Personalities

The Art of Writing Beautiful Poetry

In 1999, Rosecrans Baldwin sent his grandson an essay, ‘The Art of Writing Beautiful Poetry,’ that promised to answer the immortal question, why do people write poetry? Three years later, the essay answers anything but.

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I shall have to be the first person to admit I am not a well-known poet, and since this piece is going to be about what the title says it is going to be about, I guess that before going any further, I had better trot out my credentials. Or better yet, maybe I should explain first why my poetry is not better known, and then describe my expertise. You see, I have been writing poetry for over thirty years and my output has been sufficiently prolific to fill three fat (not the usual ‘slim’) volumes. These have been privately published (by me), but for financial and another reason I shall mention in a moment, each book was issued in a limited edition of only some thirty copies. This factor, I suspect, has had an inhibiting effect on my bookstore sales, which to date have been zero.

- ‘The Art of Writing Beautiful Poetry,’ Rosecrans Baldwin

My grandfather, still with some hair and his pant cuffs hemmed to mid-calf, fixed his eyes on me from behind his glasses and asked a question. Tall and stooped, slow-moving, he wasn’t doing well at this point, six years ago, five years before he died, sitting impatiently on the back porch of my parents’ house in Connecticut when I was on break from college and dying to go back. 82-or-so and falling irregularly, he was meaner but still smart, his memory becoming a tidy editor when he was called on to answer questions or, more likely, tell a story to a table of half-listening relatives, indulging in certain parts of his life (when he met Sally, my grandmother, or early years with his two brothers, cocktail parties in Chicago, life at Yale, the war) though ever since his wife died from Alzheimer’s he had become bitter and depressed, depressing to be around (he had always been mean in ways, but never depressed—depression, he might have said, was a vice he avoided; cruelty was advice others misinterpreted), frequently harassing his children, nurses, and even the clergy at his church, who were unable to explain exactly where heaven was or what they served for lunch.

He asked me a question that I couldn’t answer, at least not very well. I tried; back then, and not entirely unlike now, I had answers for everything.

‘I’m not exactly sure,’ I said slowly, as if I was puzzling over the answer when the question seemed so obvious and cliché, ‘but I think it’s because they have something to work out.’

He didn’t acknowledge I had said anything besides stare at me more intensely. This was fine; I was used to being ignored by him. The answer meant nothing to him and his question wasn’t much for me: by his asking, by his confession of not being sure, I figured he was simplistic, slipping, he just didn’t understand literature and maybe never had. Why do people write poetry? Wasn’t it obvious? At that point in my life, literature, reading, writing, they were everything I cared for besides drinking and girls: I was a year away from graduating college with a degree in English and a concentration in modern poetry, and I was supposedly writing a collection of poems for a special scholar program I had been awarded. I’m not even sure he heard what I said. He looked away and folded his hands over his lap. Even seated, he looked tall, his legs straight out like two artificial limbs.

‘But why do people write poetry?’ he repeated, looking over the backyard and the new trees my parents had planted to block the neighbors’ view. He turned back to me, half-smiling.

‘You know, I have the answer.’

‘What is it?’

He looked away again and rubbed his forehead, closing his eyes. ‘I’ll send you something. Tell your dad to mail me your address.’


* * *

We called my grandfather Grozzle after an imaginary troll he invented for stories he’d tell about a monster that lived near our house in Nashville, but his real name was Rosecrans Baldwin, like my father and nearly me except I was given a middle name that I omit when I introduce myself. It was rare that I ever heard him called anything else besides Grozzle—his children even used it sometimes instead of ‘dad.’ He had a Grozzle face to frighten us, stretching his mouth into an exaggerated frown, his eyes open as wide as possible behind his glasses, his head jutting forward like an angry turtle.

I never knew my grandfather before I was 13, though I mean I never really knew him, in the way children never really know anyone besides the names and roles they’re told (the family cokehead, the family success) until they’re old enough to recognize aunts and uncles as real people, as human as themselves and just as illogical, as likely to be alcoholics and heroes, or adulterers that go to church. And then, from 13 to 24, I never liked him. I had lots of reasons and I collected more when I’d worm a story out of my dad or my aunts and twist it to my theory: he was a narcissist, he was self-absorbed, he was snobbish; imposingly erudite, stubborn and unconsciously cruel, backwards in everyday life but bragging at dinner about his liberal-ness. He was also responsible for a lot of my education bills (at a school he didn’t approve of—it wasn’t Yale) for which I never thanked him.

But the adjectives, now, sound even less substantial than they felt when I’d recount them, half-believing, or invent new ones. There were also anecdotes I could draw on when I needed evidence: e.g., at my Aunt Elizabeth’s wedding I flew from school to Chicago, brought my best clothes (which were then part prep-school, part literary poser, part gay: an oversized houndstooth jacket and a pale green shirt with a darker green tie) and shaved at the hotel, got dressed, and met the wedding party at the Racquet Club where my grandfather took one look at me, frowned, and loudly asked my father if I was now wearing ‘negro-hair.’

Worse than his faults, though, were his strengths, the aptitudes I didn’t have but wish had been passed down: rapacious intellect, mastery of languages, courage and sillyness, skepticism, height. In the same breaths that I hated him, I’d also retell the good stories that always impressed whomever I had just met for the first time (a girl? a friend?) and we were starting to share stories, explaining ourselves. I described my namesake, the eccentric patriarch, an outspoken mental sideshow, reworking the old story about the sonnet he wrote for my parents’ wedding, in perfect form, rhyme, and meter, the poem in Greek on one side of the paper, the same poem, word for word, in Latin on the other, or the party he threw for his 80th birthday where he delivered an extremely long and scholarly poem on the poignant shits he’d taken in his life. I bragged, I moaned, in both I was embarrassed; I said, more than once when I was drunk enough, that the person I most admired and feared was my grandfather; I said at the same time, I couldn’t imagine a life worse than his. And still, in this obsession I had with the stories about him, I never called or wrote when we both were alive, except for a month before the end. Not once did I confess my ambitions to him—I feared he would ridicule me, turn my plans into impossible daydreams that no one with our blood, with our shared name, could achieve.

He was brilliant and he was doomed. He struggled, fought, made large mistakes, toiled at a job he despised but was proud of. He inflicted pain and didn’t see it; he had everything, including failure. His children he couldn’t understand and his grandchildren, too young, the same.

He loved his wife and she died.


* * *

Rosecrans Baldwin’s poetry will never be included in any major collection of American verse, or even be known by more than a dozen relatives, or the few living friends who heard him perform. He was, proudly, a social poet: formal occasions required his poetry, solicited or not, and since he and my grandmother were social swells at a time when cocktail parties were every night after work, he frequently composed with the guests in mind, though always in his own style, including the sniggling anxieties that show up now like watermarks under close reading. As he said, himself:

[My verses] have been chiefly about the foibles, talents, occupations, eccentricities and physical characteristics of my friends and relatives, and I have always felt that it would be improper—even immoral—for me to have published my works more widely, when they contained such possibly libelous passages as these (from my poem ‘Aspirations’):

I shall not this tale embellish.
Still and all I’d be a chump,
If I did not view with relish
Mrs. Parker’s curvesome rump.

He made it a tradition in our family that the Rosecranses—he, my father, and I—were required to write verse on special occasions. Any birthday, wedding, funeral, graduation, any or all of us had to stand and read a freshly composed two pages, secretly battling each other with the score based on as many sexual innuendos, bad puns, elaborate multi-syllable rhymes or alliterations we could cram into eight stanzas.

For many a moon, friend Howard,
You have suffered Rosey’s verse.
In vain you’ve sat and glowered
As his rhymes grew ever worse.
Be it wedding, funeral, christening,
Luncheon, dinner, tea, or dance,
You’ve sat there dumbly listening,
Wishing some one’d strangle Crans.

He was a word-freak. One claim I saw proved during summers in Maine was his ability to finish a Saturday New York Times crossword puzzle in under an hour (my dad and his sister Liz are also puzzle-whizzes). Only recently, at his funeral (and at the same time as I’m slowly developing my own cruciverbalism , though I haven’t yet finished a Times puzzle after Wednesday), I learned about his secret weapon: he used a dictionary to finish. I was thrilled when my father told me this as an aside in conversation. After so many legends and stories, because it weakened him, the quip from my father made a huge difference: we had something in common. Yes, we shared the same name, the same blood, we both liked books and bad jokes and hated sports, but now, I learned, we both also cheated on the crossword.

His poetry always had its inspiration close to heart, nearly on his sleeve; he wrote tributes to friends, family, even places, always with a grandiose ego and sentimentality that were balanced, slightly, by humor. (Though even jokes couldn’t shake the sense that the friend being described didn’t really deserve the tribute on his own merits, but because he had been lucky enough to have a Rosecrans as his witness.)

The various places in which I have lived have also contributed to my poetic development. These include three big cities, Chicago, New York and Washington, and in each case I resided right in the heart of them where the population is thickest and the turnover is greatest. On top of that I have sojourned during my summers in eleven or twelve populous resorts (in one of which I was widely known as,

The toast of Bar Harbor,
The rage of gay Ellsworth,
Acutely appraising each Seal Harbor belle’s worth.)

Seal Harbor, Maine, on Mount Desert Island, was where he bought a summer house in the 1950s that sits next door to Martha Stewart’s new estate, Highlands. As one of Stewart’s few neighbors, he loved having a celebrity next door to despise, and he kept a throw pillow by his front door should she visit, embroidered with the message, Martha Stewart Doesn’t Live Here.

* * *

October 27, a year ago, I’m sitting at the dining table in the apartment I share with my fiancée in Brooklyn, dinner’s over and I’m reading a magazine. The phone rings, I pick up.

‘Honey, this is hard, Grozzle’s dead.’ She said something like this, the exact words are missing but it was a short conversation, my mother was crying and I hung up a minute afterwards and looked out the window.

In the few years before that day I had lost my three other grandparents, one I loved and two I didn’t know, and it was only in the five minutes I had with the one I loved, a day before she died, that I felt any true sadness. Grandparents, I accepted, are something you lose: they’re the people we know who seem the most likely to die. To only feel a small amount of remorse was healthy, I told myself. I had been prepared, it was rational and smart and what they would have wanted. All night vigils are all right for true loves and young children; a quick goodbye and vichyssoise afterwards is perfectly fine for WASPy grandmothers.

A minute later I’m on the couch, head between my knees, crying so hard I can’t breathe and want to vomit. My fiancée Rachel, who never met him, holds me for a long time and says compassionate things, but I can’t listen and I don’t want to hear. Instead, a single line repeats itself in my head, trite and completely real, the exact thing I’ve refused to know for so long, against which I’ve stacked piles of excuses and wrong-doings, to prevent the tiniest slither of a whisper from sneaking through, I am just like him. We share the same name.

The last correspondence I had with him before he died wasn’t even my idea. Rachel was smart enough to suggest sending him a card and some photos of us so he’d know what she looked like and how happy I was, that he might see in my face how much I loved her, looking just like him when he met Sally. Months later, I learned he loved the pictures, taped them to the wall by his bed and would point out Rachel to visitors, telling them to notice how beautiful she was, his granddaughter-in-law (we weren’t even engaged yet, he just knew). And I believe it—he always had a thing for pretty girls, especially the strong ones.

He was cremated in Chicago that fall but my father and his sisters decided to wait until summer to bury the ashes next to my grandmother in Seal Harbor. This summer, with assorted second-cousins and great-uncles (including Grozzle’s brother David, in his tie, check jacket, and yellow pants, who would tell you, shaking his finger, ‘I’m an old dog!’ and, at the memorial, related a story about his time in Japan during the war when he heard that Rosecrans and Sally were getting married and he managed, with the help of many able radio operators, to send a telegram congratulating the couple from Japan to Maine) we stood around while the cemetery director put dirt on top of the small hole and the minister read passages, all of us staring at the headstone, some people crying, and there, all I could think: that’s my name.

I don’t think many people experience funerals where the person being buried has your name engraved on their headstone. I even told myself, this is not your funeral, you’re not being buried, you have a middle name, stop being so selfish and weird, this is his day not yours, look sad. But in a version of ‘everyone-imagines-who-will-come-to-their-funeral,’ I was able to see, possibly, what my own funeral would look like: there was Rachel, my sister, my parents, some aunts and uncles. It was a nice breezy day in Maine, in a field surrounded by pine trees, and there was a short luncheon planned afterwards at Jordan Pond with lobster salad, beer, and popovers. Excluding the lack of friends, everything seemed appropriate, the people you love and who loved you arrive, endure small-talk and have a light meal afterwards, maybe get a little drunk and tell stories about the time you wandered into a party naked, save for a bag on your foot. They’d laugh, they’d cry. It wouldn’t be so bad, my funeral.

After the burial we drove down to my grandparents’ church for the service and I never felt so stupid in my life.


* * *

Once the poet has chosen his theme, it is then necessary to decide what the structure of the poem is to be, and at this point I would like to state categorically that in my opinion no poetical work has been or ever will be truly great, unless it scans and, if possible, rhymes. Oh yes, I know all about free verse and about blank verse, and have naught but contempt for them as lazy men’s poetry. As I said in some lines I once wrote to a friend (a noted poetess):

I’ll confess a neat iambic
Pleases most my inner man.
Free verse, chum, is not my clambake.
Me? I write the best, I scan.

Before the funeral but after Grozzle died, my friend Will got a call from his mother, saying she’d seen an obituary in the Chicago Tribune and recognized my name, realized it was my grandfather, and would mail it to him to be passed onto me. Telling him, she said, ‘He’s the kind of person I would have liked to know.’ This baffled me, but Will said he felt the same way after reading it.

The obituary, like obituaries do, reads as a résumé of cobbled accomplishments, excluding, as it should, any mistakes made along the way: he was a senior partner at an accounting firm, he wore bow ties and wrote stories, played piano, served in the Navy, married a socialite and had three children, loved Chicago and was loved right back. My favorite line is ‘‘He seemed like such an imposing adult, with his bowties and tweed jackets,’ said Ron Pen [my uncle and a friend of my father’s from childhood]. ‘But he balanced that outwardly ‘captain of industry’ CPA image by writing, almost in secret, reams of plays and stories.’’

Ron, I think, got it right; he was, like many, a man inside a man, two men who had to communicate to survive, though the messages between them were often confused. Sometimes, one would sleep and the other could work—let’s call them the CPA and the Poet—and then other times they’d get in fights, for who had control and deserved more, who Rosecrans really was, and that’s probably when mistakes were made, shouts delivered in the wrestling of desires or the cocktails that confused them. He loved his children, but he couldn’t accept their weaknesses; he loved his position, but he hated his job; he loved poetry, but he doubted his talent; he loved the Democrats, but they were always disappointing; he loved progress, but he hated to change; he loved his grandchildren, but they were always so young.

He loved his beautiful wife and then she died.

My sister and I saw him in the hospital one night in Lake Forest, Illinois, where he was screaming, half-naked and uncovered, scared for his life and bound to a gurney by an IV and restraints. He pleaded with us to let him go, to help him escape, he yelled at me and told me I was worthless, yelled at my sister and told her she didn’t care about him, yelled at the doctors and the orderlies and the nurses who’d had enough and gave him a sedative drip. Completely aware of what was happening, he sat up, pulled the IV out of his arm and struggled to escape until I pushed him back down with my palm on his sternum. It was surprisingly difficult, he was so strong. His personal nurse arrived and I ducked out, making excuses, grabbed my sister and drove back to the hotel. We flew back to New York the next day and I never saw him again.

‘You saw complete fear,’ my dad told me yesterday when I called him for some fact-checking. ‘You saw him terribly terribly afraid. But you wrote him, and he loved that.’

‘I know,’ I said. We waited.

‘I wish you had seen him afterwards.’

‘Yeah, me too.’

To say he was let down by the world is too forgiving and too easy. I still have spite and I think, sometimes, if he was in my position and knew what I know, he would too. He was stubborn and confident; he picked his theme and he defended it. He had a life, not one necessarily good or bad, but one fully lived with pain and heartache and tremendous joys, confusing at many points, and surrounded by friends. I don’t want it to be mine, but it’s one to be admired.

He sent me, in college, a small brown envelope thickly packed that I didn’t open until after he died. Inside was the 24-page essay, ‘The Art of Writing Beautiful Poetry,’ the tract he promised would answer his question, why do people write poetry. I don’t know when he wrote it, and I don’t even know if anyone else has ever seen it. Inside, the question goes unanswered; instead, I have 24 pages of him, Rosecrans Baldwin, as him as his Grozzle face or his high-water pants, every joke and talent and quirky tendency, his ego in his sentences and his diction, his laughter, his insecurity, the bizarre brainy interests.

And until I opened the envelope, he was hardly there. I only had stories others had told me, and a few memories from when I was young enough to keep them untouched. Now, rereading his essay, so awfully-written and incomplete, I find I’ve never read anything so good, so personal and full of life, and so strangely bound to me.

He closes the essay with nods to his heroes, especially the Little Willie poems, a genre that’s long-dead but once was popular among frustrated parents. As he writes:

I salute the unknown geniuses who wrote,

Little Willie’s gone from us.
We’ll see him never more,
‘cause what he thought was H₂O
was H₂SO₄.

I have to admit, it’s a perfect joke.

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