on “Poems Not Written”
The poem I try not to write is the poem of the moment. Too much, I think, we interpret the adage to “write what you know” as to write what has happened to us. O’Hara’s chimerical ability to do this notwithstanding, most of us are not cut out for such reportage as art. The problem, of course, is that the instinct to do this is a powerful one. When I stare out at a roiling sea caught up in a February gale, the artist in me (that pitiable creature) is moved to make the gray-blue beauty and power something less ephemeral. When my children chase a hawk from the chickenyard, I want to capture their sudden deeds in song. So I sit down to write, and then the thing, that thing that I’ve just seen or that has just happened, moves away from me. The proximate thing, it turns out, is a hard thing to see.
Or maybe it’s not that it is hard to see, but that it is already gone. Sometimes I think the beauties of this world, or its compelling stories, or its shocking revelations, are ephemeral by nature. We can’t capture them because they are no longer there. These things reside, perhaps, in some kind of diminished form, in our minds, but that is not the same thing. So trying to write in the moment, or trying to write the moment, is simply grabbing at brass rings or herding waves or a dog chasing seagulls. I bark and pounce, but they just rise, the birds and all my lovely little possible poems, and then settle at a comfortable distance farther down the beach.
Poetry, for me, needs to be a deliberate act — an act that acknowledges, sometimes even embodies, an inability to actually say the thing I’d like to say. This is also probably why I find writing with meter and rhyme so compelling. Nothing quells the desire to write the poem of the moment like trying to cram that incredible ocean into an Italian quatrain. As soon as my pentameter gets knotted up, or my first rhyme is terrible, some of the buzz of that impulse to write quiets. And, for me at least, that is a good thing. The form, what I think of as the collected voice of hundreds of years of fellow poets, is talking back to me, chiding me a little, helping me see that I don’t yet actually (and perhaps won’t) have anything to say. I haven’t listened long enough to what was being said, is another way to think of it. The disappearing things of the world, which is all of the world, are talking to me, and it is usually not time for me to reply.
Of course my answer to this question, this question of when to write or what to write about, is trying to trap me into coming up with a definition of poetry. I’m not ready for that — real toads, spontaneous toads, nothing happening, mixed feelings, etc. I don’t think poetry wants or needs me to define it any more than the tide needs me or wants me to tell its story. But it’s OK for me to get excited about that story, to feel its ephemeral power touch the power I also feel is possible in poems. I just can’t give into it in the moment by trying to write about it, as I know I will be overwhelmed. So what am I left with? The desire to make art, like all desire, remains impulsive, but the poetry itself, should it ever even come, has to wait.
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