What Sparks Poetry

I remember how my father would explain how the moon and yes, satellites, stayed in orbit without falling out of the sky—I also learned that the moon is a natural satellite, although different from the human-made satellites which beamed information to and from earth, or vice versa.

Grief the weather over my desk as I wrote some of these poems. Grief fogging up the windowpanes in particular poems. Grief came with its own weird chant, grief that strange emotion where you know what you miss before you understand why.

The plum and the plum tree, then, became a philosophical center for me. Or, if not center, a lily pad of poetic thought, leading me to reflect on what exactly it meant for such fruition, such overabundance, to result in death, rot, and souring. And how, in a number of ways, these stages of growth remarked upon the trends of capitalism, (over)production and exploitation in Western society.

When I think of my own hearing loss, I think of irreparability, a loss that runs only one way, converting my skull to a locked vault, a cave. I like to be alone there, to study how it susurrates. Sonority, that tideline's arrival, retreat. Other losses are more acute, and I bear them bitterly. Like the constellations in the dark night of Greek thinking, the night sky overwritten with predators and prey. Washed with milk, they sink away to hide behind the sun.

We are left instead with anti-image. With possibility of/some great coiled energy. Anti-image, ironically, makes real the possibility, and possibility the real.

Tell all the truth but tell it slant—. The moment I begin saying to myself Emily Dickinson’s first line, my tongue flicks rapidly to the roof of my mouth for the first sound in the first word “Tell.” The same exact little movement happens at the end of the line’s last word, “slant.” In this pre-industrial, bodily way the reader becomes the poet’s instrument. In a way, it is as though they were one. But in another way, the bodily nature of the line enacts the double solitude: the reader’s body absolutely itself, utterly separate from the equally solitary poet who made the line: solitaria. Ferry’s poem is about the empathic loneliness Johnson’s prose suggests but cannot embody.

Translations are acts of mimetic excess, they generate too-much-ness, volatility, transformation.

This approach—Duffy's dual reverence for the Western Canon and her simultaneous roasting of it (for all those it omits)—has stayed with me in a profound way since that morning in Long Beach so long ago, and not just in books but in other facets of life. Even now, when I walk through an art museum, say, I will imagine the essential figures who aren't there, who never made it onto the canvas, who, to crib a line from Duffy, were disinherited out of their time.

Each of us enters Johnson’s book through that singular, seemingly never settled and always unsettling noun, holding a small flat object labeled Inheritance. A thing made and possessed by another, and now — is it really yours? A thing given, but was it freely chosen?

The way a poet turns their life into an artifact, paginated evidence of having lived… one of the key masterstrokes of this poem is that its form enacts the realities of its making, of the position that the poet, over and over, finds themselves in: that one must constantly unearth one’s life if one wants to keep it whole. The present falls onto the poet’s past like shovelfuls of dirt. If you want to take life with you where you’re going, you have to dig it out yourself.

What would happen if a poem “talked” to its reader? What would the “voice” of this poem sound like?

This vision of desire—to become the thing we love, to be remade in its image, to gradually take on its form—is the site of this poem, the mercurial “thing-that-is-struggling-into-existence” at its heart. In a 2015 article whose title contains its plea, its manifesto and its thesis—WE FILL PRE-EXISTING FORMS AND WHEN WE FILL THEM WE CHANGE THEM AND ARE CHANGED—Bidart describes the process of writing poetry in terms of being “gripped by something that struggle[s] to find existence through the medium of language, but whose source [is] not language”.

I love a poem that is about everything. Bhanu Kapil’s tender “Seven Poems for Seven Flowers and Love in All Its Forms” is this way, both about flowers and about not flowers, expansive and contracting in its scope.

Repetition often has an incantatory effect. Nursery rhymes use repetition, rhythm, and rhyme to grant the wish laid upon the first star. Despite this magical aura of naming and claiming, wishing evokes passivity. Wishes are childhood's epistemological firmament, they are part of the structures of intimacy available to children in a world controlled and administered by adults.

All this time, the vow held me and asked me to return to it with answers; “you” had become “I,” and “again” and “more” implied I’d been here before. What was I asking myself for? The rest of the poem? Myself? I’d hoped to depict an answer in passing material. But the wish itself was the world.