Poetry 

How to write poetry? I have been writing poems for decades, but have not done so through creative writing classes, participating in poetry scenes or engaging in performances for audiences. My only credential is an undergraduate degree in English literature.  And many years of writing and reading.  

But what is the relation between these two? Reading and writing are intertwined; one leads to and feeds off the other. What to write becomes tangled in what to read; how to write with how to read. Roland Barthes’ notion of the punctum could apply; out of the literary plenum certain texts appeal—appel—and attention is “snagged” as if caught on a hook or claw. Or perhaps the relationship is more pulsating, less defined, akin to being washed over by waves. From reading to writing, there is movement of one to another through channels and moments of sympathy and discomfit, a resounding and silencing of self. Or the relation invokes the need for flirtation as a component of literary experience, the figure or voice who calls and is answered only obliquely, teasingly, as way to extend intimacy and creative process. I have flirted with and demanded voices from my chorus of writers: Donne, Shakespeare, Blake, Dickinson, Ronsard, Dante, H.D., Apollinaire, Mallarmé, Robert Duncan, Jabès, Woolf, Susan Howe, and Mary and Percy Shelley. These writers have influenced me in the sense of influere, meaning “into/to flow, to flow into, inflow, influx, flowing matter,” the latter especially referencing astrological events where ethereal fluid flowing from stars affects human character and destiny. Or as voices woven into a web or fabric of meaning. 

Within this chorus of voices what and where is the poet’s voice? Do we need to hear it? Or can poetry be realized in the pleasure of reading? Words sit on page, waiting activation; a book sits on shelves anticipating that moment when a hand reaches out and pulls it away from its nest. Pages part, a labyrinth of possibilities is revealed, and the reader gathers threads of significance. It is an activity of appetite; on the part of the book and the reader. [“The text you write must prove to me that it desires me.” – Barthes] Sense is sought out through marks on a page but meaning is never garnered as singular. I think of the relation of the voice to the page—is there one? To speak as multiple or multitude would challenge word sequence and perhaps spark awareness of the page as something oddly, maddeningly regular and regulating. If the page is a means of focus, a canvas, words can be cast upon it. The spotting of words on a page echoes a constellation but one of multiple constitution.  

“I begin to long for some little language such as lovers use, broken words, inarticulate words, like the shuffling of feet on the pavement.” – Woolf 

“The bliss of the text is not precarious, it is worse: precocious; it does not come in its own good time, it does not depend on ripening.” – Barthes 

What is language? It may appear straightforward but when experienced as another, it reflects the self as a mirror, sometimes darkly. A poem offers the possibility of being held between; words stand in uncertain relation to one another and the reader(s) link up meaning as a bulwark against the space between, the ever present condition of emptiness, of non-meaning, of the vastness. [“Sur le vide papier que sa blancheur defend.” – Mallarmé] Within this infinity, the other as language—the other revealed in an-other language—is particularly alluring: “…the subject gains access to bliss by the cohabitation of languages working side by side: the text of pleasure is a sanctioned Babel.” – Barthes 

To be held between      language     la langue    l a l a  

The reach across words is at the readers’ pleasure. The acceptance of the other, the writer to reader and reader to writer is never certain and if not one of contest a condition of entreaty. The capacity of the word is akin to an image; there is containment, focus, a bending of the mind to the world that encapsulates experience which only retreats to become captured other-wise. Memory and the grander notion of history are organized through touchstones that make visible and invisible; what is not spoken, what in habits the silences. 

“Walk with me and you will begin to feel who I truly am, even as I find who I truly am as I come into my step fully; indeed, come into your stride with mine and you will begin to find yourself.” – Duncan 

“The now that is Night 

  time comprehended in Thought” – Howe 

“As if there were waves of darkness in the air, darkness moved on, covering houses, hills, trees, as waves of water wash round the sides of some sunken ship…. Darkness washed down streets, eddying round single figures, engulfing them…. Darkness rolled its waves along grassy rides and the wrinkled skin of the turf…. Mounting higher, darkness blew along the bare upland slopes, and met the fretted and abraded pinnacles of the mountain where the snow lodges for ever on the hard rock…and girls, sitting on verandahs…. Them, too, darkness covered.” – Woolf  

My misreading of this last line: “Then, too, darkness was covered.”