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.

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