Jacob the Crow

Every now and then something comes along and really jolts me. YesterdayI got an anonymous letter in the mail. Well, not entirely anonymous -- the return address is from "G. O. Deliverer, Burnsville MN."

I have gotten crank mail before, usually after a politically tinged letter to the editor exposes me to these kindsof postal slings and arrows.

This was different -- it was from someone who is powerfully disgusted by me, not as an advocate, but as a poet. Your soul stinks, is the basic message of the letter.

I have uploaded the letter to this URL, with a scan of the accompanying envelope. If you are into intrigue, stalking, and poetic put-downs, have a look at it.

I don't know what to feel. First, I felt complimented that someone read my work so closely -- though he clearly despises it. I mean, poetry just doesn't get read, period. I must have been doing something compelling to warrant this spiritual megatonnage. He quotes a dozen poems of mine in his poem -- so, despite the arrows sticking in me, I felt "quotable" and therefore "canonical," you know, available to quote from. Who would bother to quote from Nobody? So I'm somebody -- somebody despicable!

The poem/critique seems inspired by a poem I wrote but never published, about an experience I had down by Crosby Farm about 5 years ago. It was cold, and I was out with my dog, and I heard what I thought was a boy's voice calling out behind me -- a voice in anguish. It freaked me out, especially when all I could see was a crow departing from a branch.

My imagination got to work, as I assessed the shivery feelings I had, and I cooked up a poem about an Ovidian metamorphosis about a boy turned into a crow. In Minnesota we have a famous crime in which a boy named Jacob Wetterling disappeared, back in the 1980s. I gave the boy in my poem Jacob's name -- it amounted, in my mind, to a prayer that God would save the kidnapped boy much as Zeus transformed maidens about to be raped into persimmon trees.

Now, I knew something was wrong with this concept, and my poet friend Rich Broderick (vote for him for School Board this November) warned me in an early draft not to put on another's suffering as if it were your own in a poem. Meaning I was posing in the victim's role in my early version of "Jacob the Crow."

I must tell you that I had never thought of that before, but I agreed with the principle. It is unseemly to steal another's pain and write it up as if it were yours. And I thought my final versions of the poem sidestepped this problem -- making me someone who wished God had swooped up the boy and saved him, not as a stand-in for the boy.

But clearly, the writer of this poem/critique thinks I am still guilty of spiritual theft. I will have to re-read the Jacob poem to see if I agree or not. It is here.

G.O.D.'s central accusation, as I understand him,is that I am a manipulative egomaniac not to be trusted around sensitive minds. If so, you probably shouldn't be reading this, unless you, like me, wickedly slow down to get a look at flaming car crashes. There is something perverse in our fascination with pain and misery, no doubt about it.

I confess I have led an emotionally lurid life. I have not just felt things, I have tried to feel them even more – like Tolstoy, sprinkling cayenne down his throat so he could write about the feeling. When asked what is the matter with me, why I feel so intense, my answer is that I am naturally on the hyper-emotional side of things -- that I feel things intensely. Intense embarrassment, anger, resentment, self-pity, humor, the works.

I once had a reader write, about my brain tumor book, that I "milked" the audience, made them feel as creepy about having something the size of a baby’s arm inside my head as I do myself. It was the same accusation.Basically, that I write self-indulgently about suffering, and it's abusive to the reader.

I fully sense how annoying this would be to someone who has a better handle on himself emotionally. I wish I was Gary Cooper, but I'm afraid Iam closer to Peter Lorre -- haunted, childlike, guilty and confused.

I am trying to be more optimistic and less lurid. One thing I pray for is not be a prick and not to inflict myself on people. Not to be the Old Man of the Sea, perching and preying on people’s sympathies. I’m trying. I meditate, I exercise, I pray.

But it may be a futile prayer, because God (the real one) seems to have made me this way in his mysterious pretzel logic, twisted and salty like a fossilized tear.

Butthank you to G.O.D. of Burnsville (Burnsville, get it?) for the love in this poem, that comes all knotted up with your own hot emotions.

UPDATE: I have been asked if I know who G.O.D. is. No, I don't. It could be an old friend who knows me too well. More likely, it is someone I never have met. Several friends advise me that the letter feels likea death threat -- and that the letter seems to be both blaming me for the boy's abduction, and taking credit it for it himself. Like the references to the Zumbro River -- I have never written anything like that, so that part is all him.