Poet's Petard, March 2023

Clearing the Space

Composing a poem is probably much like taking trumpet lessons: you want to begin with a noise that demands a listening attention.

​A noise that clears space in advance for the poem, but is not yet the poem.

​Like the opening of the Early English epic 'Beowulf,' which begins with the single word “Hwaet,” that Seamus Heaney translates as “So.” Followed by a period, not an exclamation point. It could also be left untranslated and simply pronounced, which might give you more like its true purpose: to announce the upcoming delivery of a long story.

​No poem exists in a vacuum, like automatic writing that just pours out of you without any obvious preparation. For a poem to be “heard,” it's meant to incorporate at least a couple of familiar clues, which can remain largely untranslated.  Where are we? Who is speaking? What's happening? The actual beginning of a poem can seem like “merely voice” no meaning like clearing the throat, a sneeze, the sharp intake of breath that follows the conductor's downward-plunging hand. In any case, the opening of any poem often involves a little purifying noise that needs to appear in some way on the page, and which is meant to be “answered” by a certain kind of silence. 

​This little nursery rhyme always comes to mind for me when I feel a poem coming on. It works well as a way to “smudge the space” before you commit anything to writing. 

We are all in the dumps
For diamonds are trumps
And the kittens have gone to St. Paul's.

The moon's in a fit
The babies are bit
And the houses are built without walls.

​There, now, the threshold is swept, you can haul out your various notes-to-self, your juicy fragments and see if you can find a core essence that will coalesce into a poem. Here's an example of a sure-fire “poem situation” that turned out to be impossible (for me, at least) to budge from its stolid, relentlessly-informational, self. Years later it remains in my notebook, unwept, unhonored and unsung.

In London in 1632, mortality statistics listed thirteen persons who had
succumbed to “planet,” more than had been “murdered,” or died of “grief.”

(Natural History,  April 1993)

​Rae Armantrout has somehow allowed the all-too-ready pronoun “It,” to linger in the poetry ante-room long enough to send out several tantalizing hints of precocious metaphorical prowess.

The sky grayed and it was possible to name objects.

They didn't yet call out to me. This happened only
when the sun touched their skins.

Then they would do tricks.     
Perhaps a silver
bracelet of raindrops
suspended from a bone
thin twig,

almost a crib mobile

But now I've called it several things.

​And there is William Carlos Williams' poem that, without the opening four words might have been just a list, or a poem fragment that went reeling out before it had waited for the proper space to be cleared.

so much depends
upon

a red wheel
barrow

glazed with rain
water

beside the white
chickens