Whence a Poem (2)
After trapping a first draft in my computer, the rest, for me, is repeated, long, and even frustrating rewriting—or should I say “dewriting”: rewriting to determine what I really want to say. I think of Irving Layton’s words:
“The poet is searching in the ashes of his past life and the ashes of his memory for the meanings hidden in those ashes. This is the poetic quest—the search for meaning.” 1
To find this meaning, like Theseus entering the minotaur’s cave trailing a long string, I print a copy of every revised version in case I over revise and need to lead my fingers back to the freshness of an earlier draft. Swivelling toward the screen, I stare into the words’ cool light. What twitch of an image lurks there? I read aloud, listen for rhythms. Where is the creature’s breathing, its gait? How apt, the observation of poet and essayist Thomas Joyce:
“As writers, we discover what metaphors mean after their arrival. First, we contend with the birth, the creature we have before us. Is it a fish or a bird? Does it swim, fly, or both? The unexpected is to be expected. After we understand the metaphor, we seek the pattern that wants to make itself known through the metaphor.” 2
Searching the screen, I am patient. I trust. One or two words—but which?—will take me face to face with the beast. Does this talk of beast and lair sound mystical? It is, and it isn’t. Let me illustrate.
In my morning notebook one passage I’ve underlined: “Are words mere show we crawl under, scratching at matted letters for meaning?” I type the line into the computer. I stare into the screen. “Scratching”—something rumbles under that word, I can feel it. And “matted”? Something under there too. But what makes these two stir, and below consciousness pushes them together? To find where these clues lead, I pick “scratching” and doodle free associations down the screen: “animal, frantic, desperate, claws, itch, fingernails, dirty—Dirty?” My mind snaps back to “matted”.
Aha! A link. But what stuff exactly is “matted”? I doodle again, “Twigs, brush, hair—Hair?” The word spiders out—fine, fragile, evanescent, something that doesn’t hold, that melts away. “Melts”? Snow! Of course, that’s what we crawl under, to find the matted stuff, the twigs and dirt matted in ice. I’ve got it!
Feeling giddy, I reread: “Imagine words are snow we crawl under, to scratch at matted ice for meaning.” But “for meaning”? The phrase sounds flat—too literal. Now that I’ve kicked into metaphor mode, I want to keep it going. Well, what would I find under matted ice anyway? Spring? Yes, but that’s too general. What could show spring, without my having to label the season? Some plant, some flower that blooms early. Crocuses! Happily, I revise the lines:
Imagine words are snow we crawl under
and scratch at matted ice for crocuses.
The scene bursts open: I am six years old, in my red snowsuit, crawling around a whitened field, my chapped fingers scratching to find a little gold flower. Goodness! Setting, character, and event—has metaphor alone yielded so much? Or does the scene spring from an actual memory? No matter. What counts is that the moment feels real when my imagination (re)lives it.
But, being six, my attention span is short. I grow bored and flop onto my back, arms wide. Hey, now I can sweep a snow angel:
or, flattened on our backs in white,
that words fan angel wings.
Angel sculpted, I lie there. If only someone would help me up, no fist or boot gouge to spoil my perfect wingspread in the snow. Beyond my angle of vision, a nameless companion (the other in “we”?) plays on. My call for help goes ignored. I stare at the sky and watch clouds drift, as light as dandelion fluff:
And how could we forget
that words are clouds too?
Puff and blow
uncertainties into solid shapes
wait—
How far will they glide?
So far, this seems a reasonably happy poem. The sun warming my face, I’m content on my red-snowsuited back. Yet “scratching” haunts me. Its animal connotations sound a note beyond the amusements of childhood, a dark note. “Dark?” I sit up. How deal with this negative element?
For a little while, I ponder. It’s daylight now. I’m having fun in the snow. I could play all afternoon. But eventually the shadows will lengthen, and the orange sun roll down. How do I feel about the dark? Well, everything looks and feels strange as night comes on. The snow turns blue, and its surface crusts, glassy with ice. I remember my father telling me not to lick the ice: my tongue will stick, and when I try to pull it away, the skin will tear off and burn. That’s what I’m afraid of. What if these weird white words, so playful by day, also hurt:
But after shadows thin, and night
breaks through its first star,
throw off snow and run, wondering
what if white words burn?
Is that the secret of my unseen companion? Is that why we play in parallel and don’t talk? Does my snow metaphor contain another, about the biting cold of a faithless heart? Ah, the treachery of words. How very Postmodern, I chuckle. And from this joke, up springs the poem’s title: “Subtexts”.3
How peculiar the whole process is. At home in the morning [Whence a Poem (1)], I fussed and paced. At the beach, thinking of Susan Musgrave, I sipped coffee and stared over a summer-blue lake I’ve looked at dozens of times before. I scribbled a line about scratching at meaning, because of my verbal frustration. Snow never entered my mind.
Or did it? Just as the scent of prey wafts downwind to the hunter, so the poetic beast can be detected in the rhyme of a “wrong” word. Find one or two, and the trail is easier to follow.
From the desk, I pick up my printout and read the original line: “Are words mere show...” A rhyme for “show” is “snow”. Again and again I’ve experienced this eerie phenomenon. When I’m anxious to find a new word, one that seems totally unconnected will pop into my head. Yet if I rhyme it through the alphabet, the word I really want appears. It’s as if the Muse works at an angle. Why, I don’t know. Her ways are the mystery I’ve long tried to penetrate—another labyrinth, the Great Metaphor that each new poem struggles to recreate in miniature.
What I can say, with certainty, is how I marvel at the magic under the words. Gwendolyn MacEwen described it:
“For me, language has enormous, almost magical power, and I tend to regard poetry in much the same way as the ancients regarded the chants or hymns used in holy festivals—as a means of invoking the mysterious forces which move the world, inform our deepest and most secret thoughts, and often visit us in sleep.” 4
As I write and rewrite, layer rumbles beneath layer, challenging me to go deeper. But this is no onion writers peel and peel to find nothing. Something is alive beneath. As cliché, generality, redundancy, and the other detritus of first drafts are pared away and only the best words remain, its shape becomes solid, more clearly defined. Cutting adjectives, adverbs, and overlapping phrases, I play with the words left, moving them around like chess pieces, watching how their colours and nuances shift in different positions and pairs. How many metaphors lie hidden in a word’s connotations? For example, in the line “the rain tumbled down”, the verb “tumbled” easily yields other energetic images, like cavorting (tumbling) children, or circus acrobats (tumblers), but also the complete opposite, the stillness of a glass (tumbler) on the table.
As mentioned before, sometimes rhythm can be a guide in flushing out the beast. Read aloud, every lump and bump underfoot and in the ear betrays that the creature has not yet fully emerged. I play with the stresses (yes, even in “free” verse), pull vowels and consonants into new discords or harmonies, re-break lines to build crescendos from short to long, or to keep an even staccato pace, or to diminish in length to an abrupt end—whatever. Feel the gait of the beast, and its torso flashes by.
Instead of lumps and bumps, sometimes the lines’ very transparency means that the beast is miles away. No musk, no miasmic breath, no menacing snort put flesh on abstractions. The flatness of cliché or mere telling compels a hunt for muscular phrases. To form pictures, I try asking, “When I write down this idea, what am I actually seeing/tasting/touching/hearing/smelling? How can I translate mind into body?” Whatever sensuous images imagination discovers are equally revealing of the beast.
How to capture the beast—through ear, eye, word links, or other mysteries—varies from poet to poet. Despite differing psychic spaces and times, for me what remains constant is faith in the creative process, a willingness to trust the unknown, no matter how slow, how hard the stumbling ahead may be. As Thomas Joyce insists:
“Above all, the poet must write from where he is. If his mind is leaking away like a faucet at night, he’ll have to start there. If he’s bogged down, he’ll have to write about being in the swamp. If his heart is bursting, he’ll have to write about cinnamon hearts because the way to get anywhere is to start where you are and move forward a step at a time. Poems have our growth at heart, and that is one reason why writers ought not to pretend to be wiser than they are”. 5
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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), p. 17.
2. Thomas Joyce, “Notes on the Art of Poetry”, Cross-Canada Writers’ Quarterly, Vol. 6, No. 1 (1984), p.12.
3. “Subtexts” first appeared in Canadian Literature, Number 133, Summer 1992.
4. Meyer and O’Riordan, p.104.
5. Thomas Joyce, p.12.