How does a poem begin?
I like to think about what a poem does more than try to consider its value, which is also the kind of criticism I prefer. I think much time is spent attempting defences of poetry which argue it has value, without recognizing that our value system is skewed to power, capital, authority and a host of other ill things. When I read River Halen, in “Some Animals and Their Housing Situations,” saying, “Nothing alive belongs to anyone. Everyone is constantly learning this and forgetting this and learning this and forgetting this and learning,” I recognize the kinds of hands and voice that can make a good poem. I do deeply believe poems are alive, meaning I am unsettled when they’re treated as objects. They of course are objects, in a way, and deceptively simple ones, but more than that, and we know it.
A flower, let’s say a globe thistle deeply blue because I like them, has value beyond use value, right? Beyond beauty and beyond any human consideration at all. I’m aware not all would agree. I’m going to talk about poems under the terms that they don’t need to be valuable to anyone to be good. They just need to be and do things, and we can talk about them in terms of what they do. A good poem for me suggests a way of being that’s otherwise to destructive, transactional, possessive. In this sense, a good poem is also like a tree or a rock. Its speaker, is aware of position as much as relation as much as difference and does not try to flatten any of that out. In her poem, “Saturn Approaching,” Chimwemwe Undi, looking for more than what’s offered in ownership and belonging, makes a locale for more than surviving to say,“There is space where I echo, / and I find it, and I fill it like the fog.” An echo is always about listening, being able to hear. Isn’t fog insidious? That depends how you see it, feel it.
When the Palestinian poet Ghassan Zaqtan writes, as translated from Arabic by Fady Joudah, “Which flowers are speech / which flowers are silence?” something like the possibilities that keep me to a faith in poetry appear. There’s a way of being and listening that’s required to even ask this question about flowers, to hear either speech or silence, there’s an understanding that it’s not always easy to tell the difference between speech and silence. Perhaps at its best poetry is a form of silence, speaking the way wind does, or the sea, or the way we do to each other with glances. This does not mean it is always quiet. Silence has many registers, not all available to everyone or at any given time.
I like how the poet Annick MacAskill says not the same thing but to me a related thing, in a poem from her book Shadow Blight called “Variant,”
In some, calls fade to silence,
grief stilling us to stone;
in others,
they crest to howls, domestic and
unknowable
as a dog’s. Or
so the poets say.
Which makes me ask, what calls to us? I think that’s how a poem begins, and informs the whole rest of whatever it becomes, why after a beginning the whole work is not making a good poem but hearing what the poem really is. Paul Celan places our singing, both against and in spite of oblivion, within the petals that are the word over the thorns of a rose. I find his “Psalm” to be a good poem; I never think about it that way. What’s between stone and howling, in our audible registers of being with each other, listening?
