A Poem Begins with a Social Occasion and as a Model of Thinking
How does a poem begin?
“[T]he performance is in some sense always pushing back the moment of its inception.”
Fred Moten, Commonplace Podcast Episode 120: Fred Moten & Ronaldo Wilson
“An old cry at fairs, the showman having promised his credulous hearers that as soon as enough pennies are collected his donkey will balance himself on the top of a pole or ladder. Always a matter of ‘two more pennies,’ the trick is never performed.”
Kay Ryan, epigraph to her poem “Two More, And Up Goes the Donkey”
“‘But the Moon’ is after all the poets you think it is.”
Nikki Reimer, “Notes on the Text,” No Town Called We
“[A]esthetic inquiry emphasizes the link between what is held to be reasonable and what is viscerally experienced”
Kandice Chuh, “Knowledge Under Cover”
“[A]n emphasis on the uniqueness of individual experience offers little prospect for social agency or change.”
Min-Zhan Lu and Bruce Horner, “The Problematic of Experience”
“Reaching out, despite ‘not knowing anyone,’ can be scary.”
Renée Sarojini Saklikar, “Five Questions with Renée Sarojini Saklikar”
“So many of the poems begin with epigraphs which is a style once fashionable in Canadian Poetry, but which has since fallen by the way side.”
Chris Banks, “Trading Poetics: A Review of Trading Beauty Secrets With The Dead by Erina Harris”
For me, a poem begins with a social occasion. Most often, this start is indirectly social, though sometimes I write in anticipation of a poetry event or in response to a prompt another poet wrote for me. Usually, I write out of a day’s confluence of texts moving me in and out of poetry, science, and philosophy. A poem begins in the shared human project of learning and knowing: a poem is my response to learning and an expression of learning. At the same time, my poems don’t directly communicate facts or reproduce ideas. Instead, they are a place I think in, or a tool I use to think with that also records my thinking, which I also reshape as communication to others in poetic form.
A poem offers something that exists at the intersection of intertextual networks and traditions of poetry, the aspects of the world I happen to learn about in temporal proximity, and my own experience of that learning and of writing the poem. The poem attaches my thinking beyond myself into a shareable form. A poem is a performance of my thinking that I don’t need to be present for, but that makes the thinking a presence, that presents it in another person’s mind.
Writing a poem and teaching feel similar to me because each is an experience of making meaning with others. Neither is primarily about me sharing knowledge, though things I know are in the poem and I have a responsibility to bring things I know to the classroom. But that’s not why I do either, even though my knowledge is involved. The reason I want to do both activities is to make meaning together. (Something I’m trying to figure out more is how to talk about the differences and overlap between “meaning” and “knowledge” and “knowing” and “thinking.”)
When I teach, I say explicitly that making meaning together is what I want, and then my actions afterward show that this is true. Sometimes I wonder if I should preview how a poem begins for me in a similar way, even though the poems likewise show what they’re doing. An epigraph, for example, can position the poem on an interesting fact. An epigraph, though, would feel artificial for me since the poem wouldn’t truly emerge in response to my learning that specific fact. A poem starts more like a dream does, out of the compression of recent experience.
Another thing that stops me from using an epigraph is the way that it might pin the poem down, as a concrete detail different from the concrete details inside of the poem. Inside of the poem, concrete details (when I’m reading or writing) float me up into the abstract, which in turn sends me back down to re-understand the concrete details. I worry that an epigraph, outside of the poem proper, would hang onto the details and prevent the mind from moving up and down the registers of significance. (But, then, I enjoy epigraphs in poems by others, so why do I feel this way? The detail in the paratext is outside of the patterns of the details in the text, so it isn’t fashioned in the same way. It’s hard to understand what it means to separate and join a poem with the rest of everything and that’s exactly what I like most. An epigraph is a gesture toward something too big to gesture to that it is desirable to gesture to.)
Using “we” presents similar worries for me. I worry a “we” in my poem will
seem to be a universal, abstract “we,” as though the poem isn’t working through
specific details from a particular perspective, a thinker thinking from the
fact of a shared condition (unequally, differently shared). Trusting that the
poem shows that it isn’t imposing an abstract concept that doesn’t care about
the details and distinctions seems difficult because “we” blatantly enters the
poem into theory but the poem only suggests what it is thinking without
explaining. But then I also began this essay with the impossible gesture of
epigraphs, without explanation.
