Poems Bidden and Unbidden

I made the decision early on not to make writing my career, partly because I didn’t want to have to write to commission. But I have done so many times, mostly because it’s hard to resist. A poem for a show where poets respond to visual art? Fun!Thoughts on the 50^th anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights? I have many!

The down side of writing to commission is the phenomenon of the deadline. It’s no coincidence that the word contains death. There’s a sense of doom as they approach. I have a habit of waiting nonchalantly until deadlines are so close I can see their eyeballs. At that point, panic and inspiration are indistinguishable. I’m not a natural procrastinator. There’s just something addictive about the rush of meeting a deadline by the skin of my teeth. And since I seem to meet them every time, I’ve come to accept that this is just how I do things.

But it makes me wonder about inspiration. My commissioned work always feels different to me, faintly inferior, like a clever knockoff. There’s an artificiality about the inspiration that produced it. I keep my commissioned poems separate from the body of my ‘real’ work. So what does that say about the muse out of which unbidden poems arise?

Saul Bellow said: “You never have to change anything you got up in the middle of the night to write.” He was so right! Samuel Beckett said that a poem is never finished. He kept endlessly tinkering with his. He was so wrong! I feel it is a crucial part of my craft to know when a poem is finished, just as it must be for an oil painter. You can keep slathering words like more paint on the poem, or changing a word here or there until you drive yourself crazy. I tried to train myself early on to recognize the subtle settling that occurs with a poem, like something finally fitting perfectly the space that has been carved out for it. You make that final change and the thing is done. Time to move on.

Sort of like blog posts….

Mentors

When I was sixteen, I sent a sheaf of poems to Dermot Bolger, a 24-year-old whom I had heard was running a poetry press out of Drumcondra, a suburb of north Dublin. This was amazing on several fronts: one, that he was so young (he founded it when he was 18), but more importantly that it was publishing inner city Dublin poets, young poets, people who had never had a voice. It was without budget and an early book of Dermot’s own poems were sold by word of mouth in the factories and pubs of north Dublin. The poetry establishment in Ireland at the time was firmly rooted in Heaney, Mahon, poets of the North, of the stony grey soil, and of history. Dermot was publishing Raven Introductions, a series that published ten or so poems by a handful of newcomers and gave a forum to a whole generation of young, mostly urban poets coming up in working class Dublin.

“The way I try to defend it,
this demeaned spirit and country,
is by naming its constituents…
picking their hindered, wary steps
through concrete wastelands, refuseheaps,
tax offices, supermarkets,
dole queues, hospital clinics,
army checkpoints…”

                Philip Casey: Ordinary Mortals

In 1983, Raven Introductions 3 included a clutch of my poems. The year after, Raven Arts Press published an anthology called After the War is Over, in response to Ronald Reagan’s 1984 visit to Ireland. It was not what you would call a warm and fuzzy welcome for the President, and it included a poem of mine. While I was still a teenager, Dermot made it possible for me to feel that I was taking my place among real poets writing about things that mattered.

It was a very exciting time to be a fledgling writer in Ireland. New presses were springing up everywhere and when a book came out, we would read in pubs (what better to attract seasoned Guinness drinkers than a bit of a poetry reading…or was it the other way round?). One early Raven Arts “book tour” involved about 6 highly suspect characters, including myself, driving round the country in a battered old minivan. Venues sometimes had fewer audience members than readers, but since the tour also featured the consumption of vast amounts of alcohol, any disappointment was well drowned. By this time, I was reading English at Trinity College, but in my secret double life, I was reading my poems at the International Pub and county council libraries across the country.

Dermot was my mentor. Over the next few years I sent him every poem I wrote and, since it was long before personal computers entered the Irish household, we exchanged frequent letters. His were typed on tissuey paper, and they contained both encouragement and editorial advice, some of which has stuck in my head to this day. He published my first two collections of poetry, and a collection of short stories. In 1992, he shut Raven down and founded New Island Books, which published my first novel. He has gone on to be a highly respected novelist, poet, and playwright himself.

I sometimes wish we lived in an age of art patrons. Some wealthy dude could pay me to sit at my desk and write poems. But I think of Michelangelo, many of whose early commissions made him miserable because they were someone else’s vision and holding him back from his real work. I have never had any limits on my freedom to write, except the rigors of my full time job and the million details of being a working mom. But they are all just excuses. I started writing poems when I was nine, but the real work of it began for me the day I got Dermot Bolger’s first response to the poems I had sent him. Send more, he wrote, send more.

The Awful Truth About Editing

Honestly, I don’t know which awful truth about editing to begin with: that it’s entirely necessary? that it has no natural conclusion? that it can make a poem worse?

A propos of my previous post, Iris Murdoch would only write in a certain brand of notebook, longhand, preferably with a Montblanc fountain pen. Late in her career, she discovered that the notebook line was due to be discontinued. Panicked, she bought up every one she could find, sufficient for the remainder of her 26 novels.

The longhand piece resonates strongly with me. Not just for the tactile reasons I mentioned in the last post, but because it makes editing a much richer experience. You can see everything you’ve deleted. You can see what you have added and changed. You witness the evolution of the piece as it unfolds, the work of it, the cutting, planing, and sanding.

Below are two sets of my notes, one inchoate, one closer to the end of a poem. In the first, stray words; aeronautical definitions and terms from the book I was reading; the beginning of a verse. In the second, the work of a stanza coming together; the repetition and re-transcription of the few lines, trying to get them right. When a poem reaches a certain strength, I sometimes number the lines so I can keep track of where I am if I’m reworking a section.  If there’s a stanza format, numbering helps me hold to the line count and stay with the rhythm, the shape, and the relative line lengths.

I guess when I start numbering the lines, it means it’s all coming together.

The KN105 and the Poet

Sometimes I envy graphic artists the accessibility of their art, its tactile nature. You paint a painting and there it is, on the wall. You make it with your hands. You don’t have to read it aloud to people, and nobody has to decipher it if they don’t want to. They can just look, soak it up wordlessly. There is direct access from the eye to the primitive brain.

However, when I start to feel too sorry for myself, having to rely on the intermediary of words and such, I sternly remind myself that I can practice my art pretty much anywhere. All I need is a writing implement and a piece of paper. If I were less neurotic about my tools, I could even dictate into my phone as I sat in traffic. This is never going to happen, for three excellent reasons, upon which I am about to elaborate in a bulleted list ( in a former life I was a tech writer, more on that later):

• To be able to work at all, I need not only pen and paper, but my actual poetry notebook.

• My pen has to be the right pen. Not a 0.38 nib and good grief certainly not a 0.7. I’m talking 0.5. Hybrid Technica KN105. Or a Pilot Precise V5 Extra Fine.

• My notebook has to be the right notebook. Nothing with garish lines and cutesy designs on every page. Nothing with eco-friendly but ink-unfriendly absorbent paper. Nothing too largely spiral bound, I’m left-handed. Creamy pages better than bright white.

I could go on, but you get my drift. I really care about my tools. What the heck: poets don’t have much overhead. I don’t have to shell out for tyrian purple or gold leaf. So I may as well really enjoy the equipment. Until my late 20s, I wrote with nothing but fountain pens, which I diligently filled with Parker black ink. I preferred the reservoirs that sucked up the ink to those that sucked  it in the side. I was constantly wearing nibs down with all the scribbling, and my fingers were perennially smudged. Then Pilot and Pentel started coming out with gems like the Precise V5 Extra Fine Rolling Ball, and I entered the 21^st century, somewhat ruefully putting my Dickensian nibs away in a box. I still take them out and touch them sometimes.

Paper is ubiquitous in the first world. I’m lucky that way, and yet except for jotting down fragments of thought, which I can do on a stick-it or a restaurant napkin, I really need my notebook. My writing process means that without all the scribblings of the last few weeks, I cannot get started. Unless a poem comes to me in one fluid session (it happens), I usually need a jump start. I’ll read over my recent notes, and if that doesn’t do it, flip further back in the book until something catches my eye, a phrase, a list of words, a fragment of unfinished poem I can build on.

This makes starting new poetry notebooks alarming, like being faced with the proverbial blank canvas. I miss the vital reassurance of everything I’ve been working on in the past few months, even the poems that are signed, sealed, and delivered. I need their comforting presence to inform the new work. I need to see the evidence of their evolution to remind me that every time I have ever been without inspiration, I have worked through it, started again, picked up and something new and sometimes better has emerged.

The physical act of transcribing fragments in my notebook often triggers new ideas. I don’t know the neuroscience behind it, but something in the act of writing inspires my creativity. Maybe it’s the speed at which the pen moves, maybe the sound of it – a faint scratching, so much more soothing than the clacking of a keyboard – or maybe it’s the feel of it, the paper under my hand, the heft of the pen. Writing is immensely tactile for me. Turns out that after all is said and done, I make poems with my hands. 

The Hello Bit

Welcome to my blog about the craft and sullen art of writing poems. I know, the blog title doesn't really scream poetry. It's a quote from my daughter when she was about three. We were taking a walk, she was in her umbrella stroller. An elderly neighbor passed and said Hello. She responded without missing a beat, and as though it was a time-honored greeting, "HelloGoodbyeOneDayTheEnd."

John Hewitt once said: "If you write poetry, it's your own fault." I've been writing poems since I was nine, and for many of those years I have not given it a second thought. But with my 6th collection coming out this August, I started wondering why for four decades poetry has occupied such a secret place in my life when it is so central to it. It's as though I was reluctant to admit that I ate food. When pressed at a party, I might confess "well yes, actually I eat. I do, I eat food."

I think it's partly because as a published poet, people somehow assume that this means I am qualified to hold forth on poetry in general, to expound on famous poets, if not quote them at length; or - horror! - to judge their own sheaf of verses. Or because poetry is generally considered such an odd thing to do, sort of like literary trainspotting. Or they assume that I am about to ask them what they think of poetry, forcing them to admit that while they know there is wonderful poetry out there, they have never actually been able to find any; that they just don't understand it.

It's this last point that has stood out most over the years. A majority of people seem to feel that while they know poetry has worth, they have never been able to figure out what the hell poets are saying. And when I pick up Poetry magazine, I am inclined to agree with them. My love of poetry is fervent but very selective. I know what I love, I know what my life would have been immeasurably poorer without. But how to define what is good poetry? How to explain what some poems mean? How to describe that rush of joy, that feeling of rightness when I read a poem I love?

If you are thinking this blog will explain poetry to you, I'll be sorry to disappoint. All I can do is to describe what it means to me to write a poem, how I do it, the mechanics of the thing, the place poetry occupies in my life. Maybe in describing that I will be able to shed some light on my forty years of  entirely solitary and mostly secretive scribbling.

Most poets eventually break down and write a poem about writing poetry. My favorite has always been the first stanza of Dylan Thomas's In My Craft Or Sullen Art. 

"In my craft or sullen art

Exercised in the still night

When only the moon rages

And the lovers lie abed

With all their griefs in their arms,

I labor by singing light

Not for ambition or bread

Or the strut and trade of charms

On the ivory stages

But for the common wages

Of their most secret heart."