Poems are never finished - just abandoned
- Paul Valery
Yes, yes, you’re right to think - These poets. They can’t stop talking about ‘the craft’. It’s true, I am a bit partial to such poems that swivel between universes, poems whose seed of a single thought spawn orchards of metaphor and meaning, all deeply felt. There is nothing like the uncanny rush of warm awareness that a poem is speaking in two registers - one quietly embodying the act of creation itself.
While writing, I often oscillate between the twin impulses of a torrential flood of feeling and ink-stained revelation, and the more diplomatic approach of construction, shape-finding, and wading through the errata. Where should I put a stop to the non-linearity of conversations that arise from an array of characters both inanimate, and alive? Where should I let control and authorial voice override the free-will and musicality of strands in the narrative that have begun to find their own destinies? Or more appropriately, “How do I know when a poem is finished?”
This is a deliciously simple question that strikes at the very heart of so many considerations - Is it clear? Is there complete communication? Have I said what I wanted to say? Did I do justice to the idea/feeling/image/event? Is it saying too many things or not enough things? There is a lifetime of learning, infused with metaphors of relationship and transaction, between the first draft, and various edits of a poetic (or any artistic) creation. The creation cycle begins in the moment when a thought lodges itself in the fertile loam of the imagination, and then rushes to the tips of our fingers coaxing us to write. It lurches into editing, analysis, feedback, publishing and dissemination, and the again, feedback. I believe this cycle to be a microcosm of life itself - it is nothing more than a continuous striving to be witness, to give testimony with integrity and complete surrender.
Naomi Shihab Nye, as always, writes with simplicity, opening up the flat spatio-temporal miasma of the poem into a mise-en-scene that rings with pulse and the tentative wonder of this joy of creation. The point is made with minimum fuss. Not weighed down by the gravitas of meaning-making, content, action, or political will, she dissolves into the comforting spirts of intuition and play. The last two stanzas are golden, laying the last piece, not through prescription, but with a spontaneous flight of thought that is beautiful, without shedding any of its mystery.
This is what poetry, and all art is about - marvelling at beautiful mysteries, and seeing a whole in a thing without thinking consciously about how it came to happen. That joy - of the machinery of a thing that is aesthetic and complete - is in retrospect.
Note: Poetly loves Naomi Shihab Nye. Posts that reference her are scattered through the archive. Here are a couple of her poems: Famous, The Art of Disappearing. Feel free to trawl more :)