On “Not a Celtic Twilight”: A Craft Essay by William Doreski
In a way, it’s simple: I write poetry to explain the world to myself. The geography of the physical and mental planet teases me to explore the seams and gaps between the dimensions our bodies live in and the clouds our minds create and occupy. Reality and imagination, in Wallace Stevens’ terms: but I reject the notion that what lies outside the body is more real than what lives in the mind. The ideal poem would in every line, sentence, and phrase juxtapose those two ecospheres and force them to fight to a draw. No actual poems generate the power to fulfill that ideal, although Stevens sometimes comes close. Mine struggle fitfully from one competing notion of the real to another. Images flex, break, collapse into other images. Space and place are no longer givens. Little dramas lead somewhere or nowhere. In those dramas, two people, often, argue competing notions of the environment they jointly occupy. Their unstructured dialogues usually terminate dangling in a vacuum. Sometimes the poem learns something, a temporary stay against the muddle of the quotidian. Often it can’t go far enough to properly conclude.
My technique isn’t as complex as my terrain. The tension between the line and the sentence—a stock property of English-language poetry for centuries—in most of my poems takes the form not of free verse but of rough accentual verse, descended from the venerable ballad meter of the late Middle Ages and more distantly from Anglo-Saxon verse. I most frequently write in lines of seven to nine syllables. Each line has three or four accented syllables but avoids the regularity of syllable-stress verse. The principle is to provide enough stresses to shape and sustain the line without regularizing it at the expense of syntax. When I can’t feel that rhythm I write a prose poem instead.
The title “Not a Celtic Twilight” invokes William Butler Yeats’s use of ancient Irish legend and poetry, but the occasion of my poem couldn’t be more contemporary. It’s about an eye surgery I underwent last winter, a delicate procedure that even a few years ago wouldn’t have been possible. The Celtic Twilight of Yeats was an idealized moment of history revived for a sophisticated form of cultural nostalgia. My twilight was caused by the loss of sight in one eye. As with the bronze tombstone figure of my poem, references to the dim past erupt into our ordinary lives to remind us to avoid drifting unmoored into an ignorant and shapeless future. However distorted that past, it anchors us to everything preceding and shaping us.
As a figure in the poem I lie semi-conscious and staring up without seeing. The bold light of surgery and the mysterious instruments remind me how complex and expensive our civilization has become, and how much of benefit it has enabled. The surgeon of course occupies the role of the other, as I describe it above; but if asked he would point out that the drama of his expertise has a clear purpose that unfolds in the realm of the real. The imagination, however, can’t be entirely persuaded of that, and leans on its power to fictionalize and reshape events. Is this explaining the world, or obscuring it to overcome my doubts and fears? Only this and my other poems can say, but not with certainty.
