| Maybe the question is, what doesn't come
together? Certainly not you and the ex-lover who starred in many of the grainy images from
this writing period. Certainly not a get-rich-quick scheme that will net you millions of
dollars in one golden verse. And don't forget the angel choir, who is assuredly not
assembling at this hour of day or noon or night. Though you might not be alone when you
write this poem-baby in the crib nearby, dog wheezing at your feet, cat ignoring you
loudly on the couch-how fair is it to say that these others are agents of collaboration?
Do these all of these individuals come together in your head as you write the poem?
And what about time, the eternal convergence on the now, that edges the lines of your type
as you create it via notebook or keyboard into the fresh edge of your poem? Doesn't time
have a right to be called a guest at this party of collusion?
T.S. Eliot argued that the poet creates out of some neutral zone, acts as a filter for
experience. What the poet had for dinner may have influenced his word choice, but that
does not mean that beef stroganoff has a right to say it had a part in the poem that
emerges. Likewise silenced are the poet's race, ethnicity, the circumstances around the
desk at which he wrote-according to Eliot, biographical factors are distilled, and
ultimately become something transcended. The poem needs to be taken on its own terms and
without any interruptions from the biography of the creator. In essence, Eliot is telling
us, keep that maddening crowd out of what you consider my poem to be. Stick to the
facts-words on the page, and all will be well.
Eliot's argument is seductive. If we can keep poem writing pure, limited to the
interplay of intellectual factors, we don't have to defend ourselves against critiques of
being "too confessional" or subject to a critic's faulty interpretation a poem
that had its roots in that long-suffering love affair but has now moved on. If we can
promote a certain detachment from the act of creation, we can let the poem become its own
terms.
Much as I've had the experience of poems "writing themselves" in directions I
didn't intend, and much as I enjoy the surprises that come with creativity, I have to
shoot down this idea of writing poetry as an experience where one leaves the shackles of
one's life and rises above it. There are two crucial factors that argue against the
singularity of a poet's creation: time, and the poet's own courage.
All of us struggling with the craft of writing (hopefully) see ourselves get better over
time. The lines break more cleanly, the word choice improves, our minds become accustomed
to the discipline of the metier. A poem I wrote five years ago is drastically different
than the one I would write today, yet Eliot would have us consider the two poems on
equally distant terms, independent of biography, posits of the same brain. Yet, I am not
sure they are the same brain. The tools they would have at their disposal, and the
experiences that feed the poems are different. How can the creations of said brain not be
different, and that difference not depend upon the time that has passed?
I am not sure you can separate the time in which poems were written-with all the
attendant factors of history-from the act of creation. Eliot wrote vastly different poems
from the poets who now have satellite dishes and an influx of photos from Mars. He could
not have written "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" without the use of ether
on operating tables. The architecture of his brain was built by the time in which he
lived. His poetic identity emerged over time and out of its demands.
In a handyman's sense, time defines the act of writing simply because it is the principal
accessory to the crime. How many of us have started writing a poem, only to be distracted
or called away by other responsibilities? How many of us have had to get out the crowbar
to pry time into our lives to write? All poems are not created under equal duress. Those
that have the money to buy the time away from survival activities to write will have the
time to create works of art. Time's insistence that it be taken means biography is
relevant.
Courage I think is the other collaborator. If time is the agent provocateur, tweaking
our muses' noses to get us to write, courage is the native guide that takes us through the
thicket of our imagination. I think that in order to write at all, poets have to overcome
a certain stage fright. What colossal arrogance we have, thinking that others would read
us. Read ME, the poet declares in the act of writing. THIS POEM and no other is the one,
this is ME writing to YOU. A strong voice requires courage, and courage isn't summoned out
of thin air but is hampered or helped by all that has made a person what they are.
Though courage arises from the poet, it is true that it can be lent, borrowed or stolen
from the poet's predecessors or contemporaries who are working through the same technical
problems and emotional knots in their writing. It can be an internal collaborator, a
product of the poet's own self-respect as an artist, or something stirred by another's
well-spoken sentence or well-turned phrase.
The metaphor for these last few years before the millenium seems to be one of
conspiracy, forces in cahoots. There is no end to the forces depicted in movies conspiring
to wreak havoc with America: asteroids, aliens, X-file cases. I think the best this essay
can wish for its readers is that they be the ones to receive the proper taps on the
shoulder, befriended, taken in by the forces collaborating on behalf of their writing, and
once within their secret society, write, write, write. |