“Hello, my name’s Matt Gile, I am verily psyched you’re here!” Just as a quick intro, because that feels right for the occasion: I’m a poet and sculptural illustrator, studying to earn a BFA @ the New Hampshire Institute of Art. I aim to use my presence on this platform to promote the arts, my own and that of as many others as I can. My hope’s to engage with artists (of all mediums, but specifically poetry) and also with those self prescribed as, none artistic, as well. I’ll be proposing a bi-weekly poetry prompt, staggered, in the off week, with a verbiage piece on more loose and ranging topics.
Good, now that you’re cued into at a bit of where I’m coming from, we can… [ oh hello, just interrupting myself, double breaking the forth wall with these here brackets. I sort of relate them to Shakespeare’s asides, where the secretly vengeful character whispers (at an above whispered volume) about their villainous plans, so that the audience knows, only, my villainous plains are to siphon inspiration from you! Thusly, I’d like you to join me in seizing this double broken forth wall opportunity by sharing any poets, poems, or essays you think are worth knowing, in the comments section at the bottom of the page. Okay, back to business ] … beginning with the good stuff!
In his essay Live Yak Pie, James Tate writes “When I make the mistake of imagining how a whole poem should unfold, I immediately want to destroy it. Nothing should supplement the act of true discovery”.
Fist off: If you’re into poetry, be that reading, writing, or preforming it, and you haven’t already read this essay, then I highly suggest it! It is probably the best I’ve read thus far. Not sure where you side, but I find Tate’s words to be the bitter-sweet type of true. I’m crazy for attempting a summarization, but, to serve my point, I think Tate’s talking on how beginning a poem with a preset vision of its end shape cancels out actually discovering something within it and, as a result, the poem falls short of delivering impactful insight; it fails the “act of true discovery”. This makes complete sense, especially as he goes further, elaborating several other elements of this thing called poetry.
He talks about how truly great poems move us from where we’re currently planted, to someplace new. Through transplanting us into the world of the poem and building there within, an insight we hadn’t possessed before entering, is made and given to the reader. This is poetry at its finest, because that transferal dawns a light into our common well; that complicated and inescapable garment: the Human Condition. [We’re even wearing it now … see what I did there?] He correlates the poem’s insight or revelation, to the act of discovery and therein lies my struggle.
Some strong emotion, story, or idea rises up and imbues me with a desire to do something. Writing, my preferred something, is where I’ll go to begin to understanding crucial aspects of myself, in relation the world. I’m there delving into a story, reacting to an event, meditating on a peculiarity or brilliance of a little un-pocketed moment … whatever sparks the urge which ends in words, the moral’s that I want to write.
I want to write, yet, in the same stroke, I don’t want to touch the page. I am developing a decent sense of technique, with my work (not horn tooting here, I still have eons to go before I write the way I want to) but what terrifies me is going in for the BIGS: the twisted shrapnel grafted to the soft of our hearts after an awful break up, or the shared estrangement of grief; your uncle sinking into his Lazy Boy as your warbling family orbits him in the house of his dying. Or how about the exuberance of star shine on glass flat lake water, you falling backward through the air form the dock and in the water grapple with your place in all the violent, peaceful beauty … Some poems I do well on, and others not as much.
My mistake? On the ones I fudge, before I go into the first eruption phase of writing, I will have the emotion already somewhat named. A named emotion, along with a mental pre-draft of what shape and tone of the poem will have, those are dangerous things. With a starting point zeroed in on, I’ll gun for it. Barging straight into the emotional center like this, I’m more inclined to boss around, than to listen to what’s there. I belabor it, scratching marks across the page and what has happened by the time I’m done? When I’ve made this mistake, usually by the time I call it quits, I’ve utterly failed to chart any territory that excites me, or gets close to where it wanted to go.
Is that reason to shy away from going after the BIGS, nope! As a peer of mine has recently pointed out, the best works seem to be risking something: the author/ artist/ poet, they’ve got something on the line. [pun] Additionally, I’ve had professors tell me to turn my own gaze inward and reach for the more complicated.
In reluctant agreement with them, I also find myself drawn to works that posses this air of risk in them. I respond to artists who are grappling with some important strand of themselves. I find when my attempt at a poem fails, the problem is that I didn’t push beyond the one good image I rode in on ⎯ an image/line which I usually loath in retrospect. These lines, stemming from my preconception of what the end poem’s shape, tone, and agenda will be, are what doom the poem’s hopes of actually reaching the emotion at its center. Touching down with the that narrow gaze, I speak from sterile POVs, then spend the rest of my time re-explaining the image’s importance. This is merely an attempt to make adequate what was already dead in the water. And here we have the danger in zeroing in, of knowing too much and conceiving too narrowly what route our poems will take. By entering so decidedly, we blind ourselves to all other possibilities.
So, to combat overly committing to the narrow or the opposite, avoiding the risks involved with turning inward toward the twisted, chewed up, complicated stuff, I propose the following exercise: Dance to The Center Like A Stoat.
Stoats are a member of the weasel family that’ve been known to employ a somewhat unexpected technique to catch their prey. The stoat [or for our sake, the poet] will have tracked a rabbit [the insight at the emotional core of a poem] to an open field. It isn’t fast enough to directly cross the 75 yards and catch the rabbit, head on. Wiley rabbit, having evaded the stoat, will sit, watching from a safe distance in the field. With lurching hunger cradled in their stomach, what does the stoat do? It dances!
The stoat will literally throw itself into the air, thrashing down into tumbles and quick jerks of movement. This display freezes the rabbit. Wild, the stoat moves onward in a medley of rigid “stop-go, stop-go” and all the while, the jewel object of desire, the rabbit, is unable to process any of it. The stoat its blasts of absurdity to shrink the space between them. The rabbit’s as good as stone. Frozen. Then suddenly and against your better sense, you watch as the stoat draws near enough and strikes. A little gruesome, I’ll admit, but the whole scene makes for a striking metaphor and concurrently, an exercise.
If the poet, or stoat, crosses directly into the center of the field, the crossing of which is the writing of the poem, then they chance loosing the rabbit (and it certainly doesn’t look as cool!). However, I’m not asserting that this approach doesn’t serve some poems or poets well, just that the direct sprint is a risk. For our sake in this metaphor, an unswerving thrust toward the center would expose that the poet’s bold assumptions are inherently limiting. The sprinting stoat, with it’s narrow trajectory, doesn’t see other possible routes to the center. It just rides in on “how her eyes were storms, swallowing the ship of my heart” … Then, it stalls. Failing to traverse the emotional core, to encapsulate something, failing to reach beyond and into the deep … the Rabbit gets away.
Instead of rushing in, committed to one predetermined mode or stride, metaphor or narrative, extinguishing all other possibilities by doing so, then seeing that stride crash, being not fast enough and loosing despite your best efforts, watching the rabbit scoot effortlessly into the adjacent wood... I propose this prompt:
Pick some shrapnel form your past, or present, or just anything with strong emotional content. Or, if you’ve got a story/concept that you’ve had orbiting in your mind and don’t know how to explore it, that works too. This will be a session comprised of five consecutive drafts. It is an exercise in divorcing what we think we know; an exercise in not knowing if the rabbit has freckles, when we’re merely on the outskirts of the field. Allow everything you imagine the poem should be to linger on the burner, and make it your chore to ignore it (for now). Let the rabbit sit at a safe distance. Dissociate (the best you can) from the language, imagery, metaphor, or narrative you’d use if you up and broke into a sprint. Instead, do as stoats do and begin dancing in a purposefully unrelated place. Pick some wacky, obscure entrance on the outskirts of the field. If your rabbit (the poem’s core) wants to explore receiving the news about some old friend’s death, than entertain the perspective of a dog being walked outside your apartment window, or the life of the flowers you never water, and leave wilting on the sill. Or, personify waded gum on the mail man’s shoe when he brought your neighbor, from 4b, two inheritance checks; money left to them by their late uncle Winston. The point is, decide a character or item, neither of which belong and begin an adjacent story. Write without filter. Be lead into some strange scenario by what ever gets you dancing ⎯ I usually let language lead me in, playing sounds off each other in wired sequences. I find a percussion and tap to it. In this first go, your focus is a free from, generative exploration of whatever’s not in the center of the poem. Go with whatever you find and follow that vain until it comes to a nice resting point, after 5 to 15 minutes. As soon as that go concludes, plunge yourself into a second, using the best line/image/metaphor/ characters/ voice/ etc ... from the first poem, as the jumping off point for your new poem. You then do another crazy dance with it, only this time allow the poem to move toward the center. The key is to be fluid, expanding on what you generate from draft to draft. Keep each really short and keep moving. You continue this regiment of poetic spurts, staring from the exterior of the poem, and orbiting inward, allowing your elements (the most successful from each draft) to trickle through. Do this five times. Again, try to not know what you are doing. Listen and respond to what’s happening. In a free moving, uncommitted dance, you’ll be inching toward the center of your real poem and enriching it along the way. By not canceling out the crazy, you’ll find better, more surprising modes. When finally close enough to the center to reach it, you will have evolved your way there.
I know that for me, this dancing habituates discovery, because it forces me to free my mind from the rigged forms of the pre-conceived. I get the rabbit by making myself divorce the easy folly of going to the center first.
