Poetry happens outside the page. Poetry is an instant. It strikes us oh-so-quickly; it makes us mourn. It happens when life too painfully or too blissfully filters through us. By the time we’ve acknowledged it, poetry has passed.
That’s why we turn then to the page. We want to filter that poetry through the page to give that poetry a place to live again, because it’s since stopped living.
The page is artifact to poetry, that is, to what has been.
Can you give to someone else what has been? That’s the task of the poet. Over six thousand light-years away, almost one thousand years ago, a supernova explosion occurred in the constellation Taurus. When it happened, that was poetry. The Crab Nebula is artifact. We can wonder at its explosion because of that artifact.
Poetry should allow others to wonder at explosions.
Did something explode inside of you? Did something recently die? Is there, today, enough poetry to confront the page?
The line will break; the line will break, and you will need to answer why. Can you answer why? I came upon an answer once, and it was too true; so I stopped with all the line breaking because it frightened me too much. You should know why the line breaks; you should be able to say why. If you don’t know why, then you should face each day, not the page, but the break.
Because things will break, and their breaking will make you a poet.
Are you generous enough? Have you enough to give? Or have you lost trust and, as a result, cannot give enough? Sometimes, a poet loses trust. A poet often does not give enough. Giving takes a long time to learn. Giving may not be something that’s taught.
When life filters through you, and it has given you a gift (and you’ve already been gifted as a poet, that is, with the swift ability to conjure language), will you be poet enough to return this gift on the page? Life will filter through you and deposit gifts your way. You must be astute enough to see what each thing has to say.
Poetry is an instant. It is an instant in which transcendence is achieved, where a miracle occurs, and knowledge, experience, and memory are obliterated and transformed into awe. The instant passes quickly, so quickly, and then you are just your regular self again. This instant is what has been; the page is artifact to that.
Is it love that you’re after? Immortality? Friendship? Acceptance? Fame? I want to know what your motives are. You should have no motives. Your communion should be wholly sincere.
Sincerity takes time. Sincerity doesn’t come easily. The addressee still evades, eludes, escapes you. Is your addressee somewhere enjoying life without you? Or does your addressee flitter somewhere between two clouds? Your prettily packaged artifact: I want to know for whom it is intended.
These things can be learned: rhythm, rhyme, imagery, metaphor, form, synecdoche, line. The tools of the poetry trade are there; they are given easily over to you. But do you know what use there is for metaphor or what form is for? What equivalents exist of these tools in the stars?
So nice of the ancient Greeks to have left us Draco and Scorpius, Cassiopeia and the Pleiades, arrows aimed finitely toward infinity.
They knew that artifice is what we use when dressing the artifact.
The page is where we turn to resuscitate that.
Between Cassiopeia and Perseus
I thought that if I approached late enough, then perhaps it would be sparsely populated and dark enough to allow me to sever a sprig of ivy without having any witnesses. If it grows in a park, then it is public; if a church grows it, then to take it is a sin, although this is not true of sacraments. All summer, I wanted the outdoors in, but the ivy, the other severed flowers, the roots of grasses, and budding potato plants all wizened and wilted, dying from some other original sin.
What causes sadness is living in a different place each August, and each August having fog and rain instead of the Perseid meteor shower. Look toward such and such constellation, and such and such constellation is not there.
Despite the heat wave, what made me want a hot shower was my thinking of Medusa. My last love looked at me and turned to stone. What is feared takes the shape of a serpent. He was afraid, so he had to kill it; while I fear I am not beautiful, and patiently wait and inspect my ivy for roots each morning.
If I have a love story, it exists in the bowl of my breakfast. I don’t know how they do it, the ones who drink milk from their bowls when the cereal is all gone.
Every day, something dies: when there is a breeze, it scatters the dead flies on the windowsill; the mouse has been caught; a moth did not find its way out. I think of Elizabeth often, her Man-Moth confusing the moon with a way out. The misprints of the past gather like newspapers waiting to be turned into something else.
For him, I was the only brunette, I know. I was (what is the term for rocket ships that blow up and crash back down to earth?) an anomaly. Not that it matters. There are some weaknesses that reveal themselves only if you wait long enough, that is, if you look diligently for the roots.
I want to know, in the end, what will get set in stone, because what gets set in stone is, of course, final: someone’s name, the year of his birth, and the year of her dying—these things unarguably, do not change. I want to know how quickly the quickest of flora grows. As a child, in
