Any chance I have to do so, in the workshops and classes that I teach, in the mentoring that I do, I make this suggestion: create a personal anthology. Choose the 50 or so poems you love best. Photocopy each poem, even if it is in a book you already own. Or, better: type up the poem and print it out. Add more poems as you encounter them. Take poems out. Organize the anthology in the way that makes best sense to you: alphabetically, by the poets’ last names, works for me. If you want to be strict about it, always hold the number of poems to 50. Or let it sprawl, lose count. Keep the poems in a folder or a binder. Keep the anthology near.
I’ve had my own personal anthology for as long as I’ve been a poet, over 30 years. The poems are in a manila folder that’s aged to the gold of a smoker’s fingertips. When I was coming of age as a poet in the 90s, before the internet and the smartphone allowed us to access just about any text instantaneously, creating my own anthology was the only way I had of bringing together my wildly scattered affections as a young poet. Coming across a profoundly powerful poem in a book or in a journal, I would type up the poem—on an actual typewriter, in the early days—and put it into the anthology. This became a habit of being for me as a poet in my twenties. The anthology was an ordered version of a youthfully excitable part of my mind: the maker’s mind, which would on one day be fascinated by the way Mary Oliver made her poems, and then on the next day be fascinated by the way Michael Palmer made his. Therefore, the anthology was also a resource for my apprenticeship as a poet learning his art. And because I’ve continued to maintain the anthology, it points to this pleasing thing: I have never stopped being an apprentice; I will never stop being an apprentice.
There are many poems in my personal anthology that have been in it for decades now, among them Jorie Graham’s “Opulence” and Brigit Pegeen Kelly’s “Dead Doe.” Looking through the anthology, I notice that a good many of them, like an anthology within the anthology, are akin to the poems by Graham and Kelly: poems of obsessed, sustained looking. Walt Whitman’s “This Compost,” Rainer Maria Rilke’s “The Bowl of Roses,” and Kimiko Hahn’s “Resistance: A Poem on Ikat Cloth” are some of the other poems in this more select anthology. But it is Graham and Kelly’s poems that I return to with regular enchantment. “The self-brewing of the amaryllis rising before me” is the opening line of “Opulence,” and from there the poem’s speaker, in a swoon of vertiginous description over 40 unfolding lines, tracks the amaryllis’s four flowers from bud to blooming. “Dead Doe” begins with these two lines: “The doe lay dead on her back in a field of asters: no. / The doe lay dead on her back beside the school bus stop: yes.” Then the poem’s speaker, a mother waiting for the school bus with her child, in a series of alternating realizations and self-corrections over 60 lines arrayed jaggedly on the page, meditates on the significance of the dead animal, an extraordinary sight in the midst of the ordinary morning. Both poems are dramatic and abstractly difficult and tender by turns. And both are finally concerned with things that are hard to know or describe. In Graham’s poem, something like oblivion, as invoked in its last lines: “yes yes yes yes says the mechanism of the underneath tick tock— / and no footprints to or from the place— / no footprints to or from.” And in Kelly’s poem, mortality: “Child. We are done for / in the most remarkable ways.”
“The Field” was written out of and back towards the company of poets gathered above. In the summer of 2019, I was spending time in rural Vermont and the incident mentioned in the poem occurred there: during an early-morning walk, while crossing a field, I came onto two people lying in the tall grass. It took only a second or two for me to walk past them, with my eyes quickly averted, but the image, like a needle-prick to my consciousness, stayed with me. Soon after, on the same day, I sat down and wrote the poem, more or less in one sitting. The poem felt like something I had never written before. But also, it felt like something I had been writing for a very long time. In the couple of years before that summer, I’d been enamored of, and writing, poems that were discursive, associative. Like Deborah Digges’s “Rough Music” and Robert Hass’s “Thin Air,” poems that were also in my anthology, the poems I wrote were extended exercises on packing in as many disparate subjects as I could into the space of a single poem. The poems careened and twisted like rollercoaster rides. But “The Field” was a new way of being with a poem. To focus on one thing, to stick with it, to follow a seemingly organic line of inquiry—this was radically different from what I had been writing. Still, on the evidence of so many poems in my personal anthology that modelled this kind of concentrated attention, like “Opulence” and “Dead Doe,” it was clear I’d been yearning to write this kind of poem for a very long time. And, finally, here it was.
Embracing influence, actively imitating other poets—I tell my students that this is a crucial way of growing as a poet, of stretching and complicating one’s own process. Short of actually plagiarizing the words of someone you deeply admire, you’ll never become them or sound like them. Instead, influence activates your inner resources. In the fierce desire to be like someone else, in that earnest aspiration, you only become more of yourself, galvanizing strengths you hadn’t worked enough to develop or sharpen. Influence, manifested as imitation, also does this: it jars you out of the habitual and domesticated ways you inhabit your voice and perspective. It enlarges you.
When I was in the white heat of writing “The Field,” the only thing in my mind were the cascading set of associations that came out of my hurried glimpse of the couple in the field, driving the speculative unfolding that the poem is ultimately about. That is, as I wrote, I didn’t think of Graham’s poem or Kelly’s, or any of the other poems that might have served as models for the poem. Afterwards, with the poem done, I realized the deep resonances my poem had with the poems I had been reading and admiring for years. I also understood that this was how influence sometimes worked: you absorb a specific poem or a poet’s body of work so thoroughly that they become indistinguishable from who you are. “The Field” is unlike the poems by Graham and Kelly, but my poem couldn’t have been written without those poems’ haunting templates stored in my maker’s mind. My poem had those poems’ headlong energy and their arcs toward rapture. In this way, “The Field” is part of a conversation among poets. In this way, too, it is the result of a good debt.
Note:
Forthcoming in Poets at Work: Poems, Process, and Craft, edited by Christopher Salerno and Kelli Russell Agodon (Bloomsbury).
