How can I explain a lightning strike? It’s just it! The satisfaction of something really connecting, like a baseball batted out of the park. Like a puzzle piece finding its right place.
I read until the lightning strikes. Because it does. Til thunder roars, the words cause whiplash. Because poetry is a way of making light. Somewhere to place the godstuff extracted from us.
Sometimes a lesson, a thing to chew on. As in William Carlos Williams’ iconic poem The Red Wheelbarrow, which after multiple reads still shocks me with its precise, awe-inspiring enjambments.
so much depends
upona red wheel
barrowglazed with rain
waterbeside the white
chickens
Each word demonstrates its necessity without the bashful excess of elaboration. That the wheelbarrow is “glazed with rain / water” excites me. The compound word broken cleanly, without force.
Or, more inexplicably, the way the punctuation in this part of Molly Brodak’s poem “Past The Sawmill” devastates me:
Yes, there’s the warning, then the forest,
but what about the coming back from that?
What kind of—
—gate? Knife?
Here on full display is the attractiveness of poetic syntax: the usually commanding presence of em-dashes tripping over themselves, doubled into a sharp inhale that is almost a gasp, a sob.
I am endlessly attracted to moves like this. The sort of rhetorical athleticism they convey. If I were less sensitive to the particular rhythms and aesthetics of poetry, I may not be so caught, so amazed.
One of the most undeniable truths about writing is that in order to be any good at it, one must also read. Gathering input, whether it be from books, music, visual art, or something else, returns me to the flowing lifestream of all art. I become an aspect of a much larger thing, gratefully and with the fervor of someone learning to be alive.
In my reading, in addition to reaching for the next new thing, I make sure to revisit certain immortal beauties. “Meditations in an Emergency” by Frank O’Hara is one such foolproof piece. I find a new favorite line each time.
Now, it is this passage from it that I love:
Even trees understand me! Good heavens, I lie under them, too, don’t I? I’m just like a pile of leaves.
I have my obsession with turning into a tree, with centering my meditation on the similarity between myself and another natural object, usually a tree, and my love for poetry that takes a conversational tone with a touch of the surreal.
And sometimes, a poem in its entirety is a lightning strike. Most recently I was blown away by Rickey Laurentiis’s poem “Hermaphrodite,” published on Poem-A-Day earlier this week. Just look at these opening lines:
All Eyes on Earth be urgently Attracted to
that Hermaphrodite form I longed for having.
I have it.
With capitalized nouns that harken back to poetry’s lost Romantic era, the brazen reclamation of a slur elevated to godliness, and the swift claim made to bodily autonomy by way of unapologetic queerness (“I longed for having. / I have it.”), the poem feels absolute in its allegiance to the light. It is this light that I strive for in my reading and writing both.
Have I explained the lightning strike? I’m still not sure. If you were to take stock of the symbols in my more thoroughly annotated books, you’d see jagged lines in the margins every time that ineffable, beautiful thing strikes me.
It is important, I think, to remember what excites us about all of this. What makes it so that there was never any other choice for how to live.
Go through life searching for favorites, and disappointment will seem harder to find. Set yourself up in full view of the glory. In the field, wind-swept, rain-soaked, ever thirsty for the strike.