Michael Gottlieb
Selections from Collected Memoirs
from THE LIFE WE HAVE CHOSEN, 90s - 2000s
26. Daisy and the Driveway
Over the years, as our kids grew up, we came to share our house with two cats and two dogs. Their various tenures overlapped. There was a good amount of time I would set out four bowls of food in the kitchen every morning. The second dog was Ollie, another Newfoundland, a Landseer, black and white. In his old age he spent a lot of time in New York City. By then Robin and I both had jobs there. He became a minor celebrity in Chelsea.
A stunning dog, whenever we walked him along 23rd Street the Gray Line buses would slow down so that the tourists could take pictures. He was always the rambunctious teenager. But Daisy, truer to her breed, was the nanny, gentle, protective. The cats, when they were kittens, would curl up inside her paws. The kids napped atop her.
In the morning, when they were little, the children went to the end of the driveway to wait for the school bus. Daisy would go with them and lie down on the asphalt. Robin would keep an eye on them from a window. The bus would come, the driver would toot his horn, swing open the door and say hi to the dog. The kids would get on the bus, off they would go, and Daisy would slowly make her way back to the house.
Whenever I saw this, if I was, say, running late that morning, a feeling came over me. I felt it also at the dinner table, all of us sitting there. And other times too, like when I’d find myself at the wheel an SUV full of boys heading to a Saturday hockey game at the godawful far end of Connecticut at some inhumanly early hour of the morning.
I used to describe this feeling by quoting the Talking Heads: “…This is not my beautiful home. This is not my beautiful wife…”
Frankly, it was not easy to accept this was indeed my life. Having a family, a decent home, those were things I’d come to believe I’d never have. Who was I to have such things? A poet; in so many ways the very definition of a loser.
A continual and continuous disappointment to my parents. Barely able to make a living. What did they say when the other parents, their friends down in Florida, started bragging about their kids? Oh, your son is a lawyer trying cases at the Supreme Court? Oh, your son is a doctor, curing cancer? Our son? A poet. He talked us into letting him go to this ridiculous college in Vermont, the most expensive in the country by the way, so he could learn to be a poet. Impressive, no? Then he found himself a great job, something to do with the Guggenheim Museum. It meant he got to go on unemployment every summer. Isn’t that special? So, then he ended up working a movie studio and of course he got fired from that. Foreign Service Test? No, we never mentioned that to him. The Post Office test, that we suggested. And where does he live? On the fifth floor of Old Law tenement in Little Italy. Remember when we called them slums? Don’t ask me to climb those stairs a second time. An apartment so small his grandmother, fresh from Ellis Island, would have spat on the floor and gotten back on the boat.
Nothing in my life had really prepared me for such a life. I couldn’t help but wonder, was all this really mine? Could someone come and take it all away? And, of course, assuming that it was all real, and really mine, and no one was going to show up on my doorstep brandishing some writ with a gang of moving men behind him – would they be Israelis? – what had I done to deserve any of this?
But then, after a while, as I look back now, that feeling started to fade. Maybe it was all those nights reading E.B. White to my daughter. Maybe it was watching those two tiny children grow up into smart, healthy, happy kids. But eventually, it took a good number of years, I stopped feeling like a character in a David Byrne lyric. I wasn’t that guy he sang a bout with the big house and the beautiful wife, nor was I the one who’s gone underground, because he no longer has any time for CGBG or the Mudd Club. While I remembered CBGB and the Mudd Club very well, thank you very much, and Hurrah too, as well as Danceteria and the Pep, and Max’s, along with the Lower Manhattan Ocean Club and One University, and the Holiday Bar and the Red Bar, and the Ukes and Puffy’s too, the time came when this life I was now living didn’t seem so strange. While I can’t say that I ever came to the opinion that I really deserved it, I did come to believe that it was real. And as difficult as going to work always was – work never got easier, no matter how well the company was doing – this life was something real, and good.
Could I have lived my life differently? I didn’t not want to be a poet, that’s for sure. But when I looked back at my life from that vantage, at the beginning of the 2000s, I could see a lot of decisions that I’d made that perhaps I could have made differently, knowing what I knew now. Who doesn’t have similar thoughts?
Was everything that was getting thrown at me, that I was putting up with in the office every day – and in the middle of the night, because waking up in the middle of the night now seemed to be a job requirement – was that the price I had to pay for all this, this life, this wife, this family?
Maybe I could have led my life differently, made different decisions, and still had all this. Maybe I should have gotten an MFA and hopped on the tenure track at some college or university. Why not me? Maybe there were other options I had never considered. There had to be. But I had made certain choices. Willingly? Perhaps. Wittingly? That was another question. And now I had to live with them. And yes, this was the price I had to pay to have these things that meant everything to me. Not the cars or the houses but the family. And the fact was, things were looking up.
59. Does that Count for Something?
I had made my choices. I’d set forth bravely twenty years earlier, boldly leaving the city, starting a family, starting a business. Some of them were good choices. Look at the wife I ended up with, and this family. Look at them now, I said to myself. Some other choices were not so good.
As I look back at these twenty years, from 1990 to 2011, part of me says I had been focusing on family and work, making a living. As opposed to whatever I’d been spending my time before, during the Seventies and the Eighties. That earlier time, that’s when I’d really been a poet, right? Now, I was just a middle-aged guy with a family, trying to get by. I wasn’t really much of a poet any more. But was that so? Hadn’t I done as much writing during these two decades as when I was younger, before I had a family, before I had many, any responsibilities?
Now, I want to say that if the first memoir in this book, The Colorama, is about childhood and youth, and becoming a person, and the second memoir, The Empire City, is about coming of age as a poet, then this memoir is about that period, from 1990 to around 2011, when I was trying to figure out that Jobs thing: how to have a life and be a poet too.
And so, did I have that whole Jobs thing figured out? Really? What a role model am I. And as I looked back at what I’d done, what I’d managed to make happen, what had happened to me, what I kept coming back to was how easily all of this could be taken away. Family, fortune, health. How close it all came to disappearing. I’d almost lost one of my children to disease. I did lose my business and that almost wiped me out, in every way. And then, just when things were looking up, then came the cancer.
And how well had I managed things? In those essays I came to write I argued that one should be able to have a life, a partner, a spouse and a family, and be a poet too. And, if that meant taking a straight job, as we used to call it, so be it. So, how well had I done on that front? I want to say that I was a good husband and father, but well before my kids were grown, I had to leave them, every week for most of the week, in order to make a living, because I’d messed things up so much for them, for us. So much for my big talk about how we could do it all, have it all.
But I did keep writing. Maybe that means something. And a lot of people, people with whom I was young, didn’t. They couldn’t take it or didn’t make it. Although the fact that I for one didn’t stop doesn’t make me better than them. I know that. It’s inarguable.
And now? I was still here, that did count for something, I guess. And my family was still intact, healthy and happy. That, naturally, was most important of all. And so I was, I am, grateful for what I have.
Do I think that keeping on with this had any impact? On the world, on readers? I think I’m realistic enough about the effect that poets and poetry have on the world to be free from any illusion that it would make much of a difference to the world, to anyone, if I stopped. I can say, and I do believe, that if there was no poetry at all, well, that would make a world of difference to the world. But that’s poetry, not one poet, and an aging one at that. Nor had I, even back then, any illusion that this writing would save me from the cloaking oblivion that awaits us all.
The life of the poet, it was now clear, was the overarching subject of my poetry. It had been all along. I had tried to have a life, and a family, and be a poet too, and after these twenty years, written about here, I guess I’d lived enough life to ask the questions posed in the essays I was starting to write.
But back then, in 2011, it never occurred to me to say: enough, I’m done. Nor does it now, more than a decade later. And yet, the externalities, as an economist would put it, remain unchanged: how many will read this? Who will care? What difference does it make?
And so, why? Is it because of the real pleasure, the good feeling that, undeniably, there’s no way around it, that steals over you when you sit down and write? This is what you’re meant to do in this world, even if the world doesn’t give a damn. That’s surely part of it. And how much might sheer stubbornness contribute? But maybe it comes down to something else. This is just what I do. This is what you do. This is what we do. And we do it because this is what we’re supposed to do. This is the life we have chosen.
Michael Gottlieb is a poet and the author of twenty-three books of poetry, essays and memoir. His next book, forthcoming from Chax Press and excerpted here, will be his Collected Memoirs, to be published in a uniform edition with his Collected Essays, published by Chax Press in March, 2023 and his Selected Poems, brought out by Chax in 2021. A first-generation member of the Language Poetry school, he helped edit one of its foundational magazines, Roof. He was also the publisher of Case / Casement Books (1981-1999) and started the Last Tuesday multi-media performance series at La MaMa in NYC in the 1980s. In 2023 the Poetry Project at St. Mark’s in New York City will for the third time serve as the producer for a dramatization of his work. At that time, it will present an adaptation of ‘The Voices’, his long poem about Covid and NYC, directed by Chana Porter. Gottlieb was born in the Bronx and grew up in Westchester County, NY. He graduated from Bennington College where he studied poetry and painting. He divides his time between New York City and Connecticut.
from THE LIFE WE HAVE CHOSEN, 90s - 2000s
26. Daisy and the Driveway
Over the years, as our kids grew up, we came to share our house with two cats and two dogs. Their various tenures overlapped. There was a good amount of time I would set out four bowls of food in the kitchen every morning. The second dog was Ollie, another Newfoundland, a Landseer, black and white. In his old age he spent a lot of time in New York City. By then Robin and I both had jobs there. He became a minor celebrity in Chelsea.
A stunning dog, whenever we walked him along 23rd Street the Gray Line buses would slow down so that the tourists could take pictures. He was always the rambunctious teenager. But Daisy, truer to her breed, was the nanny, gentle, protective. The cats, when they were kittens, would curl up inside her paws. The kids napped atop her.
In the morning, when they were little, the children went to the end of the driveway to wait for the school bus. Daisy would go with them and lie down on the asphalt. Robin would keep an eye on them from a window. The bus would come, the driver would toot his horn, swing open the door and say hi to the dog. The kids would get on the bus, off they would go, and Daisy would slowly make her way back to the house.
Whenever I saw this, if I was, say, running late that morning, a feeling came over me. I felt it also at the dinner table, all of us sitting there. And other times too, like when I’d find myself at the wheel an SUV full of boys heading to a Saturday hockey game at the godawful far end of Connecticut at some inhumanly early hour of the morning.
I used to describe this feeling by quoting the Talking Heads: “…This is not my beautiful home. This is not my beautiful wife…”
Frankly, it was not easy to accept this was indeed my life. Having a family, a decent home, those were things I’d come to believe I’d never have. Who was I to have such things? A poet; in so many ways the very definition of a loser.
A continual and continuous disappointment to my parents. Barely able to make a living. What did they say when the other parents, their friends down in Florida, started bragging about their kids? Oh, your son is a lawyer trying cases at the Supreme Court? Oh, your son is a doctor, curing cancer? Our son? A poet. He talked us into letting him go to this ridiculous college in Vermont, the most expensive in the country by the way, so he could learn to be a poet. Impressive, no? Then he found himself a great job, something to do with the Guggenheim Museum. It meant he got to go on unemployment every summer. Isn’t that special? So, then he ended up working a movie studio and of course he got fired from that. Foreign Service Test? No, we never mentioned that to him. The Post Office test, that we suggested. And where does he live? On the fifth floor of Old Law tenement in Little Italy. Remember when we called them slums? Don’t ask me to climb those stairs a second time. An apartment so small his grandmother, fresh from Ellis Island, would have spat on the floor and gotten back on the boat.
Nothing in my life had really prepared me for such a life. I couldn’t help but wonder, was all this really mine? Could someone come and take it all away? And, of course, assuming that it was all real, and really mine, and no one was going to show up on my doorstep brandishing some writ with a gang of moving men behind him – would they be Israelis? – what had I done to deserve any of this?
But then, after a while, as I look back now, that feeling started to fade. Maybe it was all those nights reading E.B. White to my daughter. Maybe it was watching those two tiny children grow up into smart, healthy, happy kids. But eventually, it took a good number of years, I stopped feeling like a character in a David Byrne lyric. I wasn’t that guy he sang a bout with the big house and the beautiful wife, nor was I the one who’s gone underground, because he no longer has any time for CGBG or the Mudd Club. While I remembered CBGB and the Mudd Club very well, thank you very much, and Hurrah too, as well as Danceteria and the Pep, and Max’s, along with the Lower Manhattan Ocean Club and One University, and the Holiday Bar and the Red Bar, and the Ukes and Puffy’s too, the time came when this life I was now living didn’t seem so strange. While I can’t say that I ever came to the opinion that I really deserved it, I did come to believe that it was real. And as difficult as going to work always was – work never got easier, no matter how well the company was doing – this life was something real, and good.
Could I have lived my life differently? I didn’t not want to be a poet, that’s for sure. But when I looked back at my life from that vantage, at the beginning of the 2000s, I could see a lot of decisions that I’d made that perhaps I could have made differently, knowing what I knew now. Who doesn’t have similar thoughts?
Was everything that was getting thrown at me, that I was putting up with in the office every day – and in the middle of the night, because waking up in the middle of the night now seemed to be a job requirement – was that the price I had to pay for all this, this life, this wife, this family?
Maybe I could have led my life differently, made different decisions, and still had all this. Maybe I should have gotten an MFA and hopped on the tenure track at some college or university. Why not me? Maybe there were other options I had never considered. There had to be. But I had made certain choices. Willingly? Perhaps. Wittingly? That was another question. And now I had to live with them. And yes, this was the price I had to pay to have these things that meant everything to me. Not the cars or the houses but the family. And the fact was, things were looking up.
59. Does that Count for Something?
I had made my choices. I’d set forth bravely twenty years earlier, boldly leaving the city, starting a family, starting a business. Some of them were good choices. Look at the wife I ended up with, and this family. Look at them now, I said to myself. Some other choices were not so good.
As I look back at these twenty years, from 1990 to 2011, part of me says I had been focusing on family and work, making a living. As opposed to whatever I’d been spending my time before, during the Seventies and the Eighties. That earlier time, that’s when I’d really been a poet, right? Now, I was just a middle-aged guy with a family, trying to get by. I wasn’t really much of a poet any more. But was that so? Hadn’t I done as much writing during these two decades as when I was younger, before I had a family, before I had many, any responsibilities?
Now, I want to say that if the first memoir in this book, The Colorama, is about childhood and youth, and becoming a person, and the second memoir, The Empire City, is about coming of age as a poet, then this memoir is about that period, from 1990 to around 2011, when I was trying to figure out that Jobs thing: how to have a life and be a poet too.
And so, did I have that whole Jobs thing figured out? Really? What a role model am I. And as I looked back at what I’d done, what I’d managed to make happen, what had happened to me, what I kept coming back to was how easily all of this could be taken away. Family, fortune, health. How close it all came to disappearing. I’d almost lost one of my children to disease. I did lose my business and that almost wiped me out, in every way. And then, just when things were looking up, then came the cancer.
And how well had I managed things? In those essays I came to write I argued that one should be able to have a life, a partner, a spouse and a family, and be a poet too. And, if that meant taking a straight job, as we used to call it, so be it. So, how well had I done on that front? I want to say that I was a good husband and father, but well before my kids were grown, I had to leave them, every week for most of the week, in order to make a living, because I’d messed things up so much for them, for us. So much for my big talk about how we could do it all, have it all.
But I did keep writing. Maybe that means something. And a lot of people, people with whom I was young, didn’t. They couldn’t take it or didn’t make it. Although the fact that I for one didn’t stop doesn’t make me better than them. I know that. It’s inarguable.
And now? I was still here, that did count for something, I guess. And my family was still intact, healthy and happy. That, naturally, was most important of all. And so I was, I am, grateful for what I have.
Do I think that keeping on with this had any impact? On the world, on readers? I think I’m realistic enough about the effect that poets and poetry have on the world to be free from any illusion that it would make much of a difference to the world, to anyone, if I stopped. I can say, and I do believe, that if there was no poetry at all, well, that would make a world of difference to the world. But that’s poetry, not one poet, and an aging one at that. Nor had I, even back then, any illusion that this writing would save me from the cloaking oblivion that awaits us all.
The life of the poet, it was now clear, was the overarching subject of my poetry. It had been all along. I had tried to have a life, and a family, and be a poet too, and after these twenty years, written about here, I guess I’d lived enough life to ask the questions posed in the essays I was starting to write.
But back then, in 2011, it never occurred to me to say: enough, I’m done. Nor does it now, more than a decade later. And yet, the externalities, as an economist would put it, remain unchanged: how many will read this? Who will care? What difference does it make?
And so, why? Is it because of the real pleasure, the good feeling that, undeniably, there’s no way around it, that steals over you when you sit down and write? This is what you’re meant to do in this world, even if the world doesn’t give a damn. That’s surely part of it. And how much might sheer stubbornness contribute? But maybe it comes down to something else. This is just what I do. This is what you do. This is what we do. And we do it because this is what we’re supposed to do. This is the life we have chosen.
Michael Gottlieb is a poet and the author of twenty-three books of poetry, essays and memoir. His next book, forthcoming from Chax Press and excerpted here, will be his Collected Memoirs, to be published in a uniform edition with his Collected Essays, published by Chax Press in March, 2023 and his Selected Poems, brought out by Chax in 2021. A first-generation member of the Language Poetry school, he helped edit one of its foundational magazines, Roof. He was also the publisher of Case / Casement Books (1981-1999) and started the Last Tuesday multi-media performance series at La MaMa in NYC in the 1980s. In 2023 the Poetry Project at St. Mark’s in New York City will for the third time serve as the producer for a dramatization of his work. At that time, it will present an adaptation of ‘The Voices’, his long poem about Covid and NYC, directed by Chana Porter. Gottlieb was born in the Bronx and grew up in Westchester County, NY. He graduated from Bennington College where he studied poetry and painting. He divides his time between New York City and Connecticut.
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