"Future Shoes" by Michael Finley

By the time I was in my twenties it was important to me to be writing, and poetry, particularly surrealistic poetry, was the most natural path for me. It required no outside knowledge, and the rules within the form were certainly elastic. I reckon that during the years between 1969 and 1977, I wrote an average of five poems a day.

This was not unusual. There was an offset revolution going on in America at that time. Insty Prints and other paper-plate printing companies made printing something everyone could afford. It was nothing to type up a 24-page booklet, run it down to the shop, and run off 100 copies overnight. You collate and staple them yourself, and you were a published author for about $50. Or you could put out a magazine. I did both. It was great. Every day was like a day of creation, and at the end, if you wanted to, you could ball up that day's creation and throw it away. You could do anything.

I was like most young writers, full of fire but without anything special or coherent to say. But I did not know that at the time. I loved the fact that I was able to create certain effects with language. That was my talent, in fact -- atmospherics. I knew how to end a poem so that you heard crickets afterward, or you felt like you, too, could weep for some unnamed loss. At least, I thought I could.

One day I noticed something odd about my writing -- I felt compelled to break rules. One rule of poetry in the 60s and 70s, at least in the prairie school of poetry I was tutored in, was that you had to stay very concrete and imagistic. You weren't allowed to get into generalities or name feelings -- you could only portray things. But I liked breaking that rule. In particular, I liked using the word love in poems. Love was a kind of harlequin character, you could meet it on the street, or pass it by, and never know what you’d missed. It was never far from the concept of sorrow.

I thought I was very close to becoming a major figure. I cut a flashy figure at readings and such, and my work was appearing in hundreds of magazines, including a big spread in John Gills's New Poets of Canada and America. My confidence grew. And I started picking fights with people I knew I could easily dispatch. I would tease a very dolorous confessional poet about cheering up.

The worst was a fellow named James Naiden. He was a big, boorish man who edited a local magazine, held readings, and wrote poetry reviews for the Sunday book section. He was really sort of the poetry czar of the Twin Cities for a few years -- no one saw print or found an audience except through him. He was exceptionally easy to dislike, and I quickly made him the villain in my life. He had a reputation for being a violent drunk, mean to women, and dismissive of women poets. So I rose intuitively to their defense -- though I didn’t like many women poets' poems, either.

I signaled to Naiden that I was his archnemesis in a cheap shot essay in the Minnesota Daily. I wrote a "review" of the local poetry scene in which I characterized him as having "the personality of an axe murderer." It delighted me to think of him being galled by something I said in print. In my mind, he was so transparent -- so mean-spirited, so full of himself, and so unlikable -- that people reading the article would be helpless except to come over to my side, overthrow the czar, and who knows, install me as his benevolent replacement.

Of course, nothing of the sort happened. People put up with him, because at least he did the scutwork of holding the readings, and they did not want to jeopardize the bennies he distributed. To my horror, instead of taking my side, people saw our flare-up as two young male buffalo locking horns to establish dominance of the herd. Far from being his opposite, I was perceived as his twin.

Altogether, I made unflattering mention of Naiden three times in the paper. They were gruesome, taunting, insinuating mentions. And then Naiden struck back. For the better part of a year, Naiden would mention me gratuitously in reviews of other poets' work in the Sunday Tribune. He did this eight or nine times. Example: "In Galway Kinnell's latest collection, he succumbs to the solipsist pretensions of poetaster Michael Finley, beating his chest to win the attention of his betters. Alas, it never worked for Finley, and it doesn’t work for Kinnell."

At first I would find these mentions hilarious, and suppose them to backfire. I mean, I was nobody, and Kinnell was a major poet -- introducing me as a third party in order to pick on me was so -- transparent. He even wormed his way into a counter-culture magazine that I wrote for, in order to skewer me. This really pissed me off, because he wasn't counter-culture, I was. Alas, no one cared whether it was transparent. Instead my name just sat on the dungheap, ants clambering over it, dully informing people who I was and what my shortcomings were.

And it just kept getting worse. At one point, the two of us corresponded. He was rough and threatening, and I was nimble and clever, dancing around his hulking rage. And I did unethical things, cc'ing his letters to people whom I was sure would lose respect for him if they only read his own stupid words. Didn’t happen -- or at least, no one gave me the satisfaction of saying so. I wrote to one of his sponsors, informing the group of his mismanagement of their money. It was really bad.

Finally, one day, I admitted to myself that this wrestling match was causing me a lot of pain. And shame. Even though I was the good one -- well, better than him, anyway -- I felt I had ruined my own reputation.

I was alone in Minnesota, with no family, no girlfriend, no money, and no prospects. My parents signed legal papers emancipating me, making me financially responsible for myself. I asked them to. I was very proud, and writing was the source of my pride. But the aloneness went on forever. Even though I was too much of a coward to really go after the topics that might have addressed this anguish -- in writing, or in therapy -- I considered myself bold to toy with them, however elliptically, in verse.

When my first book Lucky You came out in 1976, I convinced myself that it was a book of laments for my dead sister -- despite the fact that I never once mention her in the book. I thought I was fighting the good fight, and that people who didn’t appreciate me were indifferent to my pain, and to hers. They became the bullies that tormented her in grade school, and I turned on them in kind.

So I wrote him a letter, apologizing. I discovered, when I sat and thought about it, that while I had contempt for him, and thought him to be a total crumb, he was not the problem of my life. Foolishly, I allowed him to stand in for the real item of my grief -- the pain I still felt from my sister's life, and death. When I thought of it that way, I felt that I had let my own cause down, that I let a concern of the greatest seriousness devolve into a stupid pissing match.

"Dear James," I wrote him, "this is to tell you that I am sorry for my part in the scene we have been creating the past year. I really do dislike you, but I can see very clearly now that you have no idea why I dislike you -- and that is unfair of me. So I will tell you. When I was a boy I had a sister who was sick. Her skin was blue from poor circulation, and other kids made fun of her. And then she died of the thing they made fun of her for, and I transferred my grief for her life into anger at them for being so mean. And then, when I met you, you reminded me so much of them.

"I'm not saying I have misjudged you. I'm saying I should have only dealt with the actual complaints I have against you -- not this cosmic background thing, to which you have no real connection and no responsibility.

"Please accept my apologies, and my promise to never bother you again. I'm sorry for any pain I may have cased you. Sincerely, Mike Finley."

Of course, I continued to despise him, but distantly. This experience was very sordid and very embarrassing to me. But because of it something important happened to me. I realized that things are not always what they seem -- our reasons for the present often lie in the mysterious past. I learned that it is very hard to persuade people of things that run counter to their interests. And I sensed to my surprise that Naiden was actually right about surrealism and solipcism -- that it is a shortcut to expression. A better art, a better life, would be one that builds on reality, that is awake and thinking, not just dreaming.

These were good lessons. They made the whole fracas almost worthwhile.

Years later, word came to me that Naiden was dying of congestive heart failure, brought on my a life of hard drinking. People I trusted told me that while he was not especially nice, he wasn't as bad as I'd made him appear. He was a tough guy, who grew up in a Russian immigrant family where action counted and words didn’t. His rebellion was to make a life of words, far from home.

No, I didn’t make a deathbed visit to him and make up. For that matter, he didn’t even die. But it softened things to know that he too, in his own zone, was learning.