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The two long poems of this book wrestle with the history of a father and son. I began writing Snake's Tooth in fall 1973, sparked by anger that my father wouldn't accept or respect my vocation as a poet. Okay, I thought, I'll write a poem to him: that'll make him read it, whether he likes it or not! This is an old theme, the fathers of poets have it rough...
My father, Bernard Simon, was a man of the older half of the New World, one generation out of steerage; Jewish childhood in the Deep South firmly behind him, he aspired to climb modestly into the light, "in the American dream of every generation rising a step or so in status, in accomplishment, in happiness, in wealth." In his own youth he had been a frustrated playwright and novelist, but the Great Depression taught him frightening things about a job and money. If I was going to be a writer, why couldn't I write a play, it would be so easy, or teach in a university?
In Snake's Tooth I found myself peering into the old roots of our quarrel. I found pieces of myself I hadn't known I'd lost, feelings of rage and abandonment dating back to eleven, to five. I stumbled out of the poem, shaken, closer to the warmth of love than where I started.
In Snake's Tooth, I was hoping to tell enough of my father's story that it would needle him into writing the rest. He wrote back three informative, defensive, provocative, eloquent, difficult letters, which I have reprinted here; but never did get to an autobiography. He felt that when you write down your life, that means it's essentially over.
Snake's Tooth, and the dialogue it initiated, proved cathartic for both of us, and a certain barbed sting dissolved from our relationship. But in late 1975, the abdominal pain which had bothered him for some time was diagnosed as malignant colonic cancer. The rest of his life was wracked with doctors, chemotherapy, and pain. All during his dying, and for months after the death, I scribbled at the fragments that would become Step Into Air. I did not ever show him this material...
1981