A Reply To George Oppen: Notes On Despair Poem by Dennis Ryan

June 19,2018 at 10: 40 a.m.; June 20 at 11: 48 a.m.; June 25 at 9: 28 a.m.; Wednesday afternoon, July 4,2018 at 4: 58 p.m.;
then Tuesday morning, September 13,2022 at 9: 12 a.m.; then at 11: 53 a.m.

"Not truth but each other."
--George Oppen

"... the specific character of despair is precisely this:
it is unaware of being despair."
--Soren Kierkegaard, The Sickness Unto Death

Yes, "each other" first; but if not true to one another, then what?
To create a truer syntax, a truthfulness embodied in the way
a sentence unfolds, its sense, is this what you were after?
That possibility? Perhaps, yes. I was with you and Mary on
Eagle Isle then, in your shack where you showed me some poems, your revisions, those little strips of white paper overlaid on linesyou had already composed, in pen. Yes, pen. I remember now. Little white strips of paper as you revise line to line; however, the spoken word, words spoken spontaneously, perhaps with a sense of urgency; but without the urge to be clever and evade —this is one way... if there is a way...poems in conversation. Poets as conversationalists. Each other. At times, your near-perfection of a line, syntax and diction—this kind of completeness, perfection seems a lie to me, is to live an illusion, a boy's life in books. And you have written about male poets being, living like boys, Keats, Shelley, as examples in that poem, "Boy's Room": "And indeed A poet's room/Is a boy's room/And I suppose that women know it."
I lived in that room once; rather to be in the thick of things...
Yes, to live in, participate wholly in life; yet I despair—despair
in the line, my lines sometimes. I lack your pessimism, if lack is
what it is, and your sense of bleakness, if "bleakness" is the correct term and/or characterization. Not bleakness, really. Bleak reality, your view—your worldview based on your time, place, experience—city life, Brooklyn, Red Hook, life in the inner city. That woman's poor bare foot, for example, in that New York City apartment, in one poem.

I do hope, though my hope's qualified, lives largely in myself, not
others. When I think of them—their cleverness and manipulation—
I despair. Karen, John, others. (And don't be mistaken, misinformed—they are good people; I know; but my present situation precludes, makes—most things bleak as you have written; it works both ways—John, Karen, they know my predicament. What are they to do? Can they help? No, just... they—I can't repeat this.) My poems don't say this straightforwardly, but some, they despair; I feel it, know it to be true. This auxiliary to the poems: I am trying to tell you how
I see things. Can you understand? Can you see me?
Can you try to understand me. Try. As I have asked Karen to;
and she can, try to a point, only that; she is too self-involved in
my opinion. Only that. My opinion. ("To understand" To stand
under, to absorb experience as it trickles down so that, so that—
one becomes two metaphorically, psychologically, in mind, that
level of understanding and commitment. The big C.) I say—
"despair"—between lines of poem, in-between, in poem after
poem, only to be rebuked, met with silence—so I despair.
Of others. In the way Bill Bronk despaired, I suppose, more
like him. More like him than you. My sensibility. Bill my true
brother. In Elysium if you will. Then. And before. We—Dave
and I— stopped in Hudson Falls, stayed with Bill one summer
long ago, probably July 1979. I had returned home from Freeport the Bahamas for summer. We recited verse most of the night, ‘til past 2 a.m. At Bills's urging; he taking the lead; highly theatrical.

Others, poets have noted this one aspect of Bill; Bill as a king,
of sorts, a king proclaiming his injuries; wounded; yes, maybe this, but far from me, my personality; I am no king; far from it; and hate any kind of flattery whatsoever, as I told one flattering acquaintance recently, who had said, "You speak many languages well. I know. I speak three." "No flattery, " I said;
I am a clown; a jokester; would only play the fool to Bill's Lear, wounded king in search of a lost daughter, Cordelia; then a lost son, perhaps, disappeared—here imagination plays—a la Ray F. Gricar (that Centre County, PA, D.A., county seat of Penn State
University; that time and place; look Gricar up, what happened, maybe why. Why?) That big W, mine, I kept asking, question after question—and she replied, demanded, "Stop asking".
I don't want to say who here; a person in authority. A fool, I am, am not. Wise fool, very wise fool in the play; fool full of wisdom. Shakespeare's King Lear. (Bill soft-spoken otherwise, in life, thoughtful, at least with me.) As Dave and I were on our way to Canada, Montreal. (Dave Krispinski, friend, professor at Rochester Institute of Technology; we played handball
together in Rochester, at the old Y downtown; at Alfred University
where I met Dave; at the handball courts there; with Lenny LaDage, another engineer, civil, and Hank Turner, owner of a construction firm, originally from NYC and Arkansas, respectively, living upstate, in Wellsville, NY, my home town. All three still alive, I hope.) I didn't recognize my despair 'til quite late, recently, it remaining cloaked in my affinity for hope. Affinity.
Then I read The Moviegoer, and, without warning Despair greeted, met me, sat right down next to me, spoke with me,
finally ate with me at table; bit then; though it took days for everything to sink in; then; now? Hope, a bit?