Open Windows
The poem is a window the poet makes
out of words
in the wall of self;
looking out, looking in.
Trouble is,
language, like glass, is only variously transparent,
consciously (or unconsciously) colored,
it runs, unpredictably, from true and polished
to warped and distorted.
Only the best poets manage, ever,
to make the words disappear altogether,
to leave the window open,
so the wind, going out or comming in, blows through
and the sound it makes is music.
A Raft of Words
The poem, for the poet, is a raft of words built on the beach,
phrase planks lashed together as they pop up,
pounded into stanza decks as they surface,
with a sail white as a blank sheet of paper,
only waiting a wind of breath to catch it,
to send it sailing out of sight across oceans of imagination,
hand to the tiller, in search of new continents of meaning...
island images where insight sings like rainbow birds in trees of flame...
exotic ports where half-naked natives of heart in dugout canoes
throw fruit and flowers (and sometimes spears)...
anchorages off uninhabited landfalls
where streams of unknown and unsuspected significance
flow bright across beaches where no foot has ever marred the sand...
quaint harbors that smell and feel of someone else’s home,
as untouchably heart-turning as the sight of supper through a lighted window...
harbors so vivid with strangeness they look painted, pallet knife layered in acrylics
straight from the tube, on an impossible canvas sky...
the long level equatorial runs between islands,
where the sun comes down so hard and straight it strikes sparks from the sea
and sets them to burn, stars in the infinite, sea-dark, night...
afternoons, on the lee tack,
when you let down nets for the weird, ancient fish of mid-ocean,
and swim, on a rope, over the side,
daring dolphins, brothers and sisters of the deep, vibrant,
laughing and too-wise with water knowing, to play...
and then, the storms...
the gales of laughter, the tempests of tears, the typhoons of self-pity,
waterspouts of inspiration, squalls of anger, rigging-ripping,
sail-shredding, stay-singing, upheavals that wash the decks,
and throw the sea in your teeth as they tear the breath out of you
and drown you where you stand or fight or flee beyond hope
to a new dawn and quiet seas out of all expectation...and so, in the manner of all mariners, voyaging home at last,
home to the harbor, home to the hearth,
home to the land of commerce and industry,
honor and duty, love and obligation, the joys and frustrations of the everyday,
where the ocean is only a tang on the morning air,
a stir on the listening ear in moments of silence,
a longing behind each moment and each breath,
that carries us back and back to the beach to see what raft-stuff has washed up,
that makes us live always with a sail set in our minds
and one eye on the sea.
Trying (once more) to Name Poetry
All poetry begins with an intense encounter with the world, with reality,
an entanglement with something we can see, touch, taste, smell, or hear,
with some event that we react to, with something that we do, that moves us.
(For instance, this resort to formalistic utterance, to pontification, is
the result of sixteen frustrating encounters, over the past three days,
with students who think, by the evidence of their work,
that you can build a poem out of nothing more than
words about ideas and feelings.)
But it also has, right down near the root, as a first action, an equally intense
encounter with language.
(It is, you see, the word “encounter” itself, leading by way of the ear to
“entanglement” in the next line and “event” in the one after,
that finally frees the energy of my frustration,
that causes the impulse to utter to coalesce into this concrete expression,
that makes me willing to make one more attempt to get this truth down
and into their reluctant heads.)
(And perhaps now you can see, as I do, this instant,
in response to what I’ve written so far,
that imagination is in there too. That the words are not enough without
some agent to order them, some inner builder of context
to bring out the meaning by making the relationships,
the patterns, explicit.)
Poetry arises then in a four way collision (collusion even)
between reality, imagination, language and the poet.
Reality provides the matter and the substance of the poem,
the originals of all imagined objects and actions,
the very impulse to utter.
Imagination is the inner arms and hands that arrange the
the stored memories of things and deeds, that sets them down
next to each other in unexpected patterns to see what will happen,
how they connect, where the edges dissolve and reform.
Language has rules of its own, a built in wisdom at the roots of words,
in the patterns of syntax, in the sounds of speech, that, working with
imagination, take the action often into unexplored territory.
The poet controls it all, and is controlled, provides the will
to understand, the will to move, is pulled this way and that
by the others, until, crying “enough already,”
the poet brings the poem to tongue and lips
(too often by way of fingers)
and says whatever is discovered,
what needs, in the end, to be said.
You can picture it as a wrestling match,
three against one,
or a tug-of war with the poet in the middle,
or as a dance,
you can image it as competition, cooperation, or collaboration,
but the end is same, a move in some definite direction,
with the 4 contestants, the 4 participants, so equally balanced
that there is no winner, only the movement, and often a subtle movement at that.
You might even call it a game (as I see, without knowing it, I have).
You might even call it play.
In the end it comes to a single act,
poetry, the poet speaks.
And, of course,
in the process the reality, the encounter, that started it all
is transformed, opened, revealed, illuminated,
named, tamed, set free, stirred, turned,
understood, explored, exploded, concentrated,
compacted, spit out, chewed up,
digested, swallowed whole, and served up.
Because poetry itself is also an action:
what the poet does to reality
as well as in response to it.
There is power in poetry,
power over reality in speech,
and the poet knows it.
That’s why the game is worth playing.
Nothing is real until it is named.
Nothing is fully real until you have put it where it fits.
Which is why, I suppose,
I seem to spend a so much time
doing this...
trying, over and over, to name Poetry.