Weekend Challenge: Play Tennis With A Ghost

"Tinturn Abbey And The River," Edward Dayes (c. 1794)

One of the most profound upwellings of poetry occurred for me in the five years after I first sobered up in 1987. After a decade of sex, drugs & rock ‘n’ roll, I parked that nightly mayhem for days of recovery, marriage, and professional life.

As part of that new routine, I began getting up early to read and write, opening doors within. I burrowed down into mythology and psychology with Joseph Campbell, Carl Jung and James Hillman as my lamps. I also began reading poetry with a passion, plundering the public library for voices which I felt a shouting welcome—Robert Bly, Steven Dobyns, Wendell Berry, Richard Wilbur, Mary Oliver.

Back then, I lived in downtown Orlando, so I could walk to my job at the daily newspaper. And so I carried a briefcase in one hand and a book of poetry in the other, reading out loud as I walked. Surely the bluebirds were amused.

For five years I walked ten blocks of Central Florida dailiness reading Keats and Wordsworth, Eliot and Stevens, Bishop and Lowell. (Swinburne’s Decadent seahorsey-versiness fit my walking gait perfectly). I read Rilke's Duino Elegies and Sonnets to Orpheus, Spenser’s Faerie Queene, Milton’s Paradise Lost, Keats’ Endymion. I read the Spanish poets in translation—Lorca and Machado, Jimenez and Paz and Neruda.

Morning readings had a different vibe than afternoons, the one cultural, the other revolutionary. The seasons revolved through their dominant and subdominant themes. The inward world grew massive, cathedral.

With those rhythms in my ear and reflections of so many mythic tales and motifs forming in my mind, I began to write daily verse in a journal—doggerel mostly, indulgent overripe juvenilia marked by hamhanded theft. How else does one learn to write? As Saul Bellow once said, a writer is a reader moved to emulation. Reading and writing became for me the hero’s journey: Go in, read the treasures, write them down in your own hand, come back. 

I went back to college through night classes paid for by my job (as professional training), and over eight years I completed my BA in English. One of my writing profs was big on reader-response theory, which has it that writers engage and magnify literature through their responses to it.  Critics of the theory say there isn’t enough appreciation of the thing itself – the literary work —and that’s where for me I have settled on a sharing agreement with the ages: I come to your library to read, and you come visit my singing hut to add resonance and heft to the stone.

So that’s the idea with today’s challenge: Go play tennis with a ghost. Take a poem by another poet you respond deeply to and write something by way of response. Maybe it’s the theme and cogitation which stirred you, or the rhyme scheme or alliteration. Write your poem as a letter to the original, offering something between wild applause and Bronx cheer. Make a myth your own; tell something of your history as it were written by Mysteries. (And know that despite what your ego is telling you, it's always good for the art to play tennis with someone far better than you.)

Your source of inspiration could be known to all or be a pet voice in a remote register. Maybe its one of our own. Whatever the case, read and respond—and then come back here to share what you found. (It would be helpful if you include the original, or link to it.)

In a tenth century Icelandic saga, ten ghosts of men just drowned while fishing appeared in communal rooms, still dripping wet and reaching out their spectral hands to warm themselves at the fire. They found their way into the literature, the same way pagan Iceland was then transitioning to Christian times. I think literature endures like that, with one generation getting spooked by shadows of the past and then singing them forward. Who will you partner up with for your game of ghost tennis?