...an immemorial urge

Ms. Ana María Correa over at "Out of the Woods Now" has been traversing familiar territory as of late, musing upon young efforts at soul-baring in the form of the poem. Referring to a fellow Cornellian, she says:

"Nearing the end of Nabokov's Speak, Memory I come across his beginnings in poetry as a teenager (remembering my own overly-earnest false starts) and listen to his thoughts on the matter:

But then, in a sense, all poetry is positional: to try to express one's position in regard to the universe embraced by consciousness, is an immemorial urge. The arms of consciousness reach out and grope, and the longer they are the better. Tentacles, not wings, are Apollo's natural members. Vivian Bloodmark, a philosophical friend of mine, in later years, used to say that while the scientist sees everything that happens in one point of space, the poet feels everything that happens in one point of time. Lost in thought, he taps his knee with his wandlike pencil, and at the same instant a car (New York license plate) passes along the road, a child bangs the screen door of a neighboring porch, and old man yawns in a misty Turkestan orchard, a granule of cinder-gray sand is rolled by the wind on Venus, a Docteur Jacques Hirsch in Grenoble puts on his reading glasses, and trillions of other such trifles occur--all forming an instantaneous and transparent organism of events, of which the poet (sitting in a lawn chair, at Ithaca, N.Y.) is the nucleus.

That summer I was still far too young to evolve any wealth of "cosmic synchronization" (to quote my philosopher again). But I did discover, at least, that a person hoping to become a poet must have the capacity of thinking of several things at a time.

Yes. Liberating. And thank you Ms. Correa and Dr. Nobokov...now, do I have the courage to post, even for my own scrutiny, my own naive juvenalia? Catharsis vs. humiliation...now there's a trade-off. Is there celebration of puppy love? Of idealism? And why the urge to shed all of that, like ridding one's closet of skinny ties and parachute pants? Yet I saved at least one skinny tie...and a high school sonnet or two. This kind of confusion had better not be a harbinger of mid-life crisis...stay tuned, or not.