Our Souls at Night by Haruf Kent

Author:Haruf, Kent [Haruf, Kent]
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub, azw3
ISBN: 9781101875896
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2015-05-26T07:00:00+00:00

21

I wanted to be a poet. I don’t think anyone but Diane ever knew that. I was studying literature in college and getting a teaching certificate at the same time. But I was crazy about poetry. All the standard poets that we read then. T. S. Eliot. Dylan Thomas. e.e. cummings. Robert Frost. Walt Whitman. Emily Dickinson. Individual poems by Housman and Matthew Arnold and John Donne. Shakespeare’s sonnets. Browning. Tennyson. I memorized some of them.

Can you still recall them?

He said the opening lines of “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.” A few lines of “Fern Hill” and some of the lines of “And Death Shall Have No Dominion.”

What happened?

You mean why didn’t I pursue it?

You still seem interested.

I am. But not like I was. I started teaching and Holly came along and I got busy. I went to work in the summers painting houses. We needed the money. Or at least I thought we did.

I remember you painting houses. With a couple of other teachers.

Diane didn’t want to work and I agreed it was important for Holly to have someone at home with her. So I wrote a little in the evening and a little maybe on the weekends. I got a couple of poems accepted by journals and quarterlies, but most of what I sent out got rejected, got returned without a note. If I ever got anything from an editor, some word or phrase, I took that as encouragement and practically lived on it for months. It’s not surprising looking back on it. They were awful little things. Imitative. Unnecessarily complicated. I remember one poem had a line in it using the phrase iris blue, which is all right, but I divided the word up into the i of ris blue.

What does it mean?

Who knows. Or cares. I showed that particular poem, one of the early ones, to one of my professors at college and he looked at it and looked at me for a while and said, Well, that’s interesting. Keep working. Oh, it was pitiful stuff really.

But you might have gotten better if you’d kept at it.

Maybe. But it didn’t work out. I just didn’t have it in me. And Diane didn’t like it.

Why not?

I don’t know. Maybe it was a threat to her of some kind. I think she was jealous of my feeling about it and about the time it took me away to myself, being isolated and private.

She didn’t support your wanting to do this.

She didn’t have anything she wanted to do herself. Except take care of Holly. And later she was confirmed in her feelings and thoughts by the group of women she met with, like I told you.

Well, I wish you’d take it up again.

I think it’s past my time for that. I’ve got you now. I feel pretty passionate about us, you know. But what about you? You’ve never said what you wanted to do.

I wanted to be a teacher. I started a course in college in Lincoln but I got pregnant with Connie and quit school.

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