On Saying and Making
Two mornings ago, I was driving home from the coffee shop feeling frustrated about my writing, which had gone poorly, and looking at the mountain in front of me (I live at the base of South Mountain, in Arizona), and maybe slowing for a stoplight or driving too slowly and therefor in the right lane, when I suddenly knew that writing a poem is not about saying something nearly as much as it is about making something. Perhaps this seems too obvious to some of you, and I think that I knew it a few years ago, while I was still in graduate school and writing frequently, but it's something that I had to remember at that moment.
In the past, I've said that poetry is not primarily didactic--that this is what separates it from most prose--that instead it is primarily beautiful, first. I meant that a poem doesn't want to hold up political banners, or communicate a moral, or even instruct (as many ancient myths instructed) concerning how to sew crops, or build structures against the weather. I didn't mean that a poem couldn't be didactic (wouldn't that be too severe, dishonest), as much as I meant that it's allegiance was to being beautiful, first, and all other things second. I think a poem can have many masters. But I don't know that I ever really understood what I meant by that, and so I was being abstract, academic, and maybe also delusional.
And so today, driving into the same coffee shop, I was thinking about the poem itself as a structure--something more tangible--made up of bricks, rebar, mortar (which are each bits of language). I was probably making this correlation because I recently built a flagstone and cinder block patio in my backyard, and it felt like a more creative act than anything I'd written in a long time.
I don't want to create some convoluted conceit, here. But I do want to describe the process, perhaps for my own sake, perhaps in order to orient you to the deliberate quality of the work itself. I measured out the space I wanted to contain, about twelve by twelve square. Then I dug trenches for the cinder block. I wanted the block to sit halfway below grade. I leveled the trenches with dark crushed stone and set the cinder block into it, leveling and mortaring the block as I went. This created something that looked like a very small foundation. Next, I leveled the space that was contained within the wall. I arranged unshaped flagstone, steering the the heavy slabs into place by shifting them from side to side, displacing the crushed stone beneath it. I found myself holding fist-fulls of that stone, metering it out beneath low patches. The flagstone was rough like sandpaper, heavy with awkwardness. It was called "Arizona Red." The crushed stone was called "Table Mesa Brown." I tiled the cinder block with a slate called "Peacock."
And so today, I'm working on a poem that's made from elements and bits of language, rather than a poem that tries to communicate something. When Vermeer paints the astronomer, I think he's probably more committed to making that moment, that light, that ponderousness that is at once the astronomer's robes and his expression. Now I'm sure someone has tried to uncover Vermeer's attitudes toward astronomy, and he may have had some particular attitudes, but those were probably not the chief forces guiding his hand.
That the poem is a making (rather than a saying) is a more difficult lesson for poets than it is for visual artists because we know language through its orientation toward the didactic than toward the aesthetic. In fact, it has always struck me as partly strange, partly idiotic, that I should have chosen to study as art what is actually the most practical and widely practiced of all artistic media. A poet might as well say that she is an artist of walking or an artist of breath, but those positions have been filled by singers and musicians. Maybe tomorrow I'll sew some buttons on a poem, or stitch a punk rock patch over the pocket's weakest eye.
