Creative writing - Mike Sanders 2014
Tracing density and intensity
The seamless book of poetry
Long-form genres
Wallace Stevens once intimated that poems help us live our lives. (I wonder if he felt that way after breaking his own hand hitting Ernest Hemingway on the jaw, only to have the younger writer give him a thorough pounding and leave him lying on his back in a puddle?) I don’t happen to think people’s lives are determined by art. I think there are much more powerful determining forces (and I don’t mean Hemingway’s jaw).
For me, it would be extremely hard to go through life as if for the first time, as though nobody had been there before me. Poetry reconciles us to ourselves, as Stevens says, in that it can’t be peculiar to you if someone else has had it before. It’s kind of a prophecy of what’s to come, so if you’re reading something about being 50 or being 70 when you’re 30, it doesn’t come as quite such a shock when you get to that later age. I don’t want to imagine a life without any sense of being companied by other voices that have been along the same road.
It’s been maintained that most literary people have an episode in their lives, often in late adolescence, when they write. In my case, I believe this time helped me understand what a different activity creative writing is from criticism, engaging wholly different spheres of the soul, mind, and personal essence.
Sometimes when I write about particularly complex poems, I write them out longhand rather than typing them on my computer. This act makes me feel what it’s like to have viscerally formed that poem—what it was like to put down a line and make it connect with the next one. That seems to me to be the single most helpful way to feel them through. You’ll also find that because you wrote them, so to speak, you know them by heart. Something goes through the muscles that comes back to the brain, and you know those words in a different way than if you’d just read them.
After you’ve written out poems (yours or others’), they tend to come up in your mind frequently when you don’t have the book around, as a line might rise in the mind of a poet, unbidden and against your will. That experience helps feed into a sense of how the poem gathers itself together. After all, it’s only a device like any other.
Does meeting the poets you write about change anything at all—your feeling about their work, for example? I believe it’s better not to meet them, but often it’s quite helpful to hear them read. I like having heard the voice attach itself to the poems, although it’s not indispensable. It’s true that some poets are more performative than others—think of the incantatory style W. B. Yeats used in which poets want to chant their poetry.
The opposite approach is the deadpan or restrained reading. Stevens is one of these musing readers rather than a performing reader. Yet the very flatness of it can be revealing when the voice suddenly reads a line in a way that is not flat. That emphasis of the voice—whether hyperbolic, like Robert Bly, or understated, like Stevens—can alert you to elements you haven’t quite realized from reading the page.
Experiencing a reading by a poet like Bly or Dylan Thomas is going to be more entertaining than one by Stevens or Charles Wright. Yet that doesn’t make Bly or Thomas better poets, nor does it make their poems fundamentally more intense.
Regardless of the skill in its delivery, some poetry is going to be aesthetically uninteresting, conventional, and derivative. And other literature, poorly or ordinarily delivered, is going to be original and unusual and beautiful. Some poems have an enormous density of observed detail so you learn much about what people are wearing, what time the carriage draws up, or how many people were at a party.
There’s the density of social detail, a density of population, in some types of poetry, while in others, only one voice speaks. This density of a chorus of voices—polyphonic density—is unusual for lyric poetry, but it’s nonetheless possible. More often, there’s a single voice—at least in lyric poetry—and a barely sketched scene, if you have any scene at all. There’s no plot as such; that is to say there are no events. The poem becomes the event, as Robert Lowell intimated, rather than a record of an event.
With your poems, you’re probably going to be enacting an event in the mind of someone else with a single voice. That admission to a single other mind is comparable to a soliloquy in drama: the moment where the mind stops and thinks. That idea suits most poets. They like the single voice. There’s something to be said for the power of its private intensity. The intensity of narrative poems, in which the feeling usually is diffused through several characters, generally is viewed as far less gripping than the single intensity of the single voice.
WRITING PROMPT
What kind of poet are you? Make a list of images, and assign each a poetic line of description. Do you find you tend toward density or intensity?