The Brooklyn Rail

This is what I think: that one feels nothing while writing a poem and only sort of thinks. It’s a high-wire act. Maybe. And the feelings associated with a poem, long or short, are entities from before and after the writing of the poem—which may well contain them—but one doesn’t, even cannot, experience them while writing. Writing a poem, or lines of a poem, is a pure and rather rapid experience. If you’re writing a long poem over days or months or years, there will take place sessions of this experience. The writing of a poem is almost a blank, an empty place; you might count some syllables or juggle or tinker a little, but you don’t feel. Not in the conventional sense.

But you do feel… what? I sometimes float, and tingle or vibrate. I’m not trying to sound highfalutin. I said to someone last Thursday that it, writing a poem, was like looking into a crystal ball, a remark that contradicts what I just said about the feelings before and after. And some of the writers on this page contradict me. No, it’s true: you look into a crystal ball for the poem, but there’s “work” involved before and after the writing of it. You learn how to write a poem, you meditate and read and observe and dream all day and night. You make charts, you talk to people, you have opinions, and feelings. But when you write it, you write. Afterwards you build it into yourself, though it will always have unexpected aspects. Poems exist in order to have unexpected aspects.

I’m now going to talk about (again) the writing of my poem “Your Dailiness.” I wrote it when I was twenty-seven and living in Wivenhoe, Essex, England with Ted Berrigan and our infant son Anselm. I was very stressed, I had postpartum depression that hadn’t been diagnosed, I was tired, everyone spoke British English, no one much seemed to know I was a poet except for Ted, I was a long, long way from home. I was reading a lot of books, poetry, novels, everything. Many many books. My poems felt too short, and I couldn’t seem to say anything that spoke back to me. One morning I woke up with an entire and rather long (six to seven pages) poem in my head. Every word of it. I saw it all at once, the whole poem, as if written on a giant slab. I saw or ascertained that I knew every word of it—knew, so it couldn’t be forgotten, and I only had to write it down. I proceeded during the day, as I engaged in household and social activities, to retire to my desk from time to time and write some of it down, in longhand, in a notebook. I felt the writing of it like an atmosphere, I was inside a strange, smooth kind of air and I liked that. By the end of the day I had recorded the whole poem. I remember feeling that the lines were not entirely the way they were on the slab in my mind—some sort of tall rock stele. I couldn’t make it look the same way though the words were right. Something about the lines was different. Though they were right. And the typewritten version also did not resemble the very original version, the stele version, which felt like the first draft. I couldn’t do anything about the fact that it was no longer written on a slab, and I comfortably came to terms with the situation. When I told Ted about the poem, he said nothing whatsoever back to me: I supposed he couldn’t think of anything to say. When I showed him the typed poem a few days later, he liked it very much.

I never had the experience again; I forgot for a couple of decades that the poem had happened in this way, though it was one of my favorite poems of mine. But now it seems to me that that experience is a template of what writing a poem is “like”—it was an archetypal experience. The poem is already there. OR there is something or someone or ones there who will tell it to you. Or it feels like it’s yourself telling it to you, as if that part of yourself knows exactly what to say. My sense of this location of the poem inside me, location of words or voices, keeps evolving. When I wrote “Your Dailiness” I had earned a longer work, but it had to tell itself to me. I didn’t know how to sit down and write it. Now I know how to sit down and write one, usually over many successive days, even months, but I still have to be “told it” as I go.

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I have not yet said what the exact prompt for this Critics Page is. I wrote to a number of people asking:

Can you describe the most pleasurable, profound, or extreme experience you’ve ever had writing poetry? (“the most” is somewhat relative . . .)

Then I added,

That is, I’m interested in the experience of writing poetry, what that can feel like. Exactly when or pretty close to when the writing takes place… I’m particularly interested in whether anyone has ever been freaked out writing something. Though I realize the freakout might occur just after having written said poem. You don’t always have time to know what you’re feeling while writing.

I’m trying to remember if writing “Your Dailiness” freaked me out; I don’t think it did. It perhaps freaks me out now. Such a displacement is what I meant earlier when I referred to the writing itself as an empty place. You write the poem trying to keep up with the writing that demands to be said within the acrobatics, the performance of writing so that everything that can be said and sounded and given, is. You are giving, in a specific way that demands talent and skill. Afterwards, everything from before and after flows into the poem making meaning, pleasure, perhaps a sort of upset that is offset by the fact of the poetry, which seems in and of itself to soothe and bless the reader. And maybe the poet too.