TPQ OnLine
essay by Michael Simms

Waiting for Necessity to Speak

hen I was a student in Iowa City, Stanley Bomgarten and I used to drink at a place called George's a few blocks from campus. One morning we were celebrating Stanley getting fired from his job as assistant pastor at the local Baptist Church when a young man walked in and sat at the bar. He was tall and thin with short greasy hair. His eyes shone with wild intensity behind thick black-rimmed lenses. His cheeks were flushed as if he had a fever.

"Is your name Mark," he asked. "No it's Mike," I said.

"Whatever," he said, "God gave me a poem to give to you. You can publish it under your own name if you want."

From memory he wrote these lines on a paper napkin:

When a man has tried his soul
as if it were open to loss or win
and felt the better for his trial
or felt he has traveled far
from accustomed ways

Cricket chirping
becomes a source of joy, concrete
is comforting to walk upon and churches
have their stained glass lighted.

Then he acquires acquiescence
and the wind is cool on his cheek
and he neither laughs nor cries
but looks upon things about him.

He is in the infinite heart
where the air is cool numinescence

in the sky. He begins to think
of the face he has seen
and his eyes begin searching
for the stars.

He handed me the napkin, got up, and walked out of the bar without ordering anything.

I asked Stanley what he thought of the guy. Stanley said he believed God really had given him the poem. I laughed, but when I realized Stanley was serious, I ordered another beer. We sat for a long time without saying anything. Then Stanley said his life was going to Hell.

It's been twenty years since I heard Stanley moved back to his parents' farm. Twenty years since I finished my degree and began wandering in my self-made wilderness. As for the odd young man with the poem, I never learned his name and I never saw him again.

Tradition tells us that muses are angelic creatures who descend from clouds, or drift like smoke through an open window -- while my muse is a nerd who walks into a bar. But we take what we can get, right? The sources of poetry are too uncertain for me to refuse any gift, no matter how unlikely the messenger. By the same token, a poet usually has to accept the form and scope of the poem as a given. One dare not say to the muse, "Thanks for the epigram, but really I was hoping for an ode..." If we refuse the gift, it may not be offered again.

I carried the napkin with the poem-gift in my wallet until the words disintegrated, but by then I had the poem memorized. Looking back on the experience from a perspective of twenty years, I find the event incredible, but it actually happened.

Nowadays, many poets learn their craft in creative writing classes. We call them workshops in order, I suppose, to suggest a correlation with wood-carving or perhaps clock- making. And the best teachers do a great service to the students by emphasizing how a poem works, as well as how it could work better. As valuable as workshops are in passing on the craft to the next generation and providing employment for established poets, what is missing in creative writing classes is a way to talk about the real guts of the writing process. There seems to be a fearful cynicism in these classes that prevents people from discussing the way poems are actually made. For example, the word imagination is rarely mentioned. And the traditional language for describing the moment of receiving the poem seems antiquated and even a bit silly in a classroom where down the hall people are looking through microscopes at human cells or listening to a lecture about the statistical analysis of the behavior of white rats. A student who dared to name his or her muse would be summarily dismissed as a flake. It is ironic that almost any other idea, no matter how neurotic or far-fetched its origins, will be treated seriously in a writing class, but if a student dares to talk about the act of inspiration (literally, a breathing in), his classmates will roll their eyes and change the subject. I have heard the most paranoid paradigms of human relations -- the idea that all heterosexual union is a form of rape, for example -- put forward as critical interpretations of poems in graduate workshops, and yet a discussion of love -- which seems to me the source of all great poetry -- is met with yawns and snickers. What have we come to?

Let's talk about where poetry comes from... or at least where one poem comes from. I offer one of my own, not because it is an example of a great poem (it isn't), but because I know the situation out of which it arose.

For a period of time last summer I kept a notebook in which I wrote everyday. Usually I did free-writing: scribbling down whatever came to mind as quickly as I could. During these sessions, which usually lasted only fifteen minutes or so a day, I didn't bother to think about punctuation or line-endings or poetic form; however the words came out was the form of the piece and I usually didn't revise. On June 18, I wrote a piece which I knew was not a poem, but which had an interesting tone and rhythm. I especially liked the last three lines:

darkness descends
and the birds become invisible on their branches
their nests like the thoughts of old
mathematicians.

The next evening, my wife, who is a psychologist, and I were talking about writing because she had been asked to contribute a chapter in a textbook of Jungian studies. I mentioned to her that I had been free-writing everyday for several weeks. She said, or at least I thought she said, "Yes, you have to write everyday, because you never know where a poem is sleeping." The statement made a deep impression on me. I sat on the couch, stunned by the enormity of the metaphor. After a few minutes, I went upstairs to my study. After half an hour or so, I had this draft:

You have to write everyday
because you never know where a poem sleeps

It might be coiled around a branch
high in the air
a snake dozing in the speckled shade

It might be catching a few zees
in the attic

Aunt Zelda loved

or dozing in the picture of your grandfather
in his Sunday best
framed and ready to go
through generations of dust

It might be dreaming
in a story you loved
when you were a mouse
in a wall much larger than now

A poem is a box in a box
in a cloud a boy watches
thinking of sleep
and the one time he went fishing with his dad

But you have to let it happen. You have to listen real hard
The poem can survive if it knows
you're looking for it
under the stones of the river
in the high ears of the corn field

I needed a strong conclusion, but I was stuck. I didn't know where to go from the words "corn field." Then I remembered the free-writing I had done the previous evening. When I wrote the last three lines at the bottom of the new poem, they fit.

I knew I had a poem, but it seemed rough. There were some things I didn't like, such as the business of Aunt Zelda and the picture of the grandfather. Those characters seemed cliched and inauthentic. (On a factual level, the characters are inauthentic: I don't even have an Aunt Zelda.) Also, some of the rhythms, line-endings, and shifts of perspective seemed awkward. So I went over the poem, reading it aloud to myself hundreds of times, recopying it dozens of times, each time changing a detail, sharpening an image, smoothing the rhythm, letting the poem emerge from the scribbles of my initial draft. After a few days, I had a finished draft:

Where The Poem Sleeps

You have to write every day
because you never know where a poem sleeps

It might be coiled around a branch
high in the air
dozing in the speckled shade

It might be dreaming in a story you loved
when you were a mouse
in a wall much larger than now

You may find a poem in a cloud
a boy watches, thinking
of the one time he went fishing with a bear

But you have to let it happen
you have to listen real hard

The poem can survive a night
in the woods alone, curled up
under a pine tree
after a day of looking for you

It can even be happy as a stone in the river
if it knows you are waiting for it to come home

And you are waiting
as darkness descends
and the birds become invisible
on the branches
their nests
like the thoughts of drowsy
mathematicians

Shortly after the poem was published in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, the poet Maurice Kilwein-Guevara contacted me and said that he read the poem on his mother's refrigerator. She had saved the poem because it reminded her of her native Columbia.

From the beginning of Western literature there has been a dual attitude toward the source of poetry. The ancient Greeks saw the poet as a maker, and they also had the tradition of the poem being a gift from the muse. The poem is simultaneously given by a deity or spirit, and it is made by the poet. In other traditions you see similar tendencies to equate inspiration with divine gifts or with spiritual enlightenment. Lorca's duende, a supernatural force which comes to inhabit the flamenco dancer, is his metaphor for this possession of the poet by an outside spirit. The Buddhist principle of letting go of the ego in order to be at one with the cosmos; Keats' idea of negative capability, a receptiveness to the poem; chance methods of composition such as those by John Cage and Jackson MacLow, the principle of simultaneity in which juxtaposition in itself becomes meaningful, such as occurs in the coin-tossing reference system of the I Ching; even Eliot's objective correlative -- all are versions of the idea that the poem is not something that is made but rather received by the poet. The poem stands halfway between the listener and the gods.

In the many creative writing workshops I've attended through the years, only once were the principles of imagination, inspiration, and creativity ever mentioned. In 1974, on the first day of class, Michael Ryan said that we would not be talking about these things, not because such things don't exist, he said, but because no one knows anything about them, so there's no point in discussing them. Incidentally, Bill Matthews said the same thing a few years later on the first day of class, but this time the subject that the teacher refused to discuss was rhythm. You have to understand that these are two of the best teachers, not to mention smartest men, I've ever known, yet, between them, they had ruled out as subjects of discussion imagination, inspiration, creativity, and rhythm. I wonder now why they ruled out these subjects which form the heart of poetry.... Perhaps the answer lies in their own unsureness on these subjects. There are no definite answers the teacher can give, so, the teacher reasons, let's donšt lead the students down a path where we have no map to guide us.

I think it was the short-story writer Alice Munro who said that she is always looking for a place to hide in the house, a place away from children, the phone ringing, chores to be done, the sociability of neighbors, a place to sit and stare at a blank wall, a place to get on with her real work, waiting for necessity to speak.

And eventually necessity does speak, although often in subtle ways. Sometimes a poem begins in the recognition of an oddity of language, something read or overheard that catches the poet off-guard by its metaphorical promise. For example, the French word for time, le temps, also means weather and season, implying that our sense of time is not an abstraction, but something primal that can be experienced through the senses. Another example of how abstractions are traditionally related to our sense of the body occurs in English: the word testify is related to the word testes, going back to the ancient custom of men swearing oaths while placing a hand over their testicles, swearing on their manhood, so to speak -- implying of course that if they lied they would be castrated. These primal correspondences, proto-metaphors, echo with possibilities. After this initial recognition, like finding a fossil in a rock, the challenge is to use a sense of craft to carve the poem, make it whole, bring it to life. As Jean Cocteau calls it: teaching a statue to walk.

Sometimes a bit of language will stir the poet's metaphysical sense of connectedness, the feeling that trees, animals, and even rocks share our struggle to live. My wife grew up in the Siegerland, a region of Germany rich in folk tradition. Eva remembers when she was nine years old her last visit to her neighbor Marianne Krebber before she died. The old woman was sitting at the table drinking tea while she told Eva that the night before a truck had hit the old linden tree in front of her house knocking off a great limb. She said she rushed down and stood in front of the tree. She could feel it suffering. She went into the house and looked up the remedy in her book Blumen die Durch die Seele Heilen -- "Flowers that Heal through the Soul." She found the recipe for "rescue remedy": star of Bethlehem for shock, rock-rose for fear and panic, impatiens for stress and tension, cherry-plum for despair, and clematis for the feeling of being far away that often appears before becoming unconscious. She mixed the essences in water, dipped a towel, then wrapped it around the wound in the tree. She claimed the tree stopped bleeding and began to heal. She could feel the easing of the tree's pain.

In the book, a violet that grows in wet soil is called Wasserfeder -- water-feather.

And sometimes we sense that even the dead are connected to the fabric of life. My wife tells me that a graduate student came to her office and told this story, which he claims is true. An old man died at 3:47 AM in Mercy Hospital of Pittsburgh. His brother, who had had Alzheimer's disease for five years, was asleep in a different hospital on the other side of town. The floor nurse recorded in his chart at 3:47 AM that the Alzheimer's patient said his brother's name twice. Meanwhile in a different city a thousand miles away, the student was studying for an exam. The young man looked up to see his grandfather, the man who had just died, standing in the middle of the room. The old man looked thin, but he had a gentle smile on his face. "Still studying, little professor?" he asked. The young man nodded, amazed at what he was seeing. "I have to go now," the old man said and disappeared.

Perhaps the richest source of poetry can be found in the language of children.

My four year old daughter experiences an airplane as big on the inside and little on the outside -- which, incidentally, serves as a description of a lyric poem as well. She also says Ouch is me when she has a minor injury, signifying perhaps how pain (or joy) can become our whole being. Similarly my eight year old son talks about riding a sound to school, capturing in this phrase the experience of the hum and roar of taking the bus through the morning traffic, the noise and excitement of the other children on the bus, the anticipation of the day's challenges. He has synaesthetically folded all these experiences into one phrase.

As poets, we should strive for this total immersion in the moment; it is in the present acceptance of the given that poetry exists, even when we are writing about the past.

Anneliese Becker, age 8

My children often make up little songs they sing to themselves. Recently my daughter invented one about our home that begins We live in a stone called River Own. Forgive me for sounding like a doting father bragging about the ordinary achievements of his only daughter, but I think the line is brilliant. Notice how every word in the line does a great deal of work: the active verb, the interior rhyme and assonance, the variation of the iambic rhythm with the anapestic phrase in a stone, how the strongest stresses are in the last five syllables, making the line rise in emphasis. And notice the primal significance of the mixed metaphor:

			We live
	Own		(Home)		Stone
			River

The line circumscribes a relationship between significant experiences, but like all brilliant metaphors the flow of ideas is illogical, or should we say pre-logical, capturing the experience without the obligation to be consistent and orderly. The associations are musical and intuitive because naming the world is an act of magic, not of logic. Each child has to create the world anew, just as Adam did. And just as poets must.

Many poets turn to the other arts for inspiration. For painters such as William Blake, Cezanne, and the contemporary Dutch painter Leo Klein, the challenge is to capture the sublime, to visually represent the invisible, so that the painting becomes more than itself, more than an object, more than a picture of what is seen. The painter represents vision rather than sight. Similarly, the poet does not so much hear, as he listens. He does not experience sight, but insight, not landscape but inscape, so the language we use everyday, the language of shopkeepers and college students, transcends itself.

But a young poet may become confused about the source of poetry, thinking that because so many poets have drug and alcohol problems, then this self-abuse goes with the job. Perhaps the young poet even convinces himself that the source of poetry can be coaxed along by artificial means. Many years ago a Nigerian friend remarked that I had a "time-space problem" referring to my habit of mentally drifting off. The absent-mindedness that he saw as a problem I saw as a tool of the trade: poetry resides in the clouds, I reasoned, so I was always ready to let my mind wander. I used drugs and alcohol to disassociate my senses, taking as my models Rimbaud and Dylan Thomas. Self-loathing and an obsession with death called seductively to me as they had for Berryman, Plath, Hart Crane, and so many other poets. Poetry, I thought, was the music created by a tortured soul. I ignored the fact that there are many poets, such as William Stafford and Naomi Shihab Nye, who live sane decent lives with their families, and whose work brings a vision of light and wholeness to the listener. In recent years, these two poets in particular have taught me that poetry springs from a special alertness, a willingness to embrace the present moment.

Names

Lea wants to change her name to Tina.
Her mother says she must think very carefully
because a name has to fit.
The wrong name can bind like someone else's shoes.
Who knows where a name has walked,
dust of what roads, uncomfortable creases across the toe,
the heel worn down by someone else's sorrow?

Her brother says the name Tina fits.
But if she's Tina, he says, what happened to Lea?
The name turned down the wrong street, got lost,
fell off the edge of the mountain.
The sound of her name fills the river valley.
Everywhere it is nowhere, he says,
her name needs to come home.

Lea doesn't want to be Tina anymore.
It's just too much responsibility.

Michael Simms is a contributing editor of TPQ online and the Executive Director of Autumn House Press, a non-profit corporation which specializes in publishing poetry. Autumn House's first book, OneOnOne by Jack Myers, is now available in bookstores or can be ordered directly from the publisher at simms@duq.edu.

Where the Poem Sleeps first appeared in The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. Names first appeared in The Texas Observer.

Some images courtesy of Barry's Clip Art Server.

Page posted 6/2/99