How does a poem begin?
I feel some casual magic in this astonishing paragraph from Kay Ryan:
Right now I am thinking of something unlikely that I saw a few days ago, the morning after my town had experienced a major winter flood. In the middle of a residential street, a cast iron manhole cover was dancing in its iron collar, driven up three or four inches by such an excess of underground water that it balanced above the street, tipping and bobbing like a flower, producing an occasional bell-like chime as it touched against the metal ring. This has much to say about poetry.
I also think this joke below—written by a kid—has much to say about poetry too:
-what is big and whight
and sits by a tree?
-a fridge
A few summers ago I was helping out my father-in-law at his job (he installs water-pumps in wells for folks) and we were touring this person’s property doing serious things and I happened to see a robin’s (I think!) egg that had fallen out of a tree and that had landed on the driveway. I know this is no big deal, really, but where the egg had landed and cracked open it just so happened that the old driveway had also cracked and the veins of these cracks spread out across the pavement. So when I saw this egg it appeared as if its own collision with the pavement had caused this greater fracturing. When my father-in-law yelled, “What the hell are you doing?” and he and the house-owner looked back at me I knew it would not be winning to say, “I’m inside a poem, fellas.”
Last week I heard someone say this phrase, “In the end, it was a really swell time” and just the cadence of that comment (and maybe the semi-folksy, out-datedness of the phrase ‘swell time’) seemed to make the sounds of (forgive me!) a sonnet taking its first steps. What’s notable for me is that I believe it was my belly that “heard” this cadence rather than my ears or brain.
This bad kid joke, I reckon, also has much to say about the origins of poetry:
-nok nok
-whos their
-spargus
Erín Moure’s poetry—as sophisticated and theory-informed and multi-lingual as it is—always seems to me like it’s ever in conversation with a kid-mind. I believe I learn from her work that if I’m going to gain admittance to the poem’s world then it’s probably via a humble not-knowing knowing rather than trying to impose something on the poem. Or, “in the cabbage there is something of flight grounded.” Aha after aha of wow.
Anyway, here’s a very Canadian poetry problem (!) I’ve been working on for 16 years. One day (for real!) I was pulling some junk out from behind our shed and one of the pieces was an old hockey net and when I lifted it up there was a carcass of a crow, its wings spread wide, snagged in the net. It was too difficult for my mind to understand the moment so my belly interpreted it and I knew what world I’d entered. But I know poetry is a kind of remove from this even, too, because we’re supposed to, as poets, move sensation, experience, surprise, cadence, the veryvery unsayable into words… Anywaytwice, I like how this experience of surprise still isn’t entirely the or a poem. I mean, I still can’t figure out how to say this experience as a poem because I know that the truth of it—as poetry—exists to the side or to the deep (?) of my description. In this way, maybe, the real poem cannot be “about” this thing. That is a dazzling trouble and I love it.
Tripleanyway, all of this is more radiantly expressed by this peerless kid joke:
-what did the crab say to the carpet?
-Snapsnap
