If you’re a poet, you know how it goes. What seems to be a spark of a poem — an image, a rhythm — hits you first, and off you go, like a test firework, one of the little ones that warm up the crowd. And so it goes a few lines at a time, could be, till you stand back, scratch your head, wonder what if anything you might have here.
So it goes with me, at times, and I’d like to delve here a bit into the process just to see if it’s anything of value to myself or readers; if it’s any help in any practical, or for that matter impractical, way.
This last weekend I picked up a couple of poetry books at a local used bookstore, one by a poet-friend Gerry Sloan, the other a collection of recollections by those who had known Wallace Stevens, lawyer and insurance executive and great American poet (1879-1955) in one capacity or another, Parts of a World: Wallace Stevens Remembered, by Peter Brazeau.
There are so many good directions and lines in this collection, so many throwaway lines you might think, unless you gather them up, I must have felt, and do something with them. And so I began inscribing them, or something like:
He wrote quite beautifully,
they said, though his hand was
up and down, up and down, his
signature a rocket launch going
PFFFT! or MUMMMM! though
surely that’s not what he wrote.
We all know the bit about doctors’ illegible handwriting. But here it’s the fastidious lawyer Stevens, vice president in the claims department, whose signature seemed to his colleagues at Hartford Accident and Indemnity Company all but unreadable. They joked that his John Henry looked like MUMMM, and called Stevens Mr. Mumm. (Reticent and often silent in the company of those he did not know, or did not like, he was not the usual back-slapping insurance man.)
My first line above, “He wrote quite beautifully,” addresses Stevens’ style. Evidently, as a lawyer, Stevens was clear, logical, precise, and everybody appreciated that. As a poet, however, he was baffling, at least to his practical-minded insurance company colleagues. According to the testimony of Brazeau’s book, they seem to be uniformly puzzled. One typical reaction: “I’ve tried to read his poetry, and to me it’s the biggest bunch of gobbledygook.” A polite way of saying “bullshit,” I suppose, but as Stevens observed to several of these people they were too literal-minded to understand poetry.
Now here I must confess that, in writing even these few prose paragraphs, I have seen fit to revise the opening of the poem I give above. I wrote above, in paragraph one, about how starting a poem is like “a test firework,” and only subsequently added that image to the first stanza of the poem, Stevens’ handwriting becoming a “rocket launch,” an image that seems to reinforce the shape and force of Stevens’ hand.
What I scribbled next has a few right rhythms, could be, or images, but is rough, rough, rough:
Yet what he said who knew? He was a poet, after all,
and the others merely executives, too literal minded
he advised to understand. It was a world of underwriting
and sureties, of odds and evens, some of them odder than others,
oddities you might say, and they surmised he was schizophrenic,
after all, mixing poetry and insurance; locking up wife
and daughter at the little bungalow, from which, daily,
he would sally forth to the office, and there perhaps scribble
in a dewy notebook a few lines that occurred along the way;
dictate them to his secretary and have her file ’em away
in the right hand file drawer.
This is too verbose, you see. Too many words (as the emperor in Amadeus says about Mozart’s work: too many notes) … and not well enough chosen or spliced in.
So we go back to work and hack our way through this jungle of first thoughts or inspirations.
I like the first sentence: it’s short: it’s to the point: its rhythm is right:
Yet what he said who knew?
And it’s more in accord with the length and punch of the first six lines.
So now what? It’s not that the next few lines are wrong. It’s that they’re slack, or as Stevens says in an admirably taut and funny early poem, “Bantams in Pine-Woods,” “Fat! Fat! Fat! Fat!”
He seems to position himself here in “Bantams” as poet of the New World, battling not practical men, lawyers or insurance men, but Old World poets and their pretenses. (“Bantams” was published in 1922 and made its way, the next year, into Stevens’ famous first volume, Harmonium. It was a declaration of modernism.)
Fat! Fat! Fat! Fat! I am the personal.
Your world is you. I am my world.
You ten-foot poet among inchlings. Fat!
Begone! An inchling bristles in these pines …
So if past is prelude, including the past of early modernism, by god we can do worse than follow Stevens’ example. For example,
Yet what he said who knew? He was poet,
after all, not executive, not poohbah
of the boardroom. He wrote,
he did not underwrite. He took,
he did not undertake. He was
focused, not schizwit.
OK, so this is rough, too, and maybe silly. (One can get giddy silly under Stevens’ early Harmonium example of a hundred years ago.) But it’s taking shape, acquiring a tighter form. Notice I’ve repeated here the idea of the sestet, or six-line stanza, an idea that seems popular these days in the little magazines, for even without pre-modernist rhyme or meter a poem looks tighter when arranged in neat stanzas.
What’s a schizwit anyway? (I’m interested in schizophrenia, for sure, having experience among family and friends.) Do poets, whether ten-footers or inchlings, use neologisms to proclaim or to define? And how much room do we have to do so?
In a world of underwriting,
of sureties, odds and evens,
they surmised he was schizophrenic,
mixing poetry water and insurance oil.
What did they know? Who? Who? Hoo!
He kept wife and daughter locked in the cellar.
Well, you get the drift, and it’s still drift for sure. Am I going toward, or away, from an idea? A central idea, you might say. Getting anywhere? Or gliding toward a form?
It’s impossible, could be, to separate form and idea in poetry. If you haven’t got the one, how can you have the other? But let’s come back to this, shall we, before too long? This poem, I mean. This process of revising and seeing new. This relation of form and idea.
