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How do poems happen? It seemed a simple enough question, to form a talk for a dinner – and, since I knew the caterer, I could be certain it would be a good dinner – with one of those astounding gatherings of the brightest of the brightest, in this case the “Leonardos.” But then I confronted the task of converting a baffled shrug into half an hour or so of articulate speech.
So too here. I raise the topic because this is a time of continuings and beginnings – those odd moments that mark the start of a new academic year, but which are at the same time full of repetitions and recurrences. Poets encounter such moments every time they set out to write, or are prompted to do so. A poem is a radically new thing, if it is to have any value at all. But then again it arises and lives in the shadow of all other poems ever written, particularly those composed by its author. “Am I just repeating myself?” It is one of the most fearsome questions a poet faces. Another is the question that sometimes occurs when a poem reaches a satisfactory state of “completion” – “was that the last one, ever?”
I can even use the label "poet" in introducting myself. Sometimes. Hesitantly. But that doesn't mean I really know the answer to the question that is the title of my talk. You know how unsettling it is to be asked to answer questions that baffle you. How much more so, when the question is of your own devising.
The Classical poets developed, of course, a whole array of legends, about the nine daughters of Apollo, each of whom took charge of one art (including, oddly, both history and memory). They were inspiring, and seemed to have loved to be invoked or prayed to. But they were also tricky and aloof. As Mick Jagger put it, “You can’t always get what you want.” Least of all if you want to be inspired to write a poem. There are, of course, “occasional” poems, written for a specific event. But they are not a distinguished genre, by any means. The muses seem to be tired old mythological artifices – but not so worn out, perhaps. More on that in a moment.
At least I can claim good company, in my bafflement. It is rather fun, at times at least, to be in the grip of the unknown – listen to Frank O’Hara, who is usually a rather gruff, street-wise, urban poet:
here I am, the
center of all beauty!writing these poems!
Imagine!
Or this, from another American, a West Coast outdoorsy type, Gary Snyder:
HOW POETRY COMES TO MEIt comes blundering over the
Boulders at night, it stays
Frightened outside the
Range of my campfire
I go to meet it at the
Edge of the light.
I rather like the resistant hesitancy of that poem. It surely, whatever it is, won’t come when it’s called. Another taste of a modern invocation, by a contemporary of mine, Kate Daniels, who is invoking “the muse of everyday life”:
If you are here,
where are you?
If you exist,
what are you?
I beg you
to reveal yourself.
I am not fancy.
My days are filled
with wiping noses
and bathing bottoms,
with boiling pots
of cheese-filled pasta.
Adrienne Rich is a woman of firm beliefs, so she has an unequivocal, if not exactly “tactical” answer to my title question:
Poetry . . . begins in this way: the crossing of trajectories of two (or more) elements that might not otherwise have known simultaneity. When this happens, a piece of the universe is revealed as for the first time.
That last bit sounds rather grandiloquent, I admit. And it’s as though she is trying to claim for poetry something of the clout of, say, NASA. But why not?
You are no doubt well aware of the Muses, the classical myths which account for the sources of the arts. Nine sisters, daughters of Apollo, each of whom takes responsibility for one area, each of whom (as in the current film) can be summoned or invoked or prayed to, but each of whom reserves the right (again, as in the current film) either not to reply or to reply in a where does it come from, this stuff we call poetry? I taught a seminar on contemporary poetry last spring, and I kept bumping into injunctions like this one, from A. R. Ammons: “To pay attention is the beginning of wonder.” Or, I am arguing, of poetry. And lest we think that poetry and science are wholly disparate realms, this from a poet who happens, along the way, to write wonderful essays about natural history, Diane Ackerman:
Both science and art have the habit of waking us up, turning on the lights, grabbing us by the collar and saying Would you please pay attention!
Or this, offered by – of all things – a mathematician from Brooklyn whose specialty is computer security systems:
The job of the poet is, in part, to see around the corners, through the darkness and to find the darn simple elegance of the human situation.
Or this, from a poet-critic of some renown, based at Yale:
this too is the work of poetry: to absorb and transfigure the reach of the eye or the underworld of the heart.J. D. McClatchy
We are back in mystery-land, I think – at least the “reach of the eye” in the physical/optical sense is a lot easier to grasp and measure than the “underworld of the heart.” And therein lies the adventure. An interesting poet named Kathleen Norris has gotten very involved with Benedictine monasticism in recent years, despite a prior religious autobiography that drifted from wishy-washy Protestantism to fashionable intellectual skepticism. She propounds a formulation very close, as it happens, to that averred by Robert Frost: that a poem, a good poem at least, “begins in delight and ends in wisdom.” I should offer, parenthetically at least, my understanding that the question before us is how good poems happen – not Hallmark cards or those abhorrent verses to be found at the Blue Mountain Crafts Website or (to make my position clear) most if not all of what is offered at “poetry slams.”
The bottom line is that the Muses can be invoked but not commanded; poems can be encountered or experienced but not forced very effectively. The Nobel Prize winner Joseph Brodsky once observed that “Poetry is a tremendous school of insecurity and uncertainty. You never know whether what you’ve done is any good, still less whether you’ll be able to do anything good tomorrow.” The Muses, fickle as they are, do not always sing, and when they resist the poet’s summons, she/he is left in the posture defined, painfully, by an intriguingly-named Irishman: Iggy McGovern.
MUSELESSThe sullen page
will not engage
with the thin pen;
no prayer or Zen
mantra divine
a single line
nor scan of ceiling
stir up feeling
nor cups of tea
breed verity,
just the curse
of being worse
than (m)useless?
The final question mark is syntactically dubious, but spiritually and metaphorically right on the mark.
But let us take seriously the injunction that poems arise from attention. What do we need to pay attention to, we poets (and, for that matter, readers of poetry)? First, language itself. The American W. S. Merwin has offered this:
At the last minute a word is waiting
not heard that way before and not to be
repeated or ever be remembered
one that always had been a household word
used in speaking of the ordinary
everyday occurrence of living
not newly chosen or long considered
or a matter for comment afterward
Some advice from a woman who for a while taught at MIT, Denise Levertov, who all-too-neatly combines my two principles – pay attention to the words, and pay attention to the world:
I think it’s like this: first there must be an experience, a sequence or constellation of perceptions of sufficient interest, felt by the poet internally enough to demand of him their equivalence in words; he is brought to speech. Suppose there’s the sight of the sky through a dusty window, birds and clouds and bits of paper flying through the sky, the sound of music from his radio, feelings of anger and love and amusement roused by a letter just received, the memory of some long-past thought or event associated with what’s seen or heard or felt, and an idea, a concept, he has been pondering, each qualifying the other; together with what he knows about history and what he has been dreaming – whether or not he remembers it – working in him. . . [T]he condition of being a poet is that periodically such a cross section, or constellation, or experiences . . . demands, or wakes in him this demand: the poem. The beginning of the fulfillment of this demand is to contemplate, to meditate; words which connote a state in which the heat of feeling warms the intellect. . . [T]o meditate is “to muse,” to muse comes from a word meaning “to stand with open mouth” – not so comical if we think of “inspiration” – to breathe in.
I won’t be so presumptuous as to offer declarations about whether this “constellation” of psychic events is the point of genesis of, say, a new experiment or computer program. Of course, “paying attention” in areas outside of poetry must extend to numbers, black holes, and petri dishes.
Where then do poems begin, or arise, or whatever it is they do, to get to the page? Nobody seems to know, but it has something to do with an almost mystical impulse. That is what the myths of the Muses try to encompass, and I would humbly offer a proposition. We, all of us, rely on Muses. Some of us work in fields – like music or lyric poetry – with a long-standing name for our Muse. Some of us need to find new names. I borrow the idea, in part, from yet another Irish writer, Dawn Sullivan, who insists, “We need the Muse now, more than ever before, as an inspirational symbol of restoring (in all fields) symbolic thought.” I will go so far as to offer (having called upon some advisors, one Greek and a neighbor, one a computer scientist and long-standing cyberchum) an expanded catalog of Muses, for many of the other areas at MIT:
On the one hand, what does it matter what they are called; my point is that we honor the more-or-less mystical sources of inspiration that drives the work of all of us. But then again, if the muses are anywhere near as touchy as they seem to be, in legend, calling them by the right name may be all-important. I encourage you to subject my notion to empirical test, and to report your results as they emerge.
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