Let's say you were a painter, an impressionist, and woke up one day to find Cubism invented, was in fact the leading edge, was where the juice was (apparently you slept through Fauvism). Yes, you'd been growing weary of Impressionism and had wondered privately how so many artists could see the world the same way. Had even for the last few years changed your palette and intensity of color. Chosen subjects others shied away from. You'd been painting twenty years, had never painted better, were even getting some small recognition. And you wake up to a changed world. And though you'd like to argue that the picture plane remains the picture plane and the vanishing point remains the vanishing point and always will, you have such a strong intuition that the change is not only inevitable but needed, you don't say anything. You are suddenly a beginner again. And despite the insecurity inherent in beginnings, you feel a great deal of energy. You pick up your brushes . . .

Although I'm poking fun at myself a bit, the above is not far from my situation. If I had been asked even twelve months ago to contribute to this column I'd have been more sure of myself--I knew what a poem was and how to write one. Now, I don't know. I grew up (poetically) in Fresno, California under the mentorship of Philip Levine and Peter Everwine. We wrote first person lyric/narratives, testimonials, stories in linear time (I'm thinking of two book titles--neither from Fresno poets--The Adventures Of The Letter i by Louis Simpson and Letters To An Imaginary Friend by Tom McGrath which might well describe our writing). There were excesses of course: the poet as hero, victim, doomed seer; bathos at turning thirty or being dumped. But there were successes as well. Many fine poems and many fine poets. The best work was accessible, passionately democratic, musical, energetic, and well constructed and well seen. "No ideas but in things"--we were far from academic. I don't believe any Fresno poet could be accused of being scholarly. I don't believe any of us would hole up a year in a university's special collections (even if such were available in Fresno) researching some iconic personage to eventually emerge with a book-length biography in verse. Clearly the most dazzling poet was Larry Levis. His last (sadly, posthumous) book, Elegies, has everything I ever wanted in poems. Perhaps the book is an elegy for the first person lyric/narrative. Or at least the way the form (mode is probably a better word as it has been used in many different streams of poetry) has been used for so many years in America.

Levine or Everwine (I don't remember) was fond of saying we, each of us, only write one poem throughout our life. It was said a bit facetiously of course. I think we may, if we're lucky, write two or three or even several poems in a lifetime. We may be able to write more than one way as well. So for now I'm junking the way I used to write. I'm reading widely (even an old enemy, John Ashbury) and looking at what others are doing. Ideas still come to me in first person, but I'm translating, in a way, these ideas into something else. It's too early for me to tell where I'll end up.

I thought, dear read-er, I'd test your patience and present two versions of an idea, a germ of a poem, to show you what I'm doing. I call them "Take One" and "Take Two." They both have working titles. They are drafts; "Take One" was done before I woke up to changes happening in poetry now. "Take Two" is an attempt to remove myself as a character in the poem. Neither I consider finished or satisfying to me yet. I don't consider "Take Two" in any way revolutionary, but it is different for me and, curiously, seemed to demand a different sort of music.