How Poems Arrive
For Dana Gioia
You say them as your undertongue declares,
Then let them knock about your upper mind
Until the shape of what they mean appears.
Like love, they’re strongest when admitted blind,
Judging by feel, feeling with sharpened sense
While yet their need to be is undefined.
Inaccurate emotion – as intense
As action sponsored by adrenaline –
Feeds on itself, and in its own defence
Fancies its role humanitarian.
But poems, butch or feminine, are vain
And draw their satisfactions from within,
Sporting with vowels or showing off a chain
Of silver els and ems to host displays
Of intimacy, or blame, or joy, or pain.
The ways of words are tight and selfish ways,
And each one wants a slot to suit its weight.
Lines needn’t scan like this with every phrase,
But something like a pulse must integrate
The noise a poem makes with its invention.
Otherwise, write prose. Or simply wait
Till it arrives and tells you its intention.
****
From Anne Stevenson’s 16th collection, Completing the Circle, this week’s poem explores the processes that bring a new poem into, and beyond, the writer’s “upper mind”. The tone is that of a friendly, authoritative practitioner, a speaker drawing on her own very substantial experience.
You would expect to meet the subconscious mind somewhere in such an account. Stevenson refreshes the concept with a neat neologism, “undertongue”. Readers who write can enjoy testing the word against their own experience. “Undertongue” is nicely physical, a sharper, more articulate variant on the inner voice more familiarly overheard. It’s interesting that this first line depicts the earliest stages of a poem as verbal. Some poets record beginning with a sense of texture, merely, or a little rhythmic pattern. But the poem arriving here is language-ready.
Keyboards and/or pencils are notably absent. The arrival is an oral phenomenon. The undertongue confidently “declares” the words, and then “you”, the poet, more precisely and carefully “say” them. At that point, the words get a pass to “knock about your upper mind”. The colloquialism “knock about” evokes a necessary insouciance. If the words’ freedom is limited by the setting – the creator’s consciousness – the shape they take will not be a matter of willed decision-making, either.
Now we plunge deeper into poems’ mysterious origins. “Like love, they’re strongest when admitted blind.” There’s a double meaning possible in “admitted”, but primarily it tells us that poems are most irresistible if poets allow them entry without a limitingly clear sight of them.
The thought is pursued in the third stanza’s reference to “inaccurate emotion”. This powerful entity is personified. It’s as compelling “as action sponsored by adrenaline”, and yet it has ideas above its station. In becoming a poem, emotion seeks justification, and interprets “its role as humanitarian”. It’s morally suspect, but indispensable.
With her depiction of poems as “vain” – and most likely female, whether “butch or feminine” – Stevenson emphasises the sexual element of the word-dance, transposing it from artist to artwork. Poems enjoy “showing off” and the fifth stanza justifies their behaviour with the bright vision of the “chain / Of silver els and ems” . The “em” here may play on the reference to the typographical point besides suggesting the letter M and its alliterative effect. The “chain” image works happily with the chosen terza rima stanza structure.
The reference to the “ways of words” as “tight and selfish” reminded me of the more famously selfish gene – a possibly fruitful analogy. But I also liked the idea of words as awkwardly solid objects, an image reinforced by the observation, “And each one wants a slot to suit its weight”. This is as true of words in free verse as in formal lines that “scan like this in every phrase” – but is it less true of prose?
The defining characteristic of poetry found in the concluding stanzas is rhythm – or “something like a pulse”. The mechanism of the poem insists that this pulse “must integrate / The noise a poem makes with its invention”. Yes, prose, too, has a pulse. But prose in general seems to demand less integration of “pulse” and material body.
The last triumph of the poem’s arrival is when “it tells you its intention”, at which point the poet can give a sigh of satisfaction, and relax, at least for a while. It’s the sharing of control between poet and poem that seems to be the core plot of Stevenson’s graceful narrative. But of course different poets, and different poems, have different creative itineraries. How did your latest poem arrive?