Poets often say, “I write for myself.” No doubt that’s true. I know I write for myself, to figure out how I feel, and to guide my way home. As Joan Didion said, “We tell ourselves stories in order to live. At least for a while.”
But publishing something, poetry or prose, changes everything. Once something is published, I no longer own it. It belongs to whoever reads it.
And he or she may or may not read something as I intended, which is not only fine, it’s good. The twentieth century philosopher Michael Polanyi argued that our words often reach much further than we intended.
For example, the title of the book is from the ending of “Brother to Dragons,” which is among other things, about Thomas Jefferson (by the way, I stole the title from Robert Penn Warren’s book-length poem on Jefferson. I would hope the reader catches the allusion, but it doesn’t really matter). When Jefferson wrote “all men are created equal,” he might have intended that to imply “all white men who own property.” But now, I would hope, all people of good will take it to mean “all men and women” (well, I would hope).
One of my fellow writers objected to the title Chasing the Dragon because it does refer to drug addiction, and we don’t want to look like we’re glorifying drug addiction. I certainly don’t. My best friend died of an overdose when we were in our 20’s. I think about him every day.
I was certainly aware of that use of the phrase when I wrote the poem, but I wasn’t trying to glorify drug use any more than I was trying to glorify the somewhat kinky sex in the poem (it was, after all, in the French Quarter).
The poem begins “I’ve lived in the South 50 years and I still don’t know what it means.” So, when I end the poem “I’ve chased the dragon 50 years,” it probably implies something like “I’ve tried to understand what living in the South means for 50 years” (somewhat unsuccessfully, I might add). Read the poem, and see what you think it means. Your guess is as good as mine.
But dragons have been around from the beginning. In the Babylonian creation myth, the great god Marduke kills the sea dragon Tiamat and fashions the world from her body. Not as dignified as Genesis? Don’t be so sure. In the beginning, “darkness was upon the face of the deep.” The Hebrew word for the deep is Tehome, and some scholars think that is a corruption for Tiamat.
So, dragons lurk everywhere. The Jewish people always tended to associate dragons with the water, such as the Leviathan. Christians placed the dragon on land, in the garden of Eden. In the book of Revelation, Saint John of Patmos identifies the dragon as the great serpent, Satan. So, the dragon might play powerfully in the end, as well as the beginning.
My own life view is too much molded by an early reading of Beowulf. If you haven’t read it, spoiler alert: there is a dragon in the ending, and it’s not pretty.
But I encourage you to read on until the end – my poems or Beowulf or the Bible or anything else that comes along – pretty ending or not. Chase the Dragon with me, although, really, each of us has to chase it alone. Determine for yourself what it means.
If it means anything at all.