INTRODUCING DOCTOR SOFTY

I got it early on that we don’t choose our subject matter. Ten years later I got it that we don’t choose our genre. As for structures—as for forms—as for the particular ways our own personalities must be articulated and shaped on the page: Steve Orlen taught me, rescuing me, that the architecture isn’t exactly an option, either. And he would not say personality in this context. He would say character, an idea I’ll get to in a minute.

In a letter to me once, Steve said:

My personal, simplistic theory about poets such as you, and me, and some others, has to do with ADHD. I think that’s what we are, maybe not clinically but at least enough so to use the category as a way of thinking about poetry and poems. ADHD as in manic & energetic & imaginative & associative.

In another letter, to get more exactly to the struggles he helped me understand and attempt to correct, Steve said:

A terrific, energetic, exciting, fascinating mess!

I can’t tell you how important it was to get the say-so to search out the structures and forms that most suited my own, most natural vision of the world, since only therein and thereby can come the content that has been waiting all along to address the complaint of “the old woman” in Steve’s “Poem for Men and Women” who says that “what nobody ever mentions is exactly what we need to know.” Steve’s permission did not come mainly in the form of his letters, though. Instead, it came from the poems.

Here, in Steve’s poems, the poet is no contrivance, no escape from personality, but an actual character one might admire and wish to emulate—someone open and generous and unafraid enough to be “where and what it sees,” to quote Emerson. The poet is pissing with Mick Jagger. He’s remembering the girlfriend who wouldn’t talk without truth serum. He’s in love with Dolly Parton and hell-bent on understanding the sick mind machinery of the Nazis and hipsters in sunglasses and “very tall Africans” and “really tiny Europeans” and Lewis Carroll and one of the masons too depressed to wake up to return to his work on The Great Wall of China.

In other words, the poet is everywhere at once and not too shy to admit it. He’s feeling it all at once. In “Stolen Kisses: 1968,” the poet, Orlen, is frustrated enough to speculate that “The mouth is the place all loneliness begins.” Meanwhile he’s really too honest and hopeful, too buoyant and bright, to really believe it. He’s therefore occasionally prying, or so he worries, asking everyone where they came from and who they are and what they remember and how it feels and what they think. Let me say that again. He’s therefore occasionally prying, or so he worries, asking everyone where they came from and who they are and what they remember and how it feels and what they think.

He worries he’s an intruder, a voyeur, because he “wants to know everything.” Even at his “most reasonable, most contrite, [he] can’t stop explaining,” he says, because he wants to get to the center of—the lowest, most fundamental gravity and frothiness of—how it feels to be, simply, a person. Maybe “the displaced Princess of Bohemia,” but also, most importantly, “the fetal Siamese twins” and “the albinos and the amputees, the retarded / and the refugees” and the elderly widow just wanting the song for snow to return.

Listen to the language I’m using. He’s open. He’s generous. He’s unafraid. He is not shy. He is feeling it all at once. He’s honest and hopeful. He’s buoyant and bright. He’s prying, he’s asking.

In the work of Steve Orlen, these aspects of character find their correct form and structure in the story. The story, in turn, gives a natural and unencumbered shape to the voice of the poet which might otherwise make “a terrific, energetic, exciting, fascinating mess.” But Steve’s poems are not merely narrative. They are so richly textured, so full, because Steve marries the narrative and meditative and lyric modes so effortlessly, layering one mode among the others line by line and, sometimes, word by word. This marriage of character and event to thought and music is what, I think, allows Steve to spin his poems out to the length he does. He delights in stories, yes, but there are always places to think and feel about what he’s showing you. While a purely lyric poet would find a dramatic place to end the poem fairly early on, Steve pushes on past that place to about ten other places.

It’s what makes him so abundant and democratic, so copious and plural and alive.

I tell my students all the time that that they must transfer their desire for approval to the poets they most admire. So many of these poets are dead. That shouldn’t stop us, of course. But meanwhile, occasionally, the mother and father poets are still alive and breathing. In fact, they end up right in front of us in the exact same room under the exact same ceiling, surrounded by the same books and expectant faces.

What a marvel that is. We don’t deserve it. It is therefore the most genuine gift.

It is my great pleasure to introduce you to Steve Orlen (aka Dr. Softy aka PoDoc aka Turk aka Bruce Springsteen), the father poet who taught me what kind of poet I most needed to be by teaching me how to be my own person come hell and high water both.