’ve expressed many times before—in fact, I can instantly think of at least four poems on that subject that I put together into a Substack post a while ago that all express the same anti-free-verse idea better in one way or another. “Free Verse” is superior not only for being my first anti-free-verse poem, but also because it illustrates the qualitative contrast between free verse and traditional poetry by being both. “New Borne Poems” makes the same point by being silly and fun, and “D-generation” manages to incorporate a bit of both of the previous poems’ strengths, while also being a backhanded compliment to e.e. cummings who—while he has come to personally epitomize (for me and for many) “free verse” poetry—knew the rules of traditional poetry well enough that he was able to write one of the most perfect sonnets that one might never recognize as a sonnet (due primarily to enjambment), “the Cambridge ladies who live in furnished souls”.

But the poem that perhaps comes closest to expressing what this one does, also does so far and away more effectively simply by getting personal. And, it’s one of my few sonnets. And it’s about Professor Johnson and my granddad. So, there’s no competition, really, and, because there is competition, really, this one gets included (and reproduced again here) while “POETS WANTED:” doesn’t.

To Professor Lee M. Johnson: On Poems

I always knew I did not like the poems
of our day, but never knew just why
those golden poems, read from olden tomes,
inspired, while “free verse” seemed but a lie.
I knew I loved those poems Grandad read
out loud to me before I went to bed,
but hated E.E. Cummings and his ilk,
whose modern poems trash taste, metre, and rhyme.
My loves and hates remain the same today,
but now, from Johnson, I have learned the why:
decorum, suiting forms to what they say,
true poems suits to echo forms on high.
A poem is not a poem which doth cease
pursuing its creator's ordered peace.

#2: Not Pure Poetry

While I’ve always been suspicious of definitions of poetry that neglect the word-play inherent to traditional forms in favour of a subjective emphasis on imagery or “evocative” or “elevated” language, there is a reason why such subjective definitions exist. What they’re trying to capture, I think, is something similar to what Don Beck recently wrote about “engagement” in his Substack on “Why Tolkien Is Great and Sanderson Isn’t”. Really great poetry is evocative and engaging, perhaps not merely because it evokes great images or somehow elevates our feelings—I would hate to lose out on “lower” forms of engagement in poetry like that embodied in the joy of reading “The Deacon’s Masterpiece or, the Wonderful ‘One-hoss Shay’: A Logical Story”—but because it goes beyond mere mastery (or rejection) of poetic forms to something more.

“POETS WANTED:”, for all its word-play and iambic pentameter, just doesn’t evoke all that much more, other than the didactic point that it’s making. And, given that I have other poems that are more fun and engaging and evocative that make the same point (see point #1, above), and given the quality of the didactic point that it’s making… no wait, I’m getting ahead of myself, that’s point #3, below:

#3: Not Entirely True

The main point of this poem, which I began with, was a play on the idea that the poet’s job is not to make us think about his cleverness as a poet, but simply to make us think. This is, I think, true, but it’s not the whole truth. And the problem, as I think about it, is that the word “think” evokes, for us, the idea of thought as primarily an intellectual exercise. This may, in fact, be the form of thought primarily inspired by this poem (which I now see as one of its major shortcomings), but it’s not the mode of thinking that truly great poetry stimulates. One might almost say, in response to this poem, “The poet’s job is not to make us think. It’s to make us feel.”

In fact, I think, the primary power of poetry lies not simply in making us feel, nor in making us think deeply and intellectually about a subject, but in combining these two aspects of thought, the intellectual and the emotional, in a way that is more fully, more deeply, and more thoroughly True.

No poem, no piece of writing, even, can ever capture all of the Truth in itself, of course. But the greatness of poetry lies in its ability to evoke some aspect of the truth in multi-faceted glory, through the layers of language and sound and multiplicity of meaning that the poet has brought to bear on the subject. Great poetry is dense, rich, light, beautiful, dark, joyous, sad, and solemn, all in fit measure.

A poet’s job may indeed be “but to make us think”, but to make us think fully, with feeling, in the most primal and experiential way possible while using just words. So, while the sentiment of this poem may stay with me, the poem’s inability to capture and covey this fully—or at least multi-facetedly—means that the poem itself will not.

Poems in Process

I hope you’ve enjoyed going with me on this journey. And I hope, once it’s out, you’ll enjoy the anthology of my undoubtedly imperfect and probably imperfectly selected poetry. I’ll definitely let you all know when the volume is finally “proofed” and released and available for purchase, but, in the meantime, here’s the cover art, made of of my actual drafts of the poems that made it in, for you hopefully to enjoy: