When my friend (and wonderful poet) Joan Barasovska asked me if I could be the standby reader (at her North Caroline Poetry Series April reading at McIntyres bookstore) for the distinguished Michael Hettich, who might not be able to come, I began gathering the five or six poems I thought would read well in the 15 minutes allotted. Three new ones due out this spring, natch. “Imagination Itself,” both for Earth Day and allowing a brief salutation to Sy Safransky, publisher and editor emeritus of The Sun, who had published it years earlier. Since readers were to bring their books, I wanted at least one other from The Scheme of Things.

Of course — for an audience largely made up of poets, I’d read the can’t miss “One Good New Poem.” I hadn’t read it much in recent years but from the time of its first draft in the early 1990s through the publication of The Scheme of Things in 2015, it always went over well, starting with the opening that most writers can relate to. I opened the book and began to say it to myself. Such fun to read aloud!

By now I could imagine I’d have the audience with me–always had. And maybe they’d continue as I described the familiar desolation:

And then the turn, what was once a silly notion that always got a laugh, especially from writers who’d done poetry in the schools classes in elementary schools and knew how children’s imaginations could be so much more vivid than ours:

Wait. What? Buy a gun? Hold people up? Take a 3rd grade class hostage??

I can never read that. Even now, there are probably people of recent generations who could not imagine that that could ever have been “a fanciful notion,” as my husband described it when I described my shock. As a notion, harmless, so outlandish as to be funny. Once.

I don’t think this is the common case of something that was always awful but is only recognized as such by a more evolved sensibility. It is not the world that has changed that makes the evil of “boys will be boys” and “locker room talk” evil. Or the easy assumption of my high-school self that “Gone with the Wind” was a wonderful movie even if it had some problems in how it depicted Black people. Or the slurs in past times for gay people. Those things were always awful.

But honestly, there was a time when to say I’d buy a gun to steal poems from famous poets or hold a 3rd-grade class hostage to steal their dream-images was simply ridiculous, laughable. So unthinkable as to be a fanciful notion.

There was. That time is gone. And of course immeasurably more is lost in that change than the ability for me to ever read this poem aloud again. But what I guess it reminds me is how much has changed, how terribly. Maybe even in 2015 it was too late to say those words — the Columbine shooting was 1999, Sandy Hook was 2012. Maybe I was oblivious that something I had written before Columbine was turning bad. I know I’m not oblivious now, it makes me want to throw up.

A few friends have said maybe I can revise the poem, figure out a different image. Maybe I can. It would be nice to be able to rehabilitate it (is there a Poem Rehab place it could check into?). It would be nice to finish out the desolation of Part 1:

And have a way to get to my Hopkins “Leaden Echo, Golden Echo” conceit, planting one more little flag for the imagination:

It might be nice. But there are things, thanks to how the unthinkable has been made almost ordinary, that even the imagination cannot do.