I'm going to answer a question I have gently side-stepped in many interviews over the years, taking the polite and diplomatic route, treating my works like the children they are to me, showing no favouritism.
I am often asked what is my best, most memorable, more important work.
That's a tough question for a poet with my catalog to respond to, as I can give reasons for a hundred to be considered each, in their own season and reason, the one most important work. But I decided to ask myself the question. What poem has had the most impact on your life?
That's an easy question to answer. It is an older work, often obscured by the popularity to its generational sibling "Monument", "I should have been immortal" and "The Unicorns".
It is "My Electric Lady". As with most births, there was nothing outwardly auspicious about it. I hammered it out on Psyche's typewriter in her study on South High Street in Morgantown, West Virginia, when I was 18 and did not yet understand where the spirit, the muse, the creative force came from.
It flowed in one draft, no editing, no clever assimilation of random nodes into a single entity. The "Electric Lady" of the title was Psyche, my first real love and perhaps the one that will haunt me all my days. The source of the image: She had a shirt, deep blue, with the tracing of a light blue Japanese lady with a parasol on the front. We had nicknamed the shirt the "Electric Lady" shirt, as it looked like the woman was glowing with neon-blue energies.
One evening, as Psyche (her real name was and is Nancy, but it is simpler to keep the totem-muse consistent) was studying, I sat down at the typewriter, as I would often do, and tapped out a poem.
At the time I could not tell you where it came from. It seemed to tell a story, but a story I did not think I was writing. It was perhaps the first work I can recall that came without conscious action on my part, from the preconscious.
When I was through, she and I read it and she became very upset. It foretold a parting of the ways, where I would have to choose between her and my place as a poet. It seemed ludicrous and terrible to comprehend.
Four years later she told me I would have to give up poetry to keep her. And the poem was fulfilled. Whether she was consciously or preconsciously fulfilling the prophecy, or whether my preconscious knew, just knew, that someday the choice would be given to me, I knew the choice was not a choice at all.
And a few weeks later, as I visited her at central Missouri State University, where she had already met the man who would eventually take my place in her life, a man of undivided loyalties, the final lines came to pass.
My Electric Lady
dance for me, my electric lady.
sing a song that gently soothes my soul.
tomorrow I must leave your world again, my love...
as I strive to reach this endless journey's goal.
I once gave up my poor and mortal birthright,
so that I might touch the sky and see true things.
my love, I'm not so sure I would have started,
if I could have seen the pain this voyage brings.
once again, my electric lady,
touch me and bring forth my too-rare smile.
for the moment I am just another mortal-
and a little love will last me quite a while.
if we had only met before the present,
and what is gone had made me what I am,
a love would be that all who live might envy-
but I cannot come back this way again.
for the final time, my electric lady...
give me all that I may take within my vow.
tomorrow is my child and a gift to the stars-
and the night is just my brother here and now.
William F. DeVault. all rights reserved.
This work, both in the manner of its writing, and the breaking apart of my person to be what I believe I was supposed to be, by nature or nurture, truly was the most important work.
Without the tapping into the preconscious, 95-99% of my later works would have never come to pass.
Without the pain of that parting, which still is like a knife in my soul, I would have never grown out and beyond my shell of experience and there would have never been a Valkyrie, a Leopard, a Panther, Brigit, a Southern Siren, a Mad Gypsy, Nightblooming, The Wisp, Arachne, a Goldenheart (who was, in part, an echo for a return to the moments before that poem entered the world).
I would have been, perhaps, happy and loving and loved. But I would not be who I am today. I would have never fathered the three wonderful children I now know. I would've never found my home in Venice, or friends of the brilliance and joy I have had.
Perhaps I would have been a greater writer, or perhaps at least a better person, but I know of no one with a richer legacy of poetry and I am content that I have thrown myself on my fair share of spiritual hand grenades long the path, trying to help others (perhaps even out a sense of unworthiness I am trying to transcend, rooted in my loss of Psyche).
In any case, there's my answer. There's the poem. Next question?
