Jordan Smith: These Days

These days. The first days of the second Trump administration. The last days of my penultimate year of teaching. The days after Covid changed everything or not nearly enough. The exact destination (until tomorrow or tomorrow’s tomorrow) of the long generational tailwind of the 1960s and 1970s. 

These Days. A song by Jackson Browne, nearly inescapable on the FM radio one August when, with my girlfriend, I drove to see my cousin, who was spending the summer helping on a farm belonging to much more distant relatives out in the flat land along Lake Ontario. I gave her the record when she was getting ready to fly back to L.A., where she worked until her job fell through, and then she went back to the Chicago suburbs to live near her mother. She died there not long ago, not young, but still too young and too unhappy. Her name was Judy,

I had not forgotten them.

And “These Days,” the title of a poem by David St. John, dedicated to his friend and mine, another poet, Liam Rector, also not young but still too young when he took his own life in New York City. Liam and I studied in David’s workshop at Johns Hopkins in the late 1970s. Another poet from our class called with the news; I don’t remember what we said to each other. What could it matter. The shock overwhelmed anything language could solve. Liam had been ill, seriously and more than once, and was getting ill again, and didn’t want to. I guess that’s the explanation we traded back and forth, as if we might find a lesson there. But the only lesson was the futility of words, the mind seeking something to grasp. That didn’t stop me writing elegies for him. I must have written four or five. What could they matter. The danger of elegy is that it just tells us what we already know: we lose and suffer and become the subject of the loss and suffering of others. Liam had no patience for what he called the “I fall upon the thorns of life, I bleed” school of poetry. He was always shrewd enough to see the self-aggrandizement underwriting the self-abasement. I don’t know that any of what I wrote got beyond the mere consolations of writing verse. But each poem helped me remember him.

            David’s poem did more than that. I knew that, and I didn’t know how, so I did what I usually do with a poem I love that’s beyond my grasp. I assign it. Teaching it and hearing what my students have to say usually helps. When I began preparing David’s poem for my intro class, I realized that anecdotal memory wouldn’t be enough. The stories I had about Liam were either too personal to be anything but partial or too general to have any place outside of a pro formaobit. And David’s poem is referential, not anecdotal; it is generational, as was Lowell’s elegy for Berryman. “Yet really we had the same life /the generic one / our generation offered,” Lowell asserts, before he begins to shore up the fragments in the wake of so much ruin: fellowships, and travel, and girls and drink, and the drink takes pride of place, a very male and very post-WW2 list. Probably any life, any generation is reducible to what, for those who come after, are niche cliches. nostalgic or risible or merely uncomfortably retro. But for the elegists as for their subjects, they are, if worthy of mention at all, at once mnemonics and promises, and what they provoke is not simply nostalgia but possibility, or at least the nostalgia of possibility.

            “These Days” is packed with these threads of memory, of significance, and for me to read the poem was to go back to that seminar room in the basement of Gilman Hall and sense, again, the opening of the field. Most of us there would have caught that reference, the title of a book by Robert Duncan, whose poem “Often I Am Permitted to Return to a Meadow” offered exactly what I found there: “a place of first permission,” which is also, Duncan writes, a place made “as if it were a given property of the mind / that certain bounds hold against chaos.” Maybe this is why in these days of chaos, when no bounds seem to hold, I find myself looking back to the promise those days offered. And I can go there in a flash, tracking the marled lines in David’s text like particles in a cloud chamber. 

            Text is transportive word too, the adjective including both the old-fashioned sense of transport as a variety of ecstasy and Roland Barthes’ understanding of a particular kind of writing that transports the reader and the written to a commonality that is both and neither. Barthes was in vogue at Hopkins that year; his translator, Richard Howard, was another of my teachers, and I read S/Z (well most of it; you didn’t need to make it through the whole thing to get the point) in a class with Edmund White. Since Ed saw himself as a writer, not a theorist or academic, he presented Barthes’ work as being of practical use for us, a way to think about what kinds of content were implicit in our choices of word or convention or reference, as well as a reminder that the business of writing is pleasure, and that the source of much pleasure is to unsettle the social code by invoking the rich disjunctions that send the reader’s mind off on tangents that aren’t. (Liam after a few drinks in the Mount Royal Tavern, would seem to be carrying on a conversation tangential to, but still connected to whatever we thought we were talking about. This too was unsettling but sometimes enlightening.) When I reread The Pleasure of the Text for the first time in years, I was, well, pleased to discover how much of it had become, with no thought on my part,  essential to the way I read and teach, especially Barthes’ declaration of the independence of the text from the constraints of a moralism, presented often enough as ideology, that would reduce literature to the practical and the didactic. I think Barthes might have been pleased to become my unconscious and subversive conscience.

            But pleasure is never easily conveyed, especially to those who haven’t shared the specifics of its occasion, and what I nodded at in recognition and affirmation in David’s poem was nothing my students would see, unless I showed them. So I started by creating a set of online links. I almost never teach this way, assuming that my prior knowledge is what will make the poem available when it seems as likely to do the opposite, but this, as they say, was different; this was personal. First, I linked the title and epigraph to Jackson Browne’s song. I lost myself there for a few minutes, remembering that August and my cousin, my second summer with the woman I’d marry, the little boat we sailed on Irondequoit Bay, the bar where my friend’s band played, It would have been easy enough to bring in Nico and Laurel Canyon too, but that was to return to a meadow too far. Then there were these lines:

Old streets we’d thought might carry us into a future

Beyond those days that broke like ours so meticulously built
upon a tarot deck of random

Foreign films & Sleepy John Estes songs

They needed a link to tarot cards and the heady irrationalism of those deep-image days. Foreign films too required an explanation of what a date night meant for an intellectually curious (or pretentious) student in the 1960s and 1970s: on the theatre screen, the Janus head logo, the crackling, scratched leader, and then Bergman or Kurosawa. I threw in Robert Hass’ “Heroic Simile” along with a link to the duel in Seven Samurai, and that was as good a lead-in as any to the meta-poetics that took over so much of our discussions (bonus link to “Meditation at Lagunitas” for the curious). Sleepy John Estes and the folk and blues revival and the question of authenticity came next, and the ways in which combining Son House or Blind Ed Haley with John Cassavetes or Bertolucci was part of our project. As for “holy innocence once so glorious & unsophisticated,” there’s a wonderful clip of Gary Snyder, from what must be the early days of public access cable, explaining the hopes of the counterculture as “a low consumption, relatively non-material cooperative, playful social world.” And I could go on. In fact, I did, bringing in Cesar Vallejo and Donald Justice (“hit…hard & then again”), and of course some of Liam’s poems too.

            That these were the elements of nostalgia might be enough for me as a reader, but not as a teacher. There’s a word I like better, one Snyder uses in the same interview when he’s asked about his poetic ambitions and cites Du Fu and Ben Jonson as touchstones. You can judge a culture or a counterculture by its failures, but to take its measure you must factor in its aspirations. That those are articulated by reclaimed figures of the past who themselves participated the failures of their times, is part of the textual nature of culture. As we read it, we make it. We don’t make it new; we make it newly different. Liam Rector’s charisma—and there is no doubt that he had this quality in person and on the page—was founded on the energy with which he knew the past and was never satisfied that the work had been done, however excellent the attempts. What he wanted from us, his colleagues around that table, his friends, was to make another try at it, and then another. He wanted honest effort and earned knowledge and, with any luck, wisdom and splendor. He was, as Ginsberg said of Whitman, a courage teacher.

David’s poem turns toward sadness, as elegy must, troubled by the cynicism that tosses in the wake of any foundered enterprise:

Do I confess to friends how the night breaks to apertures of

Lightning as we all seem so content with our individual fates
dressing up occasionally

In one nostalgia or another & I see again in the face of a friend

I’ve known thirty years a cold reflection of that day he suddenly
became somebody else: & what followed:

The panic on his face as if a hand had reached to grasp his throat

& all of the air in that Roman piazza was suddenly sucked up
into the ancient ruins around us

& my own blank gasp of one man being suddenly hit hard

In his clenched stomach again & again & hard again & maybe
just for effect by God

Even one last time again

Individual contentment will always be suspect, as will nostalgia if it seems no more than a choice of costume, but to betray a past, an ideal, a set of possibilities in a way that hurts, you must have loved and lived these in the first place. To be battered by the discovery that you’re someone else, you must remember your loyalty to who you were. These recollections may be conditional survivals, as is the presence of the lost one in the elegy, but survivals all the same, as happens when the objects of nostalgia remain touchstones, rather than the other way around. When I think of Liam it isn’t of the battering he took or the outrageousness, he loved to flash like an unexpectedly good watch revealed by a frayed cuff; it’s the way his presence articulated the vocation poetry could be. I had some sense of what that might mean in those upstate years that Browne’s song sends me back to; the same road I took to see my cousin on the farm was the one I’d take to hear Logan and Bly and Levertov and Ignatow read at Brockport State in the same car that I drove into Rochester for the open mics at The Cobbs Hill Grill and Poetry Central in the Universalist Church, just past the Clinton Bookshop, where I spent my high school birthday money to buy Pound and Ginsberg and Snyder. But it was Liam, with his notebooks and his film screenings and his depth of modernist reference that showed me there was a way to live it. 

            I need his memory to remind me sometimes. It is easy to get it wrong, to forget or to mishear. In Browne’s song, it’s not the days he has not forgotten, but the failures, and he says so to stave off reproaches he hardly needs. Those attritions, those aporias—they go without saying, like the second- or third-rate poems on our dittoed worksheets, and there’s no going back to edit out their compromises. I wonder if I could have offered more to my cousin, who seemed so self-sufficient in her kindness, or if I let carelessness or distance slacken my connection with Liam whose death came more unexpectedly than it might have. I might wonder why I shy away from the bleakness at the end of David’s poem, the demiurge fucking with us just because he can, but there’s not much to wonder about there, really, or at my misreading / mishearing / misremembering none of which are an errors of anything but survival, a baser alloy’s streaks on the touchstone. I had not forgotten them.

~~~~

David St. John’s poem appears in his collection, Prayer for My Daughter, Walton Well Press, 2024. Copyright David St. John

Essay copyright 2025 Jordan Smith.

Jordan Smith’s many books include LITTLE BLACK TRAIN (Three Mile Harbor Press, 2020). The recipient of grants from the Guggenheim Foundation and the Ingram Merrill Foundation, he lives with his wife, Malie, in upstate New York, where he plays fiddle and is the Edward Everett Hale Jr., Professor of English at Union College.