During his formative adventures, a twenty-something, swashbuckling Li Bai (701-761) traveled to what is now Wuhan, the capital of Hubei province, in southeast China. His intention was to visit Yellow Crane Tower, a site sacred to Taoists, on the Yangtze River. He planned to write a poem about the view from the Tower and post it on a wall among the other poems hanging there. In Tang China, posting poems on the walls of buildings open to the public was a major form of “publication”—the best way for a young poet to gain recognition. Before he finished his poem, however, Li discovered Cui Hao’s poem “Yellow Crane Tower” posted there. Three years Li’s junior, Cui had already passed the government-service exam, which included the composition of poetry. Li, bless his heart, refused ever to take it. Still, Cui was an established poet; Li was not. What’s more, Cui’s poem was in the seven-character lines of “regulated” verse that were popular at court, but not yet Li’s forte. The poem starts with an allusion to a local legend: An old man drank regularly at a nearby tavern, never paid and just kept running a tab. Though the owner never pressured him to pay up, the old man one day painted, with an orange peel, a much larger than life-sized crane on the tavern wall, as if to settle his bill, and vanished. Subsequently, whenever patrons played instruments or sang in that tavern, the crane in the wall would dance by moving its wings in time to the music. This miraculous phenomenon made the establishment a tourist attraction, and the owner became rich. Some years later, the old man returned, summoned the crane from the wall and flew away on its back. Neither of them was ever seen in this world again. Yellow Crane Tower The yellow crane, spurred by an old man, took off and is gone. When birds like that retire, they won’t be coming back again. Emptiness and a sacred tower—they alone remain: a thousand years of vagrant clouds rambling on and on. Where clear, the river mirrors banks of lush, snug Ginkgo trees, and Parrot Island shimmers with exceedingly green grass. Which way is home? I want my home here in the sunset haze. Nostalgia hurts. And so much surface: misty restlessness. The hissy fit of jealousy Li threw when he read those lines is the stuff of legend. We are told that he ripped the poem he had started into pieces. A quatrain expressing his frustration has come down to us. Attributed to Li, it may well be later tradition writing what it felt he should have written. It certainly is in keeping with his character: My fists are spoiling to reduce this holy tower to rubble. My soles are hot to stomp that island down into the mud. The poem that Cui Hao tossed off, posted there above my head, is full of what I tried to get just right—but wasn’t able. Beating Cui’s poem became, it seems, an obsession for Li. Over fifty of his subsequent poems refer to Yellow Crane Tower. He never let go of that early defeat. Li Bai yet again "Drinking Alone by Moonlight." I suppose, if one wanted, one could draw a “moral” from this story: Li went on to become the most popular and beloved of Chinese poets. Cui, in contrast, is comparatively minor, and comparatively little of his work has come down to us. Yes, individual failures here and there are of little consequence when one thinks of all the leaps and discoveries that occur in a poet’s career. Never despair, O poets: there is no fixed timeline for growth and revelation. Great poetry can come to the young, the middle-aged and the senescent. That “lesson” is pretty good, but I find this other one more immediately helpful: a poet should be honest about other poets’ work and fully concede its power and beauty, however frustrating, even infuriating, that excellence might be to his or her self-estimation and ambitions. This often painful honesty about the greatness of others’ work, rooting and rankling in there wherever poetry comes from, is a tried-and-true way to push through into new worlds of possibilities and do what you have never done before.

William McGonagall (1825-1902) was a god-awful poet. Critics assailed him with savage reviews and audiences assailed him with rotten vegetables. What endears him to me is his absolute certainty that he was meant to be a poet and his dogged pursuit of recognition. What’s more, as someone who has received his share of rejections, I admire that, for better or worse, he was immune to discouragement and showed insuppressible resilience. In 1878, after his letter requesting royal patronage was rebuffed with a perfunctory “thank you for your interest,” he was so certain the response had been favorable that he hiked sixty miles from Dundee, Scotland, to Balmoral Castle, over mountains and through a thunderstorm, to give a reading as the “Queen’s Poet” for Queen Victoria. Turned away at the door, he walked home and kept on writing. Since, it would seem, any royalty would do, he took an honorific from a letter in which the “King of Burmah” dubbed him “Sir William Topaz McGonagall, Knight of the White Elephant, Burmah.” Though the letter was obviously specious, McGonagall used the title for the rest of his career. Poverty, desire for royal approbation and ridicule sum up his life. Broke in 1887, he sailed to New York City to seek his fortunes. Hence came his enthusiastic “Jottings of New York: A Descriptive Poem,” seventeen lines of which describe Central Park. Let's start with writers and zoo-animals: . . . And as for Central Park, it is lovely to be seen, Especially in the summer season when its shrubberies and trees are green; And the Burns’ statue is there to be seen, Surrounded by trees, on the beautiful sward so green; Also Shakespeare and Sir Walter Scott, Which by Englishmen and Scotchmen will ne’er be forgot. There the people on the Sabbath-day in thousands resort, All loud, in conversation and searching for sport, Some of them viewing the menagerie of wild beasts there, And also beautiful black swans, I do declare. Say what you will about McGonagall’s poetry, the guy wrote what he saw. Rather than present a stop-by-stop account of his visit, however, he groups the material according to theme and its importance to him. The first stanza describes the Literary Walk at the south end of the Mall. A proud Scotsman, he gives us the Scottish Robert Burns and Sir Walter Scott, with Shakespeare thrown in for good measure. The fourth writer in the Literary Walk, the American Fitz-Greene Halleck, is utterly neglected, as if unworthy of mention. The second stanza focuses on Sunday visitors to the park arriving “in thousands,” which, 19th century sources suggest, is an accurate rather than hyperbolic estimation. He likely is watching them enter through the Children’s Gate (5th Avenue and 64th Street) because he goes on to mention the “menagerie” which at the time was housed behind the Arsenal, at the site of the present Zoo. The New York Public Library preserves an undated stereograph of two black swans which very well may be the pair that McGonagall immortalizes in his poem. And there’s beautiful boats to be seen there, And the joyous shouts of the children do rend the air, While the boats sail along with them o’er Lohengrin Lake, And the fare is five cents for children and adults ten is all they take. And there’s also summer-house shades and merry-go-rounds, And with the merry laughter of the children the Park resounds During the livelong Sabbath day, Enjoying the merry-go-round play. . . The third stanza exalts the Lake, the first of the Park’s features to be made open to the public (1858). Boating became available on it in the 1860’s, and McGonagall preserves not just the excited shouts there but, in a bathetic lapse, the exact cost of boat rental for children and adults, as if he were writing promotional copy. The bathos is all the more striking in that, in the preceding line, he, with the lofty literary allusion “Lohengrin Lake,” compares the rowboats with the children in them to the swan-drawn boat of Lohengrin, “the Knight of the Swan,” a German Arthurian hero who sails across a lake to rescue Elsa Duchess of Brabant. In the final stanza, he refers to the first iteration of the Carousel, which operated from 1871-1924. To make it go round, a blind mule and a horse in an underground trench would trudge in a circle, starting and stopping in obedience to a tap of the operator’s foot. In his poem "Central Park," Billy Collins moves in his mind from the current Carousel to the one McGonagall encountered: As the carousel turned in the background, all pinions and mirrors and the heads of horses rising to the steam-blown notes of a calliope, I was learning how the huge thing was first designed to be powered by a blind mule, as it turned out, strapped to the oar of a wheel in an earthen room directly below the merry turning of the carousel. What McGonagall lacks as a poet he makes up for as an enthusiast for all he sees and as a historical source. I can’t help but love him. Thank goodness that, after his visit to the New World, he at last found steady work: he recited his poetry at a circus in Scotland. For fifteen shillings per night, he would face a constant barrage of eggs, herrings and stale bread from the audience. Who says you can’t make a living as a poet?

Synesthesia, which refers to the mingling of one of the five senses with another, itself brings together disparate disciplines and media: neuroscience, trippy drug-experiences, psychedelic music, art and videos, and poetry. The “crossed wires” that it involves are more common than one might assume. Some synesthetic combinations, in fact, have become dead metaphors in English: a “mute color” (auditory and visual), for example, or a “sharp taste” (tactile and gustatory). When used for expressive purposes in literature, however, the sensory leap of synesthesia can be mind-expanding. I remember my astonishment in undergraduate school when I first read a synesthetic simile in a scene called the teichoskopia (“view from the walls”) in Homer’s Iliad. After Helen of Troy identifies a comparatively short and stocky man down on the battle plain as Odysseus, the counselor Antenor recounts that, when he first saw him in an assembly, he didn’t think much of him. He concludes: But when Odysseus with his big chest voice was speaking words like snowflakes in a storm, you’d say no man on earth could rival him. Yes, the image is meant to show the multitude and dynamism of the words uttered by Odysseus, but snowflakes? The emphasis in the first line is clearly on sound—the power of his voice. The leap from heard to seen things, however, pushes his words into the realm of the magical (and beautiful). That example shows the auditory becoming visual. Another instance of synesthesia that has fascinated me for years makes the visual auditory. In the Introductory Canto to Inferno Dante encounters a she-wolf which obstructs his attempt to gain the summit of a hill: As someone buoyant while his profits rise turns fatalistic when a slump comes round, and every prospect in him wails and cries, so that relentless creature, gaining ground, hedged and harassed me rearward, step by step, back down to where the sun is without sound. As the wolf snaps and charges, Dante walks backward down the hill until its summit eclipses the sun from his view. He is not in total darkness, but where sunlight (the direct and, implicitly, audible kind) can no longer be perceived. Interest in synesthesia as a neurological condition has boomed since the Australian sociologist Judy Singer spawned the Neurodiversity Movement with her honor’s thesis in 1998. My encounters with synesthetes have fascinated me throughout my life. In undergraduate school, for example, I had a crush on a friend who saw colors light up in the periphery of her vision in response to music. She had perfect pitch. I remember strumming a chord on my guitar and asking her which one it was. She answered correctly: “G Minor.” When I asked how she knew, she said, “Because it’s purple.” Endowed with the same sonic vision, the Russian composer Alexander Scriabin introduced the chromola, an organ that projects a color for each of the twelve notes, to the instrumentation for his tone poem, “Prometheus: The Poem of Fire” (premièred in 1911). His express purpose was to show audiences the visual phenomena he witnessed in his mind. The French poet Baudelaire, a very likely synesthete, is famous for cross-pollinating different strains of sensory information in his poetry. In her poem “The Bight” Elizabeth Bishop goes so far as to place Baudelaire’s synesthesia not just in his poetry but in his mind as well: . . . the color of the gas flame turned as low as possible. One can smell it turning to gas; if one were Baudelaire one could probably hear it turning to marimba music. Most often Baudelaire processes olfactory information in terms of sights and sounds. In his sonnet “Exotic Perfume,” after huffing the scent of his mistress’s bosom, he hallucinates a “Fantasy Island” populated by succulent fruits, sinewy males and unsuspecting females. He then zooms in to its harbor, and a poem that started with a leap from scent to vision ends on a leap from scent to sound: a sea-breeze wafts in the cinnamon-mango tang of tamarind which, in turn, goes synesthetic when it, as a harmony, “mixes with sailors’ chanteys.” Trippy. Baudelaire was psychedelic long before the Summer of Love. So many winking whiffs. So many piquant whistles. In retrospect, it is uncanny how often synesthesia, both the literary and neurological kind, caught my attention as a quirk or novelty. I felt drawn to it. Last February at age 49, I was given a diagnosis that explained a great deal in my life: I am extremely neurodivergent. I have, in addition to severe ADHD, a form of linguistic synesthesia. Words sounded aloud or in my head have an often unwieldy, mentally palpable heft and girth to wrestle with (literally) and can apply a pressure so great that I involuntarily cringe and groan, sometimes in public. They have voltage and can give a zap that makes me not just twitch, but convulse; they have wattage and can blitz my vision with a flash. The zaps and flashes are exhilarating—I want them. The images, rhythms, connotative resonance and play of poetry are my bread-n-butter but, in the end, I judge the goodness or greatness of a poem by the amount of sensory phantasmagoria it excites in my mind, the Geiger counter. This internal activity and its external manifestations, I now know, are not normal. I always just assumed that my brain operated the same way as most everyone else’s and that I was, vaguely, “excitable.” The diagnosis has clarified certain tendencies in my work. There is, for example, an emphasis on sound (alliteration, assonance, rhyme, etc.) in my poetry, as critics have observed. I now understand that this instinct is an attempt on my part to share with readers the pressing mass and at times brutal percussion of words that can recycle, against my will, in my mind. I have often written in the alliterative verse of Beowulf, in which sound is the main structuring-principle. Here is a passage from my poem “The Unmaking” which tries to capture the climactic moment in the demolition of a ten-story building: The hard-hatted brain     at the helm of the crane stoically lowered     the stainless-steel-stranded rope and raised     a wrecking ball. The arm pivoted,     and pendulous poundage followed it, walloped     the wall and wow: instant inward     disintegration. One of the many, many downsides to my condition (common in those with ADHD) is a sensitivity to the timbres and decibel levels of light. Dante’s “silent sun” has personal resonance in that LED light bulbs (now standard in the United States) emit a light that can be insufferably “shrill” to me. Sunlight, also, can be quite nagging. These lines from my poem “The Fallout” (written before the diagnosis) describe what should be a post-blizzard wonderland in Minnesota: Winter was all night. Wednesday, dawning, detonates megatons of snow. Nothing is beige except that awning. Nothing is black except that crow. The sizzling revelation this is (squinted through saturated slits) glares like the sting a cobra hisses, glints like that pitch the bellbird hits. I have been doing a lot of thinking lately about neurodiversity and the arts. The movement to regard neurodivergent conditions not as disabilities but as welcome varieties of human brains and minds is cathartic and long overdue. I am reluctant, however, at least when it comes to art-making, to run with the admittedly appealing campaign to champion the enhanced capacities that can come with these conditions as “superpowers” because the conditions themselves can present so many obstacles not just to sitting down and making art but to getting through the day. Ultimately, the task of artists remains the same, however their neurons might be arranged: to use every gift they have to create work that connects and will continue to connect with fellow humans, both neurodivergent and not. Very grateful for my recent revelation, I am now going to get back to laboring to do just that as a more conscious artist.