I can, like other poets,
talk
around the question but not really address what it is to be
inspired.
I can often identify what life experience called a poem into being, but
not
where it came from and how it got where it is going.. There
is something
about how a poem happens which is as mysterious to the poet who made it
as
it is to anyone else. Call it a muse, a kind of goddess who
blesses
us at her pleasure or who leaves us abruptly if that’s what
suits her.
I’ve known her as long as I’ve been
writing. I wrote a poem about her,
“To a Great Lady,” which appears in my
first book.
....Some men understand this—how you are a woman....
Lust, they bring. Poverty. Labor. Sorrow.
Their best hours. Yours is the hard service. For
you, Lady,
They leave us, and so be it, not one of us your equal.
They take you when you’ll have them, with a prayer, that this
Sweet lay be not the last. But you go where you will.
Yet I do not want to evade the inspiration question
altogether.
I can say that prior to writing “Muir Woods,” for
example, which appears
in my second book, I spent an afternoon there with friends, and we lay
on
our backs and looked up into the redwoods, that as we lay there, I felt
first
a sense of being human among trees, and that after a while I felt
almost
that I had become a tree. Or maybe I’m just
interpreting retroactively,
discovering that how I felt is what the poem told me I felt.
Maybe
the understanding came from the poem..
The poem which followed that one is, not surprisingly,
“Daphne,”
the woman who became a tree. Perhaps I should say that the
curious
thing is that it did indeed surprise me. I had no idea that a summer
afternoon among the redwoods would lead me to a wet winter morning on
Mount Tamalpais among the laurels.
The poem quite literally began with a complaint about the weather and
continued with looking around at the laurel. Then, as poems
do, the scene led the poem to take off in its own direction, filtered
through me and my own experience, as I began to wonder why Daphne
changed into laurel as the god Apollo, who sang to the lyre, assaulted
her.
Why would a woman loved by a god not respond in a friendly
manner? The poem itself, with a little help from Rilke, led
me to an answer:
Winter: hoarse, oracular.
The rain stings, suicidally bitter, like desire.
Why must my legs be bare
All the way up my thighs, cold,
And my soles wet?....
Stench of soft bark.
On my fingers the scent of laurel crushed
Freshens, but it does not heal
The darkness in the mind’s
Pith....
I have seen bay branches with his eyes....
A god might mark them, quiet them,
Move in what is open
Of these laurel leaves
Most tenderly.
Thus I moved from inspiration, my own
mere description of a scene and my response to it, into a process of
composition which led me, once it had been written, to an
“inevitable” conclusion.
That is a habitual practice for me. I
begin writing with a sense of an immediate remembered scene in the hope
of discovering something which makes that scene emotionally
significant. William Wordsworth said
it: “Emotion recollected in
tranquillity.” And in that tranquillity I try to
find how the words, the language, the form will lead me to the meaning
of the scene. That’s how it works for me.
Sometimes the direction a poem takes is
influenced by more than chance, though chance always plays a
part. (See the poem of
that name in my fourth book, What The Land Gave.)
“In Urbino,” one of
my longest and most profoundly exploratory poems, was
“inspired” by a trip
I took to Italy with my friend the poet John Logan (who, incidentally,
is
decidedly not the you in the poem, even though he enacted
some of what
happens in the poem and certainly observed the same scenery).
If I had to pick one particular life moment which
“inspired” the poem, it would be when I stood at
the same window where Yeats once stood, where Castiglione once stood.
In that moment, many things coalesced for me—my love of
Yeats, on whose work I wrote my PhD. thesis, my respect and affection
for Rosemund Tuve, in whose seminar I learned of
Castiglione’s Book of the Courtier, my love of architecture,
my affection for my friend (who, being ill, was not even there with
me), my love of Rilke, as well as my love of one particular man who
also was not there, and then my love of love itself—that
“sovereign happiness.”
How to meld all that together took long contemplation.
Finally
it was the building itself in Urbino and the architecture, enabling me
to
move forward in the poem, partly as an architectural travelogue and
partly
as a way of talking about what could be called stages the heart takes
in
loving someone.
In the long run I find the initial inspiration
often has little to do with the final product, for the reason that it
is the writing process itself which takes the poem where it wants to go.
There are of course inspired times, when
the poem is
“given,” which is to say that the words just seem
to appear as if from outside
of oneself. Such a poem generally comes fast, asking little
revision, if any.
There are also times when a poem is
artificially constructed. That is, sometimes, not feeling
“inspired,” I may set myself a problem, as if doing
an assignment. I wrote a number of such poems back when I was learning
how to make a poem, seeking my own voice and style. Such a
poem for me was “Blessed are They that Mourn” from
my first book. Nothing occasioned the poem. I was
playing with ah sounds and oh sounds and au sounds, in association with
Hawaiian imagery. In a sense it embodies no feeling at
all. It is simply a product of a mind at work on a technical
problem, as if it were a crossword puzzle.
Process, where it differs from
inspiration, seems to
me a matter of technique or style. I try to figure out early
on what
the poem wants in the way of form. If it’s a sonnet, I have
to choose rhyme
words which will enhance, not inhibit, the expression of
meaning. If
it’s free verse, I have to find out what word music is
suitable, where line
breaks should occur and so on. And always while I am figuring
out the
form—not imposing it but finding it—I have to be
aware also of the logic
of progression, so that the lines follow one another logically so as to
express
meaning in a sensible way, enabling a reader to figure out easily what
I’m
talking about. While I’m doing that, I have to be
alert to what the
thought reminds me of, and then to see whether the reference would be
just
a display of some extraneous information or whether it really expands
and
deepens meaning. It’s where the personal life
experience and education
enter, all that surrounds the initial inspiration and that makes the
poem
into something more than personal, makes it embody the
universal emotion
which all human beings can share.
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