A Conversation

It's a balmy day in July. I’m in my basement office. I was up late last night, as I usually am, when the idea popped into my mind to write a craft essay.

There's often talk about the conversation poets are having within their poems, but there's also the conversation going on between poets about the craft of poetry. So how do I add to this conversation? 

Can I add something new? Maybe there is nothing new. Maybe it’s all just saying the same things in different ways so it can reach somebody who otherwise might not hear it.

The Journey 

I started out in poetry with some very basic craft ideas. You know, keep coming back to concrete images. Stay open to what might come in. That was what I was basically focussing on. I learned some things about how to break a line. Mostly, I was learning by doing. 

I think part of the journey is, eventually, just as in The Pilgrim’s Progress, you end up in a morass. And in a way, you lose where you are in the journey, and you’re trying to find your way back to where you were at the beginning, which was in relationship with your poetry as opposed to being frustrated by it and trying to force things. 

So I was in this morass, and I started thinking, I need to study the craft more. I’ve been lucky, you know, but I need a deeper knowledge of the craft. 

So I started amassing these craft books and looking through them. One of them was Best Words, Best Order by Stephen Dobyns. And then, of course, I was reading lots of poetry. But the actual crafting of a poem seemed to become more and more difficult.

The Inner Circle

Then I took Ellen Bass' series of craft talks. She filled in so many gaps. And I felt so excited because I thought, I’m in. I’m in the inner circle. I know — I understand things. 

I felt empowered. But, another side of me soon began to think, Hey, you know, I sort of liked the puzzle of poetry, and now the magic’s been taken away. I've seen behind the curtain and know how the magic tricks work. I kind of wanted to figure these things out for myself. And now, it’s just going to be too easy. Ha ha ha. 

I soon realized I'd never have to worry about that because every poem has its own demands. I'm never going to figure it all out.

Metaphor & the Power of Symbols 

And that brings me to the idea that Stephen Dobyns talks about in Best Words, Best Order. He speaks about the object half and the image half of the metaphor. The object half is the thing you’re trying to describe, and the image half is what you’re comparing it to. He says that the image half needs to be open-ended so that every time you return to that metaphor, it keeps speaking to you. 

He goes on to say that the image half should have the resonance of a symbol because a symbol has multiple layers of meaning, so many layers that you’re never going to figure it out. In this way, the metaphor keeps speaking to the reader (and the writer). 

Every time you read that metaphor again, it has this kind of vibration that you can’t figure out with your mind. But you might gain more insights as you keep returning to it. 

How a Poem Might Change You

I would say that a certain uneasiness occurs when something larger than yourself enters a poem because it stirs things up. It’s like a reordering, and you’re not on top. You’re in the face of something larger. 

It’s a good feeling, but it’s also sobering, at times. Something is working within you, but you don’t understand it. In a sense, it’s beyond you. And maybe it's the essence of how a poem can change you. 

Poet & Reader

I recently read Conversations with Billy Collins, edited by John Cusatis. Collins says, “My poems have different subjects, but I think the ultimate subject of all these poems is the engagement that takes place between the poem and the reader.” 

There are some things to unpack in that statement. And I’ll use how Collins talks about it. He says that he is writing for one reader, and it’s an intimate connection that he’s looking for. In his words, “I have an idea of speaking or whispering these poems to one listener, and I hope I’m aiming for a very intimate connection.” 

He also says, ultimately, that he is the reader. He’s writing for himself. In his words, “My reader is probably me.” 

I would say, it’s a communication with the self, the larger self, and through the larger self, we are connected to everyone else. So it comes back to a conversation, a sharing. 

Billy Collins says he’s often the only one in his poems because he wants to be alone with the reader. He says: “There’s nobody in my poems. . . . Occasionally, I write about my parents, but they’re dead. When I wrote about them, they were dead. And if it’s a love poem, there’s some love interest there. But I want to be alone with the reader, see? And the more people you have in your poem, the less alone you are with the reader.” 

The act of writing requires a certain amount of solitude and in that solitude, something is created. But there’s also a wish to communicate. On what level? As Collins says, it's an intimate connection we’re looking for. 

Forgetting & Remembering

It seems all poets are in conversation or exchanging at this deeper level, whether it’s an exchange about the craft or an exchange within the poems themselves. So I’ll return to the question: what can I add to the conversation about the craft of poetry? 

Well, I think it comes back to something about the craft of poetry that I had forgotten. 

I mean, what is the craft of poetry? It’s the tools or processes we use to try to create a "made thing." (Donald A. Stauffer was probably the first one to say that "a poem is a made thing" in his essay, "W.B. Yeats and the Medium of Poetry.")

In one of the interviews in the book, Billy Collins says: “I don’t write every day, but I do – I’m confessing this to you – I do often just get up and sit in a chair with a cup of coffee and see what happens. I’ll often read somebody else’s poems, poems by William Matthews or James Tate or Marie Howe or Charles Simic. I do sit down and open a notebook and see what happens. And if nothing happens, it doesn’t. It’s kind of a combination of being passively ready to receive an idea for a poem and getting in a kind of irregular habit of sitting down and asking for something to come in.”

That’s what I forgot when I was in the morass: how to let something in. I think an important aspect of the craft is emptying yourself and being in a receptive state. And that’s not easy. Well, it is easy, but you sort of have to remember that it's an important part of writing. 

A Cautionary Tale

Even as poets are in conversation about poetry, there is also, I think, a reticence or maybe a need to be careful when talking about the craft of poetry. And perhaps that’s because there is a sacred aspect to it. It could also be that there's a worry that studying the craft may get in the way of a connection to something larger. That our “monkey mind” might take over and start messing with everything.  

And that can happen. That’s why it’s so important to come back to the idea of being open and letting something in.  

Within, Without

Collins says in yet another one of his interviews in the book, “I’d rather pick a small thing and examine it. I think attention is really a form of gratitude, looking at things without any purpose. Also spending a half an hour a day doing nothing. . . . If you actually try to do nothing for a half an hour, something will happen. You will access something within.”