On Not Knowing How to Start

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“If poetry comes not as naturally as leaves to a tree it had better not come at all.” Thus John Keats, at the age of 22, in a letter to his friend and publisher, John Taylor.

Keats’ axiom has haunted me for years. It suggests that only a copious poetry is to be valued. Undoubtedly, we who write can recognize such abundance, can thrill at our gifts when lines and sometimes whole stanzas accumulate without discernible effort. This may well be the ultimate reward for writing poetry: the rare occasions when one plays amanuensis to an unbidden voice or vision. I often think of Lord Ganesha, at the outset ofThe Mahabharata, when he is approached by the epic’s author, the sage Vyasa, who entreats him to take dictation. Ganesha relents, but only on the condition that Vyasa speak without stopping to edit his words. (The self-assured Vyasa agrees, but insists, in turn, that Ganesha understand each verse before committing it to paper. The god approves, and they are off to the races.)

The Ganesha-Vyasa pact preoccupied me 30 years ago, when I was 22. It was then, for the first time, I heard Bob Dylan’s “A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall.” Among the final lines of the ballad is “But I’ll know my song well before I start singing it.” Here, again, I get uncomfortable. Is the implication that only the ripeness of knowledge, what is trendily called “lived experience,” can precipitate poetry?

I return to the original Keats quote and ask what troubles me so. Is it the recommended reliance on inspiration as the prompt for all poetry, and the claim that anything less is superfluous, not worthy of bringing into the world? Keats’ word “naturally,” like his “leaves to a tree,” suggests a lack of art or even premeditation. Yet the figure admits the possibility that an appropriate climate and steady flow of nutrients have prepared the soil in advance.

For the time being, however, I am less concerned with the psychic development of poets than with the confidence that enables them to keep going in a single session, word by word, line by line, stanza by stanza.

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Randall Jarrell defines a poet as someone who spends a lifetime out in thunderstorms, and who must be struck by lightning at least five times before rating any good. Elizabeth Bishop professes that it is “far more important to just keep writing poetry than to think of yourself as a poet whose job is to write poetry all the time.” Referring to the latter condition, she asks, “what do such people do during those long, infertile periods?” Both poets, in brief, extol the need to “just keep writing.” But how, in the absence of lightning, does one persist—or, rather, what are the micro-wins, the intermittent jolts that renew a sense of purpose?

Again, I wish to sidestep the matter of constitutional fitness. The question is not why someone would wish to go on writing poems so much as how, from moment to moment at the writing desk, one finds sufficient inspiration to justify continuing—that is, if Keats’ axiom is to be taken seriously, and if a poem should emerge only after organic growth and maturation.

To begin to answer this question, let’s try a reductio ad absurdum. An extreme version of Keats’ premise would be that poetry gains legitimacy in direct proportion to the poet’s lack of effort. But in an age when, for better or worse, pedagogical circles maintain that the arts are largely about process—when “workshops” flourish as citadels of revision—there can be little fear of mistaking Keats’ axiom for the “first thought, best thought” slogan attributed to the Beats. Indeed, another famous letter of his—from 1820—enjoins Percy Bysshe Shelley to “curb your magnanimity, and be more of an artist [my emphasis], and load every rift of your subject with ore.”

For us to reconcile this advice with Keats’ earlier criterion for writing poetry—that it come “as naturally as leaves to a tree”—should not be too difficult. Rather than consider poetic composition as the working out of an initial impulse, the fluid elaboration of something to say, it is possible to understand Keats as meaning that no matter what tactics a poet uses to start and stay writing, the results must not betray an impression of slack “magnanimity,” on the one hand, or of forced effort on the other. (In an 1818 letter to D.H. Reynolds, Keats wrote: “We hate poetry that has a palpable design upon us” and “Poetry should be great & unobtrusive, a thing which enters into one’s soul, and does not startle it or amaze it with itself but with its subject.”) The ideal, at least in lyric poetry, is to cast a spell so that every sound, word, rhythm, and image, no matter how surprising in context, achieves an aura of inevitability.

The poet’s object, then, is to ignite a spark and sustain the “slow smokeless burning” of de-composition, to borrow another figure—this time from Robert Frost’s “The Woodpile.” Instead of a poetry that flaunts workmanship, we are talking about an invisibility of struts and joints. Invisible because these structural aids have dissolved, have receded into the poem as an organic unit. To quote Frost again, “Like a piece of ice on a hot stove the poem must ride on its own melting.”

Now that I’ve introduced a new series of metaphors into this discussion, I might rephrase my original question as: Short of waiting for the Muse to descend and bring instant relief, what are some ways to catch and hold fire throughout the writing of a poem?

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As we have seen, Keats’ axiom can be taken as referring exclusively to a poem’s impression on the reader. He does not deny the role of craft in producing that impression.

Robert Lowell, by contrast, in his final published poem, “Epilogue” (1977), sought to discard “those blessèd structures, plot and rhyme” as they offer “no help to me now.” But sheer willpower, and the exigencies of craft, always had loomed large in his self-mythology. Twenty-five years before “Epilogue,” Jarrell had spotted an illustrative tension in his friend’s mode of working.

He is a poet of both Will and Imagination, but his Will is always seizing his Imagination by the shoulders and saying to it in a grating voice: ‘Don’t sit there fooling around; get to work!’—and his poor Imagination gets tense all over like a squirrel in a squirrel-cage.’

In another late poem, “Reading Myself,” Lowell surveys his poetic output and recalls feats of ignition. To me, the lines refer to his process for psyching himself up to write a poem.

Like thousands, I took just pride and more than just,
struck matches that brought my blood to a boil;
I memorized the tricks to set the river on fire—

Admittedly, my reading may be an eccentric one. After all, the phrase “set the river on fire” can be glossed as the old British expression, “set the Thames on fire” (Lowell was probably in England when he wrote the poem). Lowell’s line thus acquires a dimension of crowd-pleasing, of gaining notoriety through his poetry. In another application of the term, the clinical psychologist Kay Redfield Jamison adapted it for the title of a book about Lowell’s manic-depressive illness. Yet I prefer to view “tricks to set the river on fire” as neither performative nor delusional.

Let’s assume for the moment that Lowell is talking not only about “tricks” acquired through long apprenticeship to a craft or trade, but also about mustering the will, while writing, to stay inspired. The metaphor of striking matches to bring one’s “blood to a boil” may appeal to those of us who lack a burning truth or searing image we wish to convey, but who must rely instead on the largesse of the medium.

By medium, I mean language, lineation, rhyme, meter, and other resources of craft. But I also embrace “medium” for its occult overtones—as representing the tricks or techniques a poet can use to tap into living speech, as if from another world.

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Among those techniques is automatic writing. Or, if the association with seances is apt to make you uncomfortable, then call it freewriting, as promoted by the late Peter Elbow. Ever since I began writing poems, I’ve found it helpful to scribble words and phrases as they occur, almost indiscriminately. Then—after, say, a couple of minutes—I look on the results. Frequently, I’ll circle one or two of those words or phrases. If not at the same session, then in the next one, I might repeat the process and again single out language that offers the start of a new poem.

Occasionally I find correspondences among these felicitous phrases across different writing sessions. The challenge I then set myself is to connect these nodes through craft. Just as when, in happier circumstances, a line whispers in my ear and begs to be transcribed, so can I treat my shored-up fragments with the dignity of a donnée. They, no less than a bespoke line, image, or idea, are the keys to my ignition.

So much for medium in terms of the occult. Now for medium as craft. The organizing principles of rhyme, meter, syllable count, or stanza shape can help the writer arrive at a subject. In short, craft is catalytic. The verbal or visual patterns one chooses to obey, if persisted in, have the benefit of eliciting a theme or statement. Rhyme-words or rhythms slide into place in fulfillment of an order one has imposed. Meaning is thereby created.

Craft can also be treacherous. To impose a form before the dream-logic of a poem has been allowed to have its say will prevent full discovery. If a convention is established too early in the writing process, then meanings may assert themselves too quickly, as choices are made that preclude other avenues for the poem. Pacing, then, is everything. It may account for the difference between craft and art. Especially for long poems, one way I have found to control the pacing is to “block” them in a prose sketch or outline. Both Yeats and Ben Jonson had success with this method.

Jonson, by emulating a classical style, often shows how craftsmanship can do the work of inspiration. Remember that he was a bricklayer’s stepson and an apprentice to the trade in his youth. In certain moods, I can think of no better analogy for writing poetry than laying brick, one at a time. (This could be because I tend to edit as I write, typically trying to get one line or stanza right before moving to the next.) The analogy suggests not only the foundation for a grand structure, but also membership in a modest trade, one that can accommodate all manner of building.

The Australian poet A.D. Hope might have approved of poetry as bricklaying when, in a 1965 essay, he advocated “the middle form of poetry: that form in which the uses of poetry approach closest to the uses of prose, and yet remain essentially poetry.” Previously, “it was a form which served without pretension the purposes of narration, the essay, the letter, conversation, meditation, argument, exposition, description, satire or cheerful fun,” Hope writes. “Its mood, like the mode, was discursive, not intense or elevated or passionate. It was in this middle field that the poets learned the exercise and management of their craft, the maintenance and modulation of tone, the arts of being at once well-bred, elegant, sincere and adept.”

Discursive, not intense or elevated or passionate. The bricklaying analogy is dull, but it allows for the concept of a poetry that can speak in the “middle field,” about all sorts of topics and themes. For the poet, too, the analogy is humble enough to encourage her to keep going. The discursive mode is not suited to all poetic composition but can be a welcome refuge when one sits down to write and is temporarily “without portfolio.” As a strategy, discursiveness—like craft—can prompt something to say.

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I have discussed how freewriting, craft, and the discursive mode all can function as “tricks to set the river on fire.” So can a few talismans—whether artifacts one keeps around while writing, or, in my case, hallowed sayings by other poets. William Stafford’s counter-intuitive advice to “lower your standards” usually works for me, as does W.H. Auden’s homage to his “tutors” (his favorite poets and philosophers) in the late poem “Thanksgiving”:

Fondly I ponder You all:
without You I couldn’t have managed
even my weakest of lines.

I began this essay with a statement John Keats made to one John Taylor. By now, I hope the reader has dispensed of any anxiety that poetry always must express itself “naturally,” pregnant with meaning from the moment of origin. But just in case, I’ll end by quoting a third John—the one who sang on Sgt. Pepper: “I’ve got nothing to say, but it’s okay.”