Critique Magazine :: On Writing II

Why write poetry? Where Rilke’s answer to this question was, "Because it’s necessary," I would like to suggest bumping it up a notch; I’d rather call it a compulsion. I write poetry because I’m compelled to do so. I’ve actually tried to avoid it for snatches of years–at least twice during my life–yet I’m always dragged back by the proverbial scruff of my neck. Something within compels me to do this thing.

One could make an elementary argument how Nature makes pleasurable those things it requires of human beings. Ingestion, excretion, procreation–all necessary to move the chromosomes from one generation to the next. But does poetry fall into such a primal category? Perhaps. Consider the buzz a writer receives when the words flow, seemingly unaided at times by the writer’s brain, words pounding down to the page, a torrent of insights, a flood of intuition. As if the writer steps on the power-rail of luck, thoughts magically appear on the page, and it is these rarefied moments of creativity that bring–to use a hippie phrase–a rush. So then, if writing is indeed a drug, then surely poetry is crack cocaine.

There’s that old saw about becoming a writer–if you want to be one, you first have to write a million words. While it’s an old saw, I believe it to be true. However, you seldom hear mentioned what should be tagged to the end of it. The axiom should include the reason for the million words: all these practice words put a writer in position to use the best literary advice I ever discovered. That advice is "don’t think."

At first this might appear to be a paradox. How can one write thoughts if one should not think? Ignoring the temptation to discuss the great volume of thoughts expressed daily with a complete absence of thinking, I will instead suggest there are sound reasons to disengage the controlling conscious when approaching creative writing, and in particular, poetry.

It’s analogous to improvisational music. Let’s take improv jazz (the phrase itself is mostly redundant), blues or rock. In order to really do improvisation, one must first put in–paying the dues–a hundred million notes. The learning experience in this is not simply the development of skill with the instrument (whether guitar or pen), but primarily to learn the location of that point where the conscious mind lets go and something else takes over. This is the moment of great improvisation ... and great poetry.

How does one find this point? Its island is charted somewhere in the midst of that ocean of a million words, and the meridian lines you use to get there are those strands of pleasure that come when certain thoughts emanate from the pen. These discussions always tip into the metaphysical, although I’ll later make a case for the opposite, but for now let’s stay with the pleasure concept. Earlier I mentioned Nature makes pleasurable those things required of human beings, and if a human is caught up in the throes of poetry, the thruway can be found by following the strands of pleasure.

It took me many years to identify this odd idea. But at last I understood that those times I received the greatest pleasure from writing occurred when I released the most conscious control. Many times, though, when I finally gave up control, I feared I was writing crap or tripe or obscure jargon–a buzz but meaningless–yet when I went back to edit and re-write, I discovered some of my best material resonating there. From this realization, it then became an apprenticeship of learning how to best intuit. More and more I learned how not to think.

These concepts all originally came from prose, from the novels and short stories I had written, but six years ago I learned how to apply it to poetry. I think, in poetry, I had always known of that exhilaration emanating from release, but it wasn’t until early 1996 that I applied it to the origin of the poem itself. I distinctly recall the place–I was in a jet somewhere over the Rockies–and the time: late at night on the red-eye. And then the potent thought: what if I didn’t think at all about the subject of the poem? What if I didn’t think about how to fill the blank screen on my laptop? My mind drifted to that mental groove, a bio-feedback type of groove, that I recognized as the place where control is not used. And, whooosh. The poem pounded down, my fingers staccato-rapped the keyboard, the thoughts swirled around, the words backflipped pool-ward, page-ward, and slapped the electronic screen; I had no idea what most of the thoughts meant ... but I felt great.

This perhaps sounds implausibly metaphysical, or in the very least, new-ageish, but I think I can talk my way out of those labels a little later; for now, hang in there with me. As Coleridge says, a good reader of poetry should make a willing suspension of disbelief. So back on the plane ... when I stopped typing I realized what had at first made little sense was now beginning to coagulate. Some strategic surgery here and there, a little word substitution, and an approach to it as a mystery to be solved, or something to be fathomed, and at last the insight of the title, the intuitive naming of this thing ... it all resulted in the birth of a poem.

This first little frankenstein turned out to be about the eyes of a business executive; I named it "Icy, Jammed Windows," and it was picked up by Purdue at Calumet’s literary publication, Skylark. It’s always good to publish, but soon I was primarily fascinated with the process, and this was how I swam into my current torrent of poetry. I learned how to approach this thing of poetry: the initial ‘don’t think’ level of mind, the later unobtrusive guidance from myself as the words parade by, the herding of the cats so to speak, then the moment of awareness, of ‘I know what this damn thing is about!’ which occurs sometimes in the middle, sometimes at the end of the poem, and then the wrap-up of the final verse reflecting the first verse (when I had no idea at all what was coming) that so often unnerves me. All this speaks to me of a wondrous process. And is this not the way to best approach poetry, as a wonder?

And perhaps this is the best time to discuss the three ephemeral, or wonder-bearing, components of poetry. They are the Big W, Inferred Montage, and Reverse Prayers. Keep in mind, this is the world according to Ward. Concrete components such as Denotation, Connotation, Imagery, Metaphor, Metonymy, etc., etc., can all be readily learned from any creative writing class. What I’m interested in discussing here is the whiffy, the ephemeral, the ghostly properties that make a poem resonate. Those very components that are, almost, too difficult to discuss.

Poetry should aim at a scales-dropping-from-the-eyes awareness, an abrupt dawning of realization; poetry should get the reader to exclaim "Ahhhhh!" The job of the poet is to intuit, then transcribe it in a manner that will transport the reader somewhere definitive–and ultimately recognizable–within the human condition. I call it the "Big W."

Have you ever seen the 60’s film, "It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World?" If you have, bear with me while I encapsulate the plot: The ten or so main characters in the film are present at a car accident where a dying gangster tells them he buried a fortune in southern California at a Santa Rosita park, right at the Big W. Then he dies before explaining the meaning of a Big W. All the characters charge off, and most of the film chronicles their transportation attempts to be the first to arrive at the park. The picture culminates with all ten characters running frantically, criss-crossing each other’s path throughout the sunny park by the ocean. What is a Big W? Windmill? Waterfall? Watchtower? Water Chestnuts, for crying out loud? Nobody knows, yet everybody stampedes on. At last Jonathon Winters runs through the middle of four palm trees that lean apart like two pairs of V’s ... or seen from afar, they are indeed a giant W.

There’s a wonderful shot of Winters running through the middle of the palms, speeding toward the camera, galloping, galloping, then abruptly he stops. His eyes widen with the dawning potency of the idea. He has found the Big W!

This is what poetry should do. This is the potency of poetry. And this is what should be flimflamming down from the ‘don’t think’ side of things through the poet’s fingers to the page. This is why I talk of a buzz or a rush. And the poet really shouldn’t be involved with the poem if none of this is going on. However I don’t claim that the reader will react like Jonathon Winters to every poem. They seldom do, but the poet should every time.

I read a poem of Dickinson’s yesterday that illustrates the Big W for me:

There is no frigate like a book
To take us lands away,
Nor any coursers like a page
of prancing poetry.

This traverse may the poorest take
Without oppress of toll;
How frugal is the chariot
That bears a human soul!

I read this while at a mall’s food court with my daughters, and I exclaimed under my breath, "All right, Emily!" But I must have spoken more loudly than planned, because when I looked up, my daughters were shaking their heads over further bizarre remarks from the old man.

The second ephemeral component is Inferred Montage. In film-making a montage refers to the ability of one scene following another to form a third concept or awareness in the mind of the viewer. The cliché of this is the scene of two lovers gazing into each other’s eyes, followed by a scene of a locomotive entering a tunnel. Two scenes when juxtaposed equate to the consummation of the sex act.

The Inferred Montage is not exactly the juxtapostioning of scenes or phrases or words in the poem to create a third idea, but rather it is the gradual appearance of an idea, a coagulation of a foreign element where there wasn’t one exactly intended, similar to alien markings that appear in wheat fields where yesterday one would have sworn there was nothing. The analogy continues: like the indentations in the field, it is clear these portentous markings mean something–but what exactly is the message?

Something comes forth within the poem to signal the awareness of an alluring idea that–where related–is different than those the poet currently wrestles down to paper. For the poet, this is an awareness that goes beyond the Big W.

First, an overall example that umbrellas my body of work, then I’ll discuss a few specific examples: About five years ago, as I wrote while not thinking, I began to write about certain historical figures in my poems. In the first year about 75% of the poems I produced had to do with a historical or deceased literary figure, with three women in particular coming to the foreground, Joan of Arc, Sylvia Plath and Emily Dickinson. What came out of the seven or eight Joan poems was a message of forgiveness; what came out of the Emily poems is a message of Emily the poet finding a new language to speak of the circular existence or nature of the soul. (As an aside, T. S. Eliot instructed his tomb be engraved with the phrase, ‘in the beginning is my end, in the end is my beginning.’ Emily, of course, states she was ‘called back’ on her own tombstone, inferring she had been there once before.) So far as Plath, I’m still in the middle of her series, so I don’t yet know how it ends.

Specifically, there are certain lines that poke at my contentment, over and over again, until I become aware of the reason for their resiliency. One such line is in my "Emily Chooses to Hide"

"... something, somewhere, must sail out to touch the soul."

This line stayed with me, quite incessantly, until I completed the seven-poem Emily sequence. Another such line is in a poem I did on Tolstoy:

Anger fires the mammoth words,
snarling ... hairy, with muddy tusks
aimed to gore the sagging bellies,
the sinking skin that has become
the lives shared for so many years.

You will never object to argument,
for it is the underbelly of lust ...
and you will never think to avoid
the Cro-Magnon hunt of formidable beasts
because great mounds of meat are always
dangerous to earn.

And you would never scream out;
you would never die;
you would never dream the totem
of your passion’s eye or breast ...
and you would never accept the tusk
into your crested ribs
without a proper disembowelment;
you must see plenty of blood
to soak up all the spilling
words of anger or love,
but hardly ever forgiveness,
since you suspect absolution
is the chastity belt rebuffing
a certain literary lust.

Artist’s note:

Leo Tolstoy (1828-1910) was one of the greatest authors of fiction the world has produced. Best known for War and Peace and Anna Karenina, he enjoyed a long literary career spanning the youthful extolment of Cossack life to a later quest for moral and social certitudes. He became a conscience to the world, and developed a credo of five commandments: do not become angry; do not lust; do not bind yourself by oaths; do not resist him that is evil; be good to the just and unjust. His avocation of a life of poverty increasingly brought him into conflict with his wife, and his final years were marked by incessant bickering. In the end, the quarrels drove him from home one night, and he died three days later at a remote railroad station. He once wrote, "Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way."

The line I keep returning to is: ‘And you would never scream out; you would never die; you would never dream the totem of your passion’s eye or breast ...’ Someday, I know, something else will come out of this line. Then there’s the Robert Penn Warren poem:

Curling around the saviors of our specters–
those who would think to separate happenstance
from determination, those who would think
to show us the skeletons of disbelief
that prop up the flesh of our hopes–
sailing around the prophets who predict
our souls are meant to mourn our mortal days ...
curling, sailing, displacing:
this is the stuff of proper spirit.

You have always threaded your way through ...
tiptoed ... placing paths below your clever feet,
siphoning the marrow from the bones of this age;
yet you were meant to come clear early,
meant to hit the beast head-on, square, mean,
the wallop that causes a slight but proper veer ...
And this you delivered long, long before
your own flesh lost its hold
on the cadaver of our world,
and you sailed and curled out,
forever out, now that you understood
the difference between happenstance
and determination.

Artist’s note:

Robert Penn Warren (1905-1989) American author, was named the first poet laureate of the United States. He is best known for his novel All the Kings Men. Astonishingly, most of his poetry is now out of print.

The recalcitrant line here, to me, is: ‘our souls are meant to mourn our mortal days ... ’ This one eventually wormed its way into the final Emily poem. The Inferred Montage speaks directly to the poet, with certain lines appearing in the wheat fields of the poet’s brain as puzzles to be solved. Interestingly, they are often solved throughout the next hundred poems written. Truly it’s the process that becomes as fascinating to me as the poems themselves.

The last of the ephemeral stuff is the Reverse Prayer idea. Prayer emanates from the beseecher, a request of the individual that flows out into divinity. Poems, I believe, are the reverse of this process; poems radiate inward to the individual from the exterior of the poet, little requests from the great outside. Poets are people who are a smidgen more attuned to these remarks from the exterior, but they still cannot interpret the concepts succinctly. The struggle of the poet is to translate a wordless language into a poem that will knock somebody, somewhere, off their feet. Possibly one could make a case for the divine not hearing the exact words of the beseecher either ... but intuiting the soul. Again, in reverse, is it not the role of the poet to intuit the divine?

It took me awhile to arrive at this place; but after I had it fleshed out, I felt rather proud of it, even somewhat unique. Bonehead that I am–for what in the past million years of human beings on earth has really changed in human nature? Surely not pride. A year later, I was startled to read in an essay on Emily by Richard Wilbur, "Sumptuous Destitution" that Emily called poems ‘bulletins from Immortality.’ Spooky, is it not? Or maybe it’s akin to Spielberg’s "Close Encounters of the Third Kind," as though there are poets, like pinpricks throughout the country, all building clay models of a mountain they’ve intuited. Eventually the poets–like Eliot’s and Dickinson’s tombstones–will arrive at kindred places. Forgive me, but I can’t resist saying at this juncture that I’d like the line ‘our souls are meant to mourn our mortal days ... ’ engraved on my own.

When I was seven, and I clearly remember the incident, I was sitting in church one Sunday, listening to the sermon. The priest was speaking about immortality, and made the point that no one can possibly know for sure what awaits us after death. And hence, one needs faith to explain this world and the next. Being a bonehead even at seven, I wondered why no one had ever been able to figure it out. Maybe adults just gave up on it after a while. Why couldn’t it be done?

I decided that if someone thought about this subject all their life, if one studied the issue long enough, if one were properly dedicated, they could indeed solve this mystery the priest described. And why not I? Young Lancelot, there in the pew.

So forty years later, here I am; but even I’m not pompous enough to say I’ve got it solved. Far from it, because it cannot be solved. However, the task at hand is to answer the question ‘why write poetry?’ and this little story is the beginning of my particular affliction. For if one does not use theology (faith in religion), or philosophy (faith in logic), to apprehend the afterlife, then there is really only one other tool left to use. And that is poetry (which requires a faith in the poet’s ability to intuit).

Poets, priests, shamans ... they are all doing the same carving with bones. They are all scratching away at the same question. All fielding or tossing the same whiffleball prayers. And there is really only one world-series question to aim at the human condition, and that is ‘why?’

Lastly, let’s see if I can pull this whole discussion away from the metaphysical, like I promised much earlier. Sometimes I fear this sounds like I should be out under a cardboard pyramid, lining up my crystals with a favorable planetary conjunction. In discussions of poetry one can easily pratfall into New Age spiritualism, and I well understand the risks of sounding bufoonish on the subject.

However, if one subtracts religion–any form of religion–from the pursuit, and approaches it agnostically (and not atheistically, since that too requires a type of faith), there is still something beyond the human being to be intuited. Whether using one’s intuition, or one’s conscious study, or even one’s subconscious premonitions, this state beyond death is always sensed. Sensed. The only problem is the age-old one: you simply can’t prove it. You can’t uncover something tangible, like finding a butterfly wing on a trail deep within a forest then bringing it back for other people to see and gently touch.

Even though the ephemeral wing cannot be produced right now, I’ve always suspected that in the end our race will discover it’s actually physics, and not metaphysics. Today we’re simply not clever enough human beings yet to create strong enough microscopes or telescopes to pierce the other side of our natures.

I say it’s physics, and not metaphysics. And as poets, we are all some strange combination of scientists and priests. If this is true, then it is simply a matter of time, where Nature herself will periodically produce boneheads who are compelled to write poetry.