Re: the Vintage Book of Contemporary American Poetry

It's inauguration day, January 20, 2021. I could be at home, watching the TV presentation pomp and pageantry. But old, achy, onerous and anxious, bladder full with no toilet near, I wait in a chilly car in a VA clinic parking lot, entry to warmth and light prohibited by the COVID pandemic. Inside, my life-partner -- afflicted by diabetic, infected purple insensate second toe, left foot -- seeks news of its possible fate: to be treated or scheduled to be permanently removed from its too snug position among the other toes. Fidgety, I have settled upon re-reading for the umpteenth time selected pages among my (now) collection of loose sheets between two crumbling covers held together by rubber bands: what's left of my copy of The Vintage Book of Contemporary American Poetry, edited by J. D. McClatchy. Many of these poems (all perhaps?) are no longer "contemporary" -- this is a 1990 paper publication with poetry from the preceding 40 years. I still treasure many of the poems. My custom, when alone, is to read out loud, and to mark or circle poems, selected phrases, lines, or passages that I choose, for whatever reason, and often to think/fantasize how or whether I might (or would) have written and then recited in my own words, in my own voice, my own altered poetic echoes of those lines, those thoughts, those rhymes, those carefully or recklessly considered pronouncements and descriptions. And to wonder whether my own contrivances would blend well with the originals that fostered their appearance. I conclude: my ersatz poetic products might be somewhat like an infected toe that could be snipped away -- or treated and tended, nurtured, cured, made healthy, worthy enough for a place crowded among those others. As I have tried (fitfully) here to do.