A poem is equipped with many entrances. The field of open composition or form, the confluence of various inspirations. The word, the feeling, the meaning, the intent. And how should I begin?
There’s a theory that suggests that all poets write the same poem over and over. I think the expectation or implication here is that we are hoping to approach some perfect expression of the thought. This often-misquoted Jack Kerouac line comes to mind: “Soon I’ll find the right words, they’ll be very simple.”
More likely, the right words are right over and over, in different contexts and forms. Poets love the moon, for example, but we all do unique things with it.
Here is Mary Barnard’s translation of a Sappho fragment, focused unsurprisingly yet beautifully on aloneness and the passage of time:
Tonight I’ve watched the moon and then the Pleiades go down The night is now half-gone; youth goes; I am in bed alone
The moon is invoked more surreally in the second stanza of “So Many Moons” by Braulio Arenas, translated by Willard Bohn:
Dreams and more dreams kisses and more kisses What will remain of so much moon What will remain of so much water so much thirst so much drinking glass
A recent favorite by Patricia Smith is electric and personified, with the title bleeding into the first line: “The Sun, Mad Envious, Just Wants the Moon”
out of the way. It knows that I tend to cling to potential in the dark, that I am myself only as I am beguiled by the moon’s lunatic luster, when the streets are so bare they grow voices.
I could make similar associations with other popular images such as birds or flowers or blood. How marvelous it is that no matter when or how a poet lived, the objects that find their way into the poems cannot possibly be entirely unique. It’s fascinating to watch how all this sameness inherently points to difference.
We cannot help but to revolve around what we deem artistically concerning or relevant, and this is where specificity resides; the cultivation of voice. I often return to Richard Hugo’s essay “The Triggering Town,” and one quote stands out to me in particular:
Your obsessions lead you to your vocabulary. Your way of writing locates, even creates, your inner life.
When reading poetry collections physically, I like to underline frequently used words or turns of phrase. These repetitions are the center of the work, and all else billows from these themes.
In Crush, Richard Siken returns constantly to a set of words, including “light,” “story,” “apple,” “hands,” “monsters,” “driving,” and “movie.” E. E. Cummings mentions “spring” 33 times throughout 100 Selected Poems. In Heaven Is All Goodbyes by Tongo Eisen-Martin, a “cigarette” is a recurring character, alongside “prison,” “street,” “heaven,” “proletariat,” “Friday,” “poor,” and “walls.”
Ted Berrigan’s The Sonnets is an entire sequence of poems that scrambles and repurposes the same phrases. Fragments like “banging around in a cigarette” and “it is 5:15am” and “I like to beat people up” enter various contexts on the ever-shifting stage of the complete work.
There is something honestly fascinating about going beyond doubling down, and infinitely repeating what seems to be the greatest truth or the best way of conveying feeling.
I think, too, that poets love to act as if our poems are living things. Personifying poems’ desire for attention almost justifies how desperately we need them. As in the John Ashbery poem I analyzed in the past, which “is concerned with language on a very plain level...talking to you.”
This thought crossed my mind again when I read this Angelo Maneage interview, in which he says, “I can try to figure out what a poem wants, or what I want, by dancing around points abstractly, and looking for clues I’ve left for myself unconsciously.”
But how can a poem want anything, especially if it hasn’t been written yet? Are we the chosen ones, magically able to channel the spiritual desire and energy of poems through our own voices? (This does admittedly feel more sensible than the more realistic alternative: that all of this is a simple transfer from mind to page by way of… I don’t know... brain stuff?)
This idea of poet-as-vessel is as immortal as poetry itself. Automatic or associative writing casts the poet as a space out of which ethereal language flows, but even formal or narrative writing has to come from a well of magic creativity somewhere. What, really, is the mental process of composing or editing a poem? I’m sure it’s explainable, but it feels so spiritually beyond.
In a recent “On Poetry” column in the New York Times, Elisa Gabbert brought up a point I hadn’t thought of (as she tends to do), saying “the poem is a vessel; poetry is liquid.” This liquid poetry can spill out into a conversation, a song, a piece of prose, an academic text— anything.
So is our humanness the liquid poetry housed by the poems we write? To what extent is the writing of a poem a transcription of the self?
When Sappho writes about the moon, it is also Braulio Arenas’s moon, and Patricia Smith’s moon, and my moon, but it occurs to all of us individually in ways that no one else can replicate. Every method of composition, no matter how inspired or traditional, is unique; our poetic voices like fingerprints, wholly personalized.
I enter a poem, usually, in parts. I keep a small notebook of handwritten fragments and every day or so, I type these fragments up in an arrangement that only then becomes a poem. I can’t explain why these words occur to me, or where it all comes from. Maybe a matter of sheer input and output, taking in enough life and poetry and emotion to then place it into a written form of my own?
If poetry is a place, it is a large room with millions of doorways. The doorways are colors, feelings, music, ideas, loves, experiences, overheard sentences— anything that will let us in and keep us for a while.
Maybe we write poems to be heard, maybe we want the poems to hear us. No one will ever write a perfect poem about the moon, but to be able to read and write hundreds of attempts is a lovely way to spend a lifetime.
Even in these newsletters, I’m repeating myself. “I love when poems do this and that. I think everything is in some way a poem. Here’s one of my poems! Until next time, goodbye!”
So let’s keep trying to say it, whatever it is. I don’t know how the poem-sausage is made in my brain or yours, but if we can agree that it tastes fucking great, I think we’ll turn out alright.
Well, I hope you’re well. Thank you for reading— and hello, new people! I’ve gained as many new subscribers in the month of April as I did the month I first started this thing. It’s not much, but I’m so grateful to have any type of readership, so thank you all for finding me!
Before I crash into the void again, I want to leave you with a brief list of poems I’ve greatly enjoyed recently:
“Self-Portrait as a Hackberry Tree” (Protean Magazine) AND “Good Grief” (Academy of American Poets) by KB Brookins. The self-proclaimed “Black queer nonbinary miracle” has done it again, & again, & again. As a miracle of the same kind, I’m deeply proud.
“Self Portrait as Virgin Moon; Or, Boymode Rebirth at the End of Lent” (Moist Poetry Journal) by James O’Leary. It’s hard to pick a favorite line here, but “Kiss me soft & quiet, an arrow launched from our quivering mortality” is incredible, I genuinely gasped when I read it.
“Long Distance Song” (The Quarterless Review) by Rhiannon McGavin. Rhiannon is such a great reader, and the audio of this poem is wonderfully moving.
“Gary Gulman, You Are Giving Up” (Wax Nine Journal) by Eve Kenneally. I love the dark, surreal, comedically inclined vibe of this one.
“Film Theory” (Bomb Magazine) by Xan Phillips. This is the type of poem I hope to write someday. Highly satisfying & real.