DAVID HOCKNEY

ALPHABET POEM: TO THE LETTER I by Erica Jong

I, io, ich, yo, Я, uppercase, lowercase, sometimes confused with love which starts with L, but could easily be I, with a foot, a pseudopod facing the future, or at least the righthand margin of the page –all we know of life and all we need to know.

The poet must abolish I, said Keats; have no identity, be as water flowing around a rock –a voice for all the unsaid waves within, antenna of the deep.

‘Here lies one whose name was writ in water,’ he would have graven on his gravestone had he but world enough and time –but the harpstring broke, and his dearest friends would not deny his I –(they could not for they still believed themselves).

Ich, I, io, yo, Я turned from lettres majuscules to miniscule by cummings (ee, I mean) to droplets of vapor condensed along a blade of grass (by Whitman), to Blake’s tiger, to Dickinson’s buzzing fly (we so insist on having names, then die).

For the poet whoever he (or she) may be is always beneath the violets singing like wind or water…

To become a natural thing, eye of the cosmos, sans i’s, sans teeth, sans everything, to see the rock the hand, the water, rippling around the thrown pebble as part of the same art, the art of the possible, life passing into death and death to life –poetry not politics.

The abolition of the I, eye, eye, the end of i, so that even the dot becomes a flyspeck, morse code of infinity… i dies –but the breath lingers on through the medium of the magic alphabet and in its wake death is no more than metaphor.

The alphabet is poetry’s DNA; what sperm and egg are to our progeny, the alphabet is to the poet, germ-cells, single, yet dividing like a zygote, characters encompassing the world.

We are all one poet and always we have one communal name, god’s name, nameless, a flame in the heart, a breath, a gust of air, prana whistling in the dark.