I have come to recognize a certain kind of full-on insomnia as an aura, as before a headache, of a gestating poem. Which is not to say that these poems spring fully formed, Athena-like, out of the brain. Maybe it is how an oyster feels when the irritant gets under their nacreous skin. It’s possible that the inability to sleep itself puts me in poetic mode (quarrels have a similar effect, evidently)—that that kind of disturbed, overwrought, stretched-thin consciousness creates the condition whereby the mundane shimmers with significance. The poet A.E. Housman (who also posited the poem as pearl-from-irritant) confessed in a letter that “the desire, or the need [to write poems], did not come upon him often, and it came usually when he was feeling ill or depressed.” So it is possible that the not feeling one hundred percent well is part of it. Or maybe the poem is the logical result of being up all night, when the house is quiet (I have a teenager), and there are no distractions. Certainly, the anthologies are full of poets writing sonnets to Sleep or to the Moon. But there are other times when, during the broad light of day, I go hunting for poems, and make myself try to write them down. Sometimes a real poem comes out of a willing it to be, or even a mere exercise. Sometimes a good poem is fashioned out of a bad one, silk purse from sow’s ear, through cunning and relentless stitching and unstitching. Sometimes a poem starts as an “ear worm,” a catchy line or phrase that demands to be worked out and developed. Sometimes it is an image, a simile, a curious connection. Often there is a batch of poems, like pancakes: the first two raw in the middle, wonky, or burned, and the third just right. The method is that there is no method. One of the counterintuitive things about getting older is that writing poems does not get any easier after a lifetime of writing. Maybe it gets harder. I have been writing, and publishing, poems for a long time now. Among my very first acceptances was from Seventeen magazine when I was sixteen. I was elated beyond measure; it was summer and I remember going to the neighborhood pool and turning summersaults of joy under the water, blowing bubbles to keep water from going up my nose. And they sent me a check that was worth more than a whole night’s babysitting. The thrill of getting a poem right, and having an editor welcome it, never gets old. It still tickles the nose. I compose almost exclusively in “received forms” — sonnets, blank verse, syllabics, villanelles, etc. It is not that I do not appreciate well-wrought free verse, but my free verse poems are rarely as good as my more “formal” poems. For me, “free” and “formal” are deceptive terms. I find the infinite choices of a free verse poem, like an endless supermarket aisle of different breakfast cereals, to be paralyzing and unhelpful, while the limitations of formal verse are paradoxically freeing: the Universe, the Muse, the form, is collaborating, opening up possibilities you would never otherwise have considered. Rhyme, certainly, has the property of giving permission to the strange, unsettling, or serendipitous: rhyme is the reason. Form is about giving up some measure of control, a liberation. I do remember distinctly moments where I “learned” how to write a poem. Sometimes I was trying to do something else, something perhaps beyond my technical scope, and I stumbled into an unexpected thing. “The Man Who Wouldn’t Plant Willow Trees” was meant to be something smoother and more elegant — I think I was going to refer to the ancient discovery of salicylic acid (a chemical found in willow bark) as a painkiller, and that would connect somehow with the “weeping” willow. Now, I probably would be able to write that poem, and it might be clever and elegant, but I might not be able to write “The Man Who Wouldn’t Plant Willow Trees,” which surprised me with its hissing ending: Willows are slobs, and must be cleaned up after. They’ll bust up pipes just looking for a drink. Their fingers tremble, but make wicked switches. They claim they are sorry, but they whisper it. In short, there is no formula to writing a good poem. If one had a formula, obviously it would be easier to make them; you could have a production line. But then they would be, by definition, formulaic. Each time you make a poem you have to reinvent the wheel, or the pottery wheel. Not that there aren’t tricks of a kind. One of the problems with being creative is that you have to somehow separate the childlike mind that creates and plays from the grown-up mind that censors and criticizes. (The grown-up mind can come in handy later, during revision, but needs to be completely misdirected in the first stage.) I think of the conscious mind, the editor mind, as something like an old-fashioned vampire, who can be easily distracted by various kinds of accounting, by flinging some buttons on the floor. Throw a number of syllables at him, or a new complicated rhyme scheme or verse form, so that he is left totting up their number on his abacus, and the essence of the poem can slip past his notice on tiptoe. I do have little spiels I give to young poets in hopes it will help them. Things I am constantly saying include “put it on paper; you cannot be too obvious.” Often there is a compelling idea, observation, or story in the back of the poet’s mind, but it exists nowhere on the page. The poet is afraid to be too clear, thinking that clarity is boring, or unpoetic. Yet clarity and mystery can coexist, like tide pools and their anemones. I tell poets to read and to memorize: make poetry part of the furniture of your mind.
There's nothing Artificial about our Intelligence