Klutz — The Story of a Poem

In the spring of 1985, I finished my M.F.A. in creative writing.

I was burned out. Two years of writing poetry and short stories and presenting them in writing workshops for unrelenting (and not very helpful) peer critique is brutal. Don’t try it.

I had drained the well and the water table. For a year, I wrote nothing.

I went to work for a bank, entry-level, in a back-office clerical role, processing mortgage loan payoffs and cancelling deeds of trust. I was hardly T.S. Eliot working for Lloyd’s; far from it. Plus, I had no Pound or Hemingway to arrange a private fund so I could escape from my day job.

One night I was washing dishes and this poem arrived, unannounced:

The Klutz

The sink narrows like a vise,
and the wineglass I’m washing
pings against the porcelain sink,
sprinkling shards into the suds.

I assume a constant state
of genuflection, retrieving
pills, pens, coins: they flee
my grasp like Mexican jumping
beans. Please do not ask me
to carry the groceries, hang
pictures, dust the mantle. I
succumb to indexterity.

Made for the moon maybe?
Where everything fragile
gives a second chance,
and the Blue Delft figurine
knocked from the counter
floats over my fingertips,
whirling above gravity,
a dervish of the divine.

If you have ever felt like objects in the physical world are working against you, you will certainly appreciate a kitchen sink that “narrows like a vise” and futile attempts to hang an uncooperative picture, or dust elusive figurines on the mantle.

The clumsy first-person narrator looks for relief, some form of divine intervention, where gravity might suspend it’s laws and the wineglass stays in one piece for another day.

I also had fun with the self-deprecating title, from the Yiddish klots meaning “clumsy person, blockhead,” which derives from the Middle High German klotz “lump, ball.”

There is humor and wit in the piece, and domestic insight (please don’t ask me to do household chores that we both know will result in something broken!).

The speaker addresses himself, and perhaps an adjacent spouse, who shakes her head in dismay.

The speaker, in wondering if he is made for the moon, admits he may not be entirely at home on this planet or in his house.

There’s also a spiritual subtext here, as the poem speaks of genuflection, and a zen-like acceptance, succumbing to the minor god, indexerity (a real word, by the way).

At twenty lines, this blank verse poem reminds me a bit of a sonnet. A more accomplished poet might have been able to pull it off in one of the classic sonnet forms: Petrarchan, Shakespearian or Spenserian.

I’m not that guy and I know I’m not that guy.

“The Klutz” has its moments and I’m glad the editors of Tar River Poetry concurred when they agreed to publish it.

This essay originally appeared in The Writing Mirror (2018)