Before I wrote poems, I flew airplanes. Most of my
flight time came in a venerable old Navy patrol plane called the P-3 Orion. I spent many hours learning the
ins and outs of that aircraft, starting with its most essential components:
flight controls, turbine engines, controllable-pitch propellers, hydraulic
systems, and generators. The generators alone were astonishing. They provided
all the electrical power the crew’s instruments and computers consumed; they
lit red, green, and white position lights so other aircraft could see us in
dark skies; they illuminated the flight station so we could read navigational
charts at night; and they powered our landing lights so we could distinguish
the runway from rough ground. At the time, I didn’t appreciate the point of
knowing how a thing I would never take apart and fix actually worked. Looking back,
I love the metaphor those three-phase brushless generators provide for the
craft of writing poetry.
The generators in my plane took the motive force of
physical motion from the violent spinning of its engines. They harnessed that
motion to turn magnets whose rotation induced current in a stationary coil of
wire. The current flowed to a larger coil of wire that became an electromagnet.
A set of coils rotated within its field, which created an even greater current
than in the first stage. This current flowed to the rotating coils of the final
stage, creating an even larger magnetic field that induced a current in static
coils that surrounded the rotation within the generator. These large loops of
wire just sat there, encompassing all the motion and the changing fields,
waiting to be excited and send the resulting current out through the circuits
of the airplane as if they’d suddenly read something they had to tell the
world.
It strikes me now, decades after I learned how my
plane got its electricity, that the ability to take turning input, induce an
electromagnetic response, increase the effect, and eventually illuminate a
microcosm for the people who inhabit it, describes the way I try to write
verse. The turning world, the turns of phrase I hear, the turns I see children
take as they play games, and the turns of fortune or misfortune that befall
friends and strangers provide the motive force for inducing a response in me, and
I in turn try to induce a response in others.
Although the poet may generate a response, he or she
is not the source of power. The input for poetry comes from the world turning
all around the poet. The poet converts motive force into power through
description, word placement, and word choice.
Careful attention to meaning, even to etymology, contributes
significantly to the output. Knowing words, and their potential. Knowing, for
instance, that the Latin verb vertere,
which means to turn, has a past
participle, versus—from which we get verse, which the poet relies on to
conduct meaning and illuminate a small part of the world by the power of its
own turning.
Devon Marsh served as a U.S.
Navy pilot before a career in electronic payments at Wells Fargo Bank. His
poems have appeared in The Lake, Poydras Review, The Timberline Review,
Muddy River Review, Penmen Review, Loch Raven Review, Nightingale and Sparrow, The Kakalak Anthology of Carolina Poets,
and at http://devonmarsh.com. Devon lives
in the Piedmont region of North Carolina.