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2/23/2023 4 Comments

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
4 Comments
Carolyn Martin link
2/23/2023 04:58:10 pm

Lovely, thought-provoking essay, Anita. I loved that Natural History quotation for the notion of dying of "planet." How perfect for this moment in history when the "planet" kills so many as we kill it.. I may borrow it for an epigraph for a poem. Thank you!

Reply
Susan Kline
2/23/2023 07:30:28 pm

"Clearing a Space" seems very appropriate around now. After a whole pandemic spent mostly alone in the house, the clutter is worse than when it started, but my patience with ignoring it is at an end. One has to clear a space for living, for doing, for thinking. As music starts from silence, and as you point out, poetry also needs room to begin.

Thinking about the ratio of items to storage places in a house, I decided yet once again that a 1300 square foot house with a two car garage has enough room for one elderly lady, even with piano tools and supplies, power tools, and two very large pianos. And that the simplest and most accurate indicator that a house is overfilled is the presence of stacks of books, boxes, and assorted items sitting on the floor instead of filed and stored. They start on the edges of hallways and rooms, and then work inward, before having other items put on top of them.

I started with the computer room. It has two tables and a desk, and two large filing cabinets, plus the chair in front of the computer. Too much junk mail, old documents, boxes of piano related items and paper, and items which really belong in a different room had narrowed the floor space to a path from the door to the chair, plus a free space for an oil-filled electric radiator.

One starts by picking up one thing, or a small handful of assorted paper. With some time invested one gets fast at repeating previous decisions. There is a place for a wastebasket, and another large wastebasket for recycling of paper and cardboard. One repeatedly fills them, and then empties them. Discoveries happen. Deep in a large box of mostly assorted and elderly junk mail was the camera case for my Canon Eos, missing for moths. And deep under a pile which exists no longer, down near the carpet I found a CD by Gilles Vonsattel, who played a lovely concert here. I had never listened to the CD. Now I have, and the long lost carpet has emerged from 2/3 of the room. As the carpet emerges, it is gradually vacuumed.

Here is Gilles, playing with his friend Inon Barnatan. Gilles is the one wearing glasses. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5Zjt9QTj6V8

One good point of having clearing and decluttering automatic habits honed by practice is that it releases the mental space that fretting about the poor state of one's house has taken up. One can STOP THINKING ABOUT IT. So, there is fresh room for who knows what ...

Anita, I had never read that delightful nursery rhyme.

In a way, we all eventually die of planet. Planet and its surroundings could rid itself of all of us any day it chooses. Luckily it allows us to remain for awhile, on sufferance. So, when the sun is gentle and the air is sweet and the trees are in bloom, that's a total gift we did nothing to deserve.

Reply
Anita Sullivan
2/24/2023 07:37:01 am

Thanks, Carolyn and thanks, Susan! It seems silly that I can only reply through this rather clunky system. Susan, I loved listening to the Rachmaninoff (wrong spelling) and to hear about your cleaning strategies. I wish you the best. love, Anita

Reply
Ingrid Wendt link
3/5/2023 10:44:20 pm

I really am taken by this consideration of a "threshold" into a poem -- even the word "So." I'm going to look back at my own and others' poems with this in mind. Hmm. As to the nursery rhyme, how delightful. The line about the kittens rings a bell, but not the rest. (How could that be?) Anyway -- what a unique way to prepare your mind to move into poetry mode! I also am enjoying pondering your observation about "the all-too-ready pronoun “It." Thanks for this Petard. Glad you aren't stopping!

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