Origins: A Craft Essay by Staci Halt
Louise Glück asks in her essay “Forbidden,” “Can I trust what I see given my preference to see it?” I believe this question haunts all poets whether they’re aware of the question’s existence or not. I rather think an extension of this question hovers around the somewhat horrifying notion that much of published writing is born, or nurtured to toddlerhood, in a navel-gazing MFA workshop wherein poets, at least, must regularly be–and sometimes are not–reminded, “Line breaks in a journal entry does not a poem make,” or, to borrow from Glück we ought to ask ourselves if we can we trust what we write given our preference to write it?
Poets must apply a critical lens to fledgling poems. We must prod ourselves to see that the speakers of our poems can (and often should) divorce themselves from what Real Thing may have happened to the poet that was the genesis of the poem, and be open to what the poem itself needs to say. This is where writing a poem gets thrilling: When it jumps the tracks and decides to be about something else entirely.
“...we as poets and readers of poems are greatly served if that experience itself doesn’t trap the poet into only writing exactly how it went down.”
William Wordsworth had verbose and grandiose things to say about being a poet, the role of a poet and what makes up a poem and why in his Preface to Lyrical Ballads, and if you haven’t read it, pour a drink first because you’re in for a ride. This pedantic and sometimes self-important treatise is dated in every possible sense of the phrase, but remains important to poets because he seems to be tottering around what would become the transition from formal verse into what would become free verse poetry– from an English-speaking Eurocentric tradition anyway.
Wordsworth and I do not agree on much, but this part of Preface interests me: “I have said that poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings: it takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquility...” I would take liberties and expand this to posit that yes, a poem is absolutely usually generated as a response to a very real experience that has struck the poet on an emotional level and yet, we as poets and readers of poems are greatly served if that experience itself doesn’t trap the poet into only writing exactly how it went down.
That the emotion of a circumstance remembered later “in tranquility”, as Wordsworth suggests, can serve as a springboard for the poem instead of its roadmap is perhaps an undervalued bit of advice, especially when it comes to revision.
My poem “Dogma” which appeared in Abraxas’s first issue, is one part of a triptych of Dogma poems wrestling with a rather fucked-up god or at least, the speaker’s complicated relationship with a less-than-perfect deity. What makes the poem fun to talk about is the process behind the final poem, which is that it started off as a seven-stanza monstrosity wherein the female speaker narrates the origin of scars all over her body titled “Storied Skin.” This poem arose from a prompt generated by a friend in poetry class we were taking together at Harvard. It was based on real events and the resulting scars, and after the class I realized the poem was more of a writing exercise than quality work. It was relegated to my haunted graveyard of poems and half-poems in Google docs.
A year later, as I was writing another Dogma poem, I heard Jericho Brown mention in a writing seminar how he saves lines on scraps of paper and sifts through them sometimes to place lines in poems that started off in a different place. I’d never before considered a writing-as-collage technique, and I zeroed in on this waste-not-want-not approach. Not every line in a bad poem is bad. Elementary, maybe, but it was a revelation for me: The poem that needed to be written wasn’t about me at all. I revisited the scar poem and one line stuck out to me as salvageable, which ended up becoming the final line of the Dogma poem, which is more austere and slow-paced than the origin poem. “This is the only convincing evidence/ of a male god/ of creation: a woman’s body is perfectly designed/ to try to kill her.”
As soon as I detached myself from the speaker of the poem, and then the speaker of the poem detached herself from my life’s real events, the poem had room to breathe. Dick Hugo has something to say about this when he instructs in Triggering Towns, “You owe the truth nothing; you owe the poem everything.” Dean Young shares his own take on this idea in an interview giving advice to poets: “The blood’s always fake but you got to try to make the bleeding real.”
The words of my poet forbearers comfort and remind me that a poem has its own agenda, and it doesn’t need to tell what really happened to the poet. In fact, poems often render themselves stale and cliched missed opportunities when they do. (See: so many first drafts.) Instead, the poet is their best when they stand as a flawed and ofttimes stilting oracle who, if they are lucky, is struck with the words that end up asking an important, truthful question, which in the end is far more interesting and communicates—hopefully—more broadly than the inciting events ever could.
Works Cited
Gluck, Louise. Proofs & Theories: Essays on Poetry. Hopewell: The Ecco Press, 1994.
Hugo, Richard. The Triggering Town. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1982.
Wordsworth, William and Samuel Coleridge. Lyrical Ballads 1798: A Critical Edition. Ed. Wayne K. Chapman. Clemson: Clemson University Digital Press, 2011.
Young, Dean. “Make the Bleeding Real.” Neon Pajamas: December 5, 2018. https://www.neonpajamas.com/blog/dean-young-interview
Staci Halt teaches and writes near Boston, and parents six awesome humans and three cats. Her work has previously appeared or is forthcoming in Rattle, Salamander Magazine, an anthology by Driftwood Press, The Los Angeles Review, and others.
