Sherod Santos, “The Great God Pan Is Dead”

In winter coats the couples arrived
sharing a single umbrella. Others fended off
the sleety rain with hats, newspapers, and scarves.
In the foyer, they took off their overcoats
in silence, though the men were especially solicitous,
and the women left alone to ponder their thoughts
were careful to avoid each other’s eyes.
As if stooping beneath a threshold, they bowed
before they entered the room where everyone
gathered into haphazard groups of threes and fours.
They stood that way for a very long time,
and since no one could think what else to do,
some of them wept, some of them prayed,
some of them simply stayed outside
as ice flowers formed on the windows,
and the sleet turned slowly to snow.

The Intricated Soul collects poems from five previous books, and adds several new works, of which this is one. Other recent poems by Santos include “A Writer’s Life” (from Valparaiso Poetry Review), “A Place in Maine” (Slate), and three poems translated from the Lyric Greek (Poetry Daily).

Last month, the blog How a Poem Happens talked to Santos about the writing of “Carousel” (which is also in this volume) and elicited the confession that “I’ve been struggling with it—or it has been struggling with me—for ten or so years.” In 2002, he elaborated on his process to another interviewer: “One can either muscle a poem in a direction settled on before the first line is written, or allow the poem—through its own generative inclinations, the swell of its music, the associative connections suggested by its images, the syntactical affect of its sentences—to lead somewhere you hadn’t foreseen before you sat down to write the poem. In that sense, one allows a poem to evolve more like a dream, carried away by impulses which are not so governed by the conscious mind, perhaps even by impulses the conscious mind has attempted to suppress. This makes writing poems, for me at least, a good deal more perilous, for one must give up the assurances of a fixed destination and allow uncertainty to fill the sails. But this is part of the thrill that draws me back to the empty page.”

18 February 2010 | poetry |