Whence a Poem (1)
As a writer, I am fascinated by a process that defies logic. Where do the poems come from? How do the lines take actual shape on the page? The answers startle. Some explanations derive from my own experience of the Muse, some from reading how other Canadian poets have created. For example, Milton Acorn described the source of certain sonnets in his collection Captain Neal MacDougall and the Naked Goddess as:
“… almost a voice that came to me, you know. I’d hear him talking. Sort of in my head.… The most incredible incident was the creation of Martin Dorion.... When I heard the poems it wasn’t me at all! You see I’m a second tenor usually, but this was first tenor. And a very tough voice. I identified the muse as an Acadian. There’s some Acadian in me, you know. There are a great number of poems written around this voice, which I entitled Martin Dorion.” 1
For C.H. Gervais, also, creativity was like a voice inside his ear. However, to make that voice speak, Gervais proceeded more methodically than Acorn:
“I hear my voice clearly. When I write, I constantly repeat the lines. I have that sense when I’ve written even two lines, I have to repeat them and I don’t know the third one. It’s almost as if I’ve forgotten the third line. Suddenly, reading it, hearing it, the third line comes. And the fourth. So I hear my voice.” 2
Some poets have begun not so much from the ear as the eye. A writer engaged with social issues, particularly those concerning women, Bronwen Wallace found her inspiration in observed daily life:
“For me, poems usually start with a gesture, or a strong visual image of someone saying or doing something, or a particular angle of light. I try very hard to make that the centre of the poem, because I trust that intuition, as one that plugs into collective experience.” 3
Similarly feminist Gay Allison’s poems started with visual images, but developed more intuitively toward a destination unknown:
“I believe you can separate [form and content] to look at them, but for me, the image comes first. I’m very visual. The image stays in my head for a couple of weeks, in a mental landscape. Fragments make connections. It’s an ordering of chaos. I don’t know what I’m going to write about until I’ve started writing. I don’t force it because it doesn’t work.”
Gwendolyn MacEwen, proponent of magic and myth, merged both ear and eye:
“I start from something which is a fusion of the sound and the picture. I usually hear the lines as they go through my mind, so I guess I do hear it before I see it.” 4
As the years creep by, and in my own poems I work deeper into the art, my aesthetic goals and the struggles to achieve them have altered. More and more I am concerned with getting at a peculiar kind of artistic truth, neither an imitation of the “outside world”, nor a Postmodern game with language, but an internal integrity and solidity, within and beneath the lines. Ideally, I long for poems that are three-dimensional, that breathe, that give off light.
But how to write one—or any poem at all, for that matter? Once in a while I get lucky, and a poem forces its own way out, even in the most unlikely circumstances. What a surprise: one morning as my husband sped us north from Toronto up Highway 400, by the Barrie offramp, out had scribbled a short first draft.
In contrast, in quiet times when I am alone, a phrase may sing into my brain, like the tip of a long, pink ribbon tickling consciousness. I snatch and write it down. My ear strains. Rippling out of the darkness on a rhythm, a second line takes shape. Or it leaps across a breathless space, as if the Muse’s immense hand had snapped it like a whip. I write that down too, and keep on pulling, a line at a time, until at last over the page the whole poem has unravelled, silky pink loops scratched with question marks, brackets, and arrows, a tangled lair for the beast breathing within.
Sometimes I’m not so lucky. I feel a poem’s pressure build in my diaphragm. I fidget at my desk; I pace the house, stalking shadows, what Dennis Lee has referred to as his:
“mooching around in an empty space that words may or may not decide to enter, waiting on them tongue-tied.” 5
But if the clouds aren’t pouring, and the air is above 15 degrees Celsius, notebook stuffed in my purse, why not drive to the beach? From a bench overlooking the water. I recall Susan Musgrave’s complaint:
“Writing can be likened to fishing. Except I hate fishing. Things never surface for me. I’ve never once caught a fish that came to the top. The rod bends double. Something’s down there that never comes up. I think how can people go out there and idly catch fish, as if they’re not doing some mystical thing? People always think I’m crazy but that’s how I feel. You hook the darkness.” 6
Staring over the lake, I enjoy the last sip of my takeout coffee. It’s time to cast, and I order myself to write for 30 minutes. Anything. Just keep the pen moving across the page. “Well, here I am again, staring at the lake,” the words bob along the surface.
Sigh. I always seem to begin this way. “Why say the obvious?” I write, and chide myself for feeling blocked. Next, I chide my chiding: “Get on with it. Look at the sun dancing on the water.” I ignore the cliché, gulp down doubt, and scribble on. After 30 minutes I’ve filled several semi-legible leaves. To unstiffen my back and clear my mind, I hike a kilometre down the boardwalk. At the other end, I sit under a tree and reread.
Much of the wordrun sprawls flat and transparent, functional sentences muttering the obvious to myself, what Roo Borson described in her own creative process as:
“a lot of garbage, incredible garbage... reams and reams of junk to get at anything real.” 7
But here and there, words coalesce, a small heap heaving beneath the surface, like a sea monster about to push back up in a mighty wave. I feel the life, the promise. The lump in my diaphragm has transferred itself to the paper. But what is it all about? Where is this pressure straining? I know only that it is there, anxious to be pulled into the open.
Quick! Before it escapes. Rush home and trap it in my computer!
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1. Bruce Meyer and Brian O’Riordan, In Their Words: Interviews with Fourteen Canadian Writers(Toronto: House of Anansi Press, 1984), pp. 126-127.
2. Judith Fitzgerald, “WQ Interview with C.H. Gervais”, Cross-Canada Writers’ Quarterly, Vol. 8, No.1 (1986), p. 5.
3. Barbara Carey, “WQ Interview with Bronwen Wallace”, Cross-Canada Writers’ Quarterly , Vol. 6, No. 4 (1984), p. 3.
4. Meyer and O’Riordan, p. 104.
5. Alan Twigg, For Openers: Conversations with 24 Canadian Writers, (Madeira Park, B.C.: Harbour Publishing, 1981), p. 243.
6. Twigg, p. 44.
7. Meyer and O’Riordan, p. 153.