Autobiography

AUTOBIOGRAPHY

For those who weren't born, it's all the same.
They perch upon some tree in Space and smile.
Myself, I never thought of it, I came,
A nine-months child.

I spent the best part of my life in school,
Cramming my brain till I forgot each word.
I grew into a highly polished, model fool.
How did it happen? I really never heard.

The war came next (it cut off our vacation).
I trotted with the field artillery now.
We bled the world to ease its circulation.
I kept on living. Please don't ask me how.

Inflation then, and Leipzig, and a whirl
Of Kant and Gothic and Bureaucracy,
Of art and politics and pretty girls,
And Sundays it was raining steadily.

At present I am roughly 31
And run a little poem factory.
Alas, the greying of my hair's begun.
My friends are growing fat remorselessly.

I plop between two chairs, if that's appealing,
Or else I saw the bough on which we sit.
I wander down the garden-walks of feeling
(When feelings die) and plant them with my wit.

I drag my bags around despite the pain.
The bags expand. My shoulders grow unsure.
In retrospect, permit me to explain:
That I was born. And came. And still endure.

The work was printed under my full name - Jerome Dennis Rothenberg -
in the winter 1957 issue of The Hudson Review (!) & brought a letter shortly thereafter from Ferlinghetti, asking if I wanted to take a crack at a German postwar project, about which he (like me!) knew very little. The search that followed coincided with the reclaiming of my own work & life after the actual working on the Kästner poems in 1955 and '56.
Posted over on Poems and Poetics