Roy WhiteWALK ME TO THE CORNERListen to Audio Version read by Shelley Wefald.Walk me to the corner, our steps will always rhyme. Leonard Cohen We needed to move with conviction if we were going to make it across town from the church with the adorable Bernini elephant (known to me from memory and from my friends' description) to the train station, catch the commuter train to Orte, and drive past hillsides of grazing sheep and cypress and olive groves to the house in time for dinner with our friends. So I put my right hand between Shelley's shoulder-blades, my white cane in my left, and settled in close behind and a bit to her left, and we set out briskly, my right foot stepping generally in time with her left. We skimmed over broken cobbles and random steps, skirted shoals of tourists, darted around what appeared to be off-duty stunt drivers in their tiny 500s, and arrived at Termini station bathed in sweat but otherwise unharmed and on time for the 17.12. Over the years, we've gotten a lot of practice making our steps rhyme, from the rocky hills of West Clare to the throngs in the New York subway. And that's important, because to do this sort of thing without tangled legs and recriminations, you need to be aware of pace and momentum, yours and your partner's; it is, I suppose, the same feel for rhythm and measure required for dancing, but this would be a very irregular dance, one that speeds up and slows down and veers and stutter-steps. A better analogue would be verse rhythm, though not Pope or Poe, the one's refined and elegant quadrille ("What oft was thought, but ne'er so well expressed") or the other's surprisingly rollicking danse macabre ("The moon never beams / Without bringing me dreams…"). No, I mean something that hits a groove and swerves away, what you might find in Tracy K. Smith or Atsuro Riley, as here: Betty's pink house and Mrs. Sweatman's brick house and Linda's dock-facing And of course I hope that my own work embodies this dynamic agility. I am told (e.g., by neuroscientist Daniel Levitin in This Is Your Brain on Music) that our sense of rhythm lives in a very old part of the brain. We have needed to move in time for a long time, and the tools of rhythm were there when we began to learn the pleasures and uses of talking. I can well believe it; even when I could still see, even before I became fascinated with drums, I almost always heard what I read, and was carried along with it if it moved with conviction, or felt the sense of waste and lack if it did not. By the end of a Shakespeare course, I would find bits of iambic pentameter smuggling themselves into domestic conversation. Nowadays when I write a poem, I can sometimes feel the pull of that meter, and must take care not to let my writing become a stroll down the boulevard, but to give it all the obstacles and switchbacks and traffic snarls it needs. But poetry isn't just about rhythm, and walking with a guide isn't just about getting to the train station. It is, at least as my guides and I practice it, a rather intimate experience—as guide, you must be constantly aware of what your partner needs to know, warning of curbs and tree-branches, and as follower, you learn whether your partner has a bold stride or rolling gait, a springy or defeated step, relaxed shoulders or bundles of knotted muscle. When I try to write a poem, I find myself in both roles. Dante could never have plunged into the dark without his caro duca, his dear Vergil, and no poet writes without a hand on the shoulder of some heroic guide who helped show that poetry was possible. For me, there are the writers who created the space that poetry occupies in my head, Blake, Dickinson, Borges, even (admit it!) Billy Collins, and others whose words and phrases form a cloud of language around me. I have no delusions about being anyone's Vergil, but on a humbler scale, I do imagine the poem as an act of intimate communication, where the reader accompanies me over a twisty terrain. This is by no means a universally shared conception; fifty years ago, in the reign of the New Criticism, it was fashionable to think of poems as verbal icons, floating free of history in an abstract space of structure and ambiguity. And I sometimes feel, reading certain kinds of contemporary work, that the futility of language as a means of personal connection is the point of the whole enterprise. Such poetry strikes me as unfriendly, as though my guide were intentionally leading me into lamp-posts. I do not require poetry to be easy (in a culture where so few people read poetry, surely those who do must be prepared to expend some effort), but I would like to think that the difficulties are the challenges of landscape that make the walk worth taking, not the result of my sticking out a foot in the reader's path. It is natural for most people to think of both walking and writing as solitary, meditative acts, and of course I, too, write alone. Even Milton, I think, composed by himself before getting one of his daughters to "milk" him of his verses. And I, too, sometimes walk alone, but my years of experience with collaborative walking have surely made me more sensitive to the social nature of poetry, as of all language. In general, one of the big tasks imposed by blindness is to negotiate with the necessity of relying on other people. One could interpret this lack of independence as a crippling defect that prevents one from becoming a complete person, and on some days that's what it feels like, but mostly I believe that it has allowed me to see through the delusion of self-sufficiency that seduces and misleads so many of us.
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