8. POEMS CAN BE ABOUT ANYTHING. IT ALL DEPENDS ON WHAT POETS DO WITH THEIR SUBJECT MATTER, NOT THE SUBJECT MATTER ITSELF.

     “To the poet nothing is useless.”

                                      --Samuel Johnson

We’ve all heard it: “there’s nothing new under the sun.” In other words, all the ideas of the past are just recycled in every new generation. Haven’t those millions of poets through the ages said everything that can be said about love, death, change, crisis, despair, joy, happiness, beauty in nature, and so on? And the answer is . . . of course not!

There’s always plenty more to say, and plenty of more ways of saying things. After all, all of us are unique and we perceive experience in our own unique ways. There are always new ways of saying what we want to say. Once more: poetry is in both in the what-is-said and in the way-we-say-it. Those two things are inseparable in a good poem.

All the poets I’ve ever known or heard of have had a very strong need to “say it my way.” If you are a person who likes words a lot, and who enjoys putting them together in ways that are new and fresh—well then, you are thinking like a poet. I remember Annie Dillard, a prose writer and poet, saying in one of her books that she liked the way the words “winter” and “knives” go together. That’s the kind of sensibility I’m talking about. “Winter knives.” Yes, you may agree, as I do: there is something right about that phrase. 

But how about subject matter? Do you have a favorite subject? Some poets do and some don’t. For me, as I’ve said before, sports have always been a productive subject for poems. I’ve also written a lot of poems about animals over the years, following  my long-time interest in biology and evolution. I’m a writer—maybe you are too—who is a fan of Nova, Discovery, and other TV programs about animals and nature.

Those who read a lot of poetry know that certain subjects are quite commonly addressed by poets. In fact, they can be cliché subjects, because they are so commonly seen. Look at the following poem, by the Chinese poet, Yuan Mei, who lived in the 18^th century:

WHY HE DID NOT WRITE

A POEM ABOUT THE HISTORICAL

BURIAL-PLACE OF LO-YANG

With high mounds the hill is thickly spread;

I give them a glance and drive swiftly by.

A poem is here, but I cannot bring myself to make it.

Too many poets have tried their hand before.

(Note: in this poem, “drive swiftly by” no doubt refers to some sort of horse-drawn vehicle—it would be hard to come up with another verb in this context, I think—but the word “drive” seems a bit odd to me, since I’m picturing some kind of vehicle that a person “drives”)

To paraphrase the poem: I’ll pass up this grave of a famous man instead of stopping and making a poem. After all, so many poets before me have written about the grave and the man in the past, so I’m sure I couldn’t say anything new.  

Ah, yes. But, what’s intriguing about this poem is that even though the poet says that the subject matter of a famous man’s grave site has been worked over so much that it’s pretty much been used up, the poet still makes a poem . . . about what? About the fact that he can’t make a poem! Pretty sneaky, if you ask me. But it works, which is all that matters. It’s a poem alright, and I think a good one. It’s the kind of poem you might read and then say to yourself: Why didn’t I think of that?

What do you like to write about? Do you have a favorite subject? Or are you fairly eclectic in your choice of subject matter?

Probably, you realize that, being human, you can’t help experiencing what all humans experience. The same thoughts, the same emotions, fears, doubts, joys, ups and downs—all the universals of human existence that go back tens of thousands of years. And yet, you also realize that what you have to say about anything, you can make your own in the way you say it. When you finish making a poem, you can say to yourself: Even though what I’ve written about is not all that unusual, this is mine. I saw something with my own eyes and then I made a poem about it, putting words together in a way that’s never been seen before. To be an artist—painter, sculptor, composer, poet—means to create something out of one’s own particular and unique life experiences, and then to share it with others. 

Finally, here’s my suggestion: Don’t exclude any subject or idea or experience. Instead, INCLUDE. Be open to everything, especially to possibilities. “I dwell in Possibility,” wrote Emily Dickinson.

Walt Whitman said of the lowly mouse that it is “miracle enough to stagger sextillions of infidels,” and  that “a leaf of grass is no less than the journeywork of the stars.” And that “I find no sweeter fat than sticks to my own bones.”

In a poem by Reed Whittemore, he spoke of “the elegance of a door knob.” Dylan Thomas spoke of a “heron-priested shore”—that is, how herons, when they walk alone a shoreline, resemble priests in their posture, quietness, elegance, and dignity. William Carlos Williams wrote a wonderful poem about “a poor old woman” eating a plum on a street corner in a big city, and of having, at one point in the poem, “one half” of the plum “sucked out in her hand.” The poet describes her standing there, eating that plum, which “tastes good to her.” In fact, the plum tastes so good that Williams repeats the phrase, “it tastes good to her” at the end of every stanza of the poem, savoring the phrase as the woman savors the plum.

How could laundry hanging on a line in a city be very interesting? And yet, Richard Wilbur’s well-known poem, “Love Calls Us to the Things of this World,” which is based on hanging laundry, begins memorably and dramatically:  “The eye opens to the cry of pulleys.”

How about the subject of an injured hawk, described by Robinson Jeffers in “Hurt Hawks,” which begins:  “The broken pillar of the wing jags from the clotted shoulder.”

Don’t forget items in the newspaper that might give you a good idea or image for a poem. How about a divorced husband who—according to a news item—demolished his house? The poet John Ciardi read the article, and wrote a poem from the point of view of the angry husband. Here are the opening lines:     

                    It is time to break a house.

                    What shall I say to you

                    but torn tin and the shriek                

                    of nails pulled orange

                    from the ridge pole?

How about a poem about garage sales by Karl Shapiro with a phrase such as “nothing serious can go wrong here.” And in the same poem, note the phrase “approach and mosey” as the people  walk toward the sale. You couldn’t write those phrases unless you’d been to garage sales and done some good observing.

You might not think that a poet could be interested in something as ordinary or mundane as cans of car engine oil on a shelf in a greasy gas station. But take a look at the ending of Elizabeth Bishop’s poem, “Filling Station”:

                                 

                 . . . . Somebody

        arranges the cans  

        so that they say:

       ESSO—SO—SO—SO

       to high-strung automobiles.

       Somebody loves us all.

And speaking of automobiles . . . James Dickey, in “Cherry Log Road,” wrote about a young man secretly meeting his girlfriend in a auto junk yard, which he calls “the parking lot of the dead,” and of one of the junked cars “releasing/the rust from its other color.”

The next time you pass junk yard for autos, or one in the country, take a look at those old, useless, thrown-away cars in “the parking lot of the dead.” Maybe they’ll remind you of a car you once owned, and maybe—just maybe—a girl friend or boy friend of your youth. And maybe when you get home, you’ll put a line or two—or better yet, something with an image in it—down on paper or up your computer screen, and see if a poem comes out of it. 

Keep dwelling in possibility, as Emily put it.

7. “A POEM IS AS GOOD AS IT IS DRAMATIC.” --Robert Frost

What did Frost mean by that word “dramatic”? He could’ve meant many things, but I would think that he had in mind something dynamic and with some tension, rather than something static. Poems—and Frost said this too—employ words in such a way that they act up. Poetry is a performance in words. I say it this way: poets are word athletes.

Watch a cat dozing, but with its eyes still half open. Notice how anything that’s static, not moving, doesn’t get its attention. But the second it sees something moving, it perks up, and is ready to move (or pounce) because of that movement. Get your poem moving—somehow—and your reader’s eye, and mind, will follow it.

One way to do this is to put something or someone in motion at the beginning of your poem, with, say, one good verb—or, try to create a context or atmosphere of words in which drama can take place. That’s why opening lines are so important: they either draw the reader in or they don’t. Consider the following opening lines of poems, some of which you may already know.  Do they strike you as dramatic in any way? Do they make you want to read further? Do they, in your estimation, create momentum, or action—something dynamic as opposed to static? 

                  Tiger, tiger, burning bright...

            
                  Go, soul, the body's guest,
                  upon a thankless errand...
              
                  One two, buckle my shoe,
                  Three four, shut the door...


                  Great A, little A, bouncing bee...

Hinx, minx, the old witch winks...

Iron thoughts sail out at evening on iron ships . . .

When serpents bargain for the right to squirm . . .

Go to the Western Gate, Luke Havergal.

go where the vines cling crimson to the wall . . .

I caught a tremendous fish . . .

I must go down to the sea again,

to the lonely sea and the sky . . .

Wild Nights—Wild Nights!

It was my thirtieth year to Heaven . . .

Because I could not stop for Death,                                           
he kindly stopped for me . . .

Over Sir John’s hill,

The hawk on fire hangs still . . .

Oh I leap up to my God, who pulls me down!

Traveling through the dark I found a deer
dead on the edge of the Wilson River Road . . . 

Let us go then, you and I,
when the evening is spread against the sky. . .   

                   [Here are a few openings by James Dickey,

a poet who was as dramatic as any poet I could

mention]

                   All wheels, a man breathed fire

                   Exhaling like a blowtorch down the road

                   And burnt the stripper’s gown

                   Above her moving-barely feet.

                   A condemned train climbed from the earth

                   Up stilted nightlights zooming in a track.

                   I ambled along in that crowd . . .

                   Bums, on waking . . .

                   I have just come down from my father . . .

                   And now the green household is dark.

                   The half-moon completely is shining

                   On the earth-lighted tops of the trees . . .

                   Here and there in the searing beam

                   Of my hand going through a night meadow
                   They are all grazing

                   With pins of human light in their eyes . . .

I’ve always enjoyed both reading and writing poems about physical action, including poems about sports: athletes in motion. The subject of sports, for me, is inherently dramatic: for instance, a pole vaulter rising up and over a crossbar, a sprinter running the 100-meter dash, a gymnast doing a gymnastics routine. (What an understatement, I’ve always thought: that word “routine!”)

I’ve always spoken of two basic kinds of “action” or “sports poems”: the participatory kind, in which the speaker is performing some sort of physical activity that he or she is, in the poem, engaged in; and the non-participatory kind, in which the speaker is observing someone performing. For decades I wrote the first kind mostly—why? Probably because I was familiar with athletic competition and physical action, as an athlete. But more and more, no longer a competitive athlete, I tend to write the other kind of poem. Obviously, it doesn’t matter which kind you write; what matters is how you write it!

Describing dramatic moments and humans or animals in motion, of course, won’t automatically guarantee that you’ll have a good poem; but again, the human eye, like the cat eye, is more interested in motion and drama than in something that’s standing or sitting still. Is there anything inherently exciting about, say, someone sitting in a chair reading a book? It all depends, of course, on how the poet sees what’s going on, and what words and phrases are used. It can be dramatic, depending on the poet’s sense of drama in this specific situation. For instance, something going on inside the head of the person in the chair.  

Here’s a poem by X.J. Kennedy to look at in light of what Frost said about drama in poetry. 

LITTLE ELEGY

                                     For a child who skipped rope

                    

 Here lies resting, out of breath,

Out of turns, Elizabeth

Whose quicksilver toes not quite

Cleared the whirring edge of night.

Earth whose circles round us skim,

                                    Till they catch the lightest limb,

                                    Shelter now Elizabeth

                                   And for her sake trip up death.

A few things to think about: when you say the poem out loud, what do you hear? Perhaps a jump rope song? “Johnny over the ocean, Johnnie over the sea . . .” there are hundreds of these songs, which have come down to us from a long time ago. That little song in our memory is dramatic—it conveys images and sounds of kids skipping rope, in a steady, animated rhythm.

The poem’s rhythm, then, emulates and dramatizes that regular, fixed, jump-rope rhythm, with its trochaic tetrameter meter, and it also has rimes:

                   HERE lies REST ing, OUT of BREATH,

                   OUT of TURNS, e LIZ a BETH,

                   WHOSE quick SIL ver TOES not QUITE . . .

And yet the rhythm/meter breaks down at the end of the poem’s last line. (The poem is an elegy, which means it’s about someone’s death.) And the breakdown, ironically, is both metrical/literal, and symbolic. That is, the rhythm is interrupted in the last stanza with those three, final, stressed syllables, or beats, “TRIP UP DEATH” (instead of TRIP up DEATH, which would be the expected trochaic meter of the rest of the poem, except that you don’t read it aloud that way). And so the meaning comes through: the girl has been literally “tripped up” by the rope, but also by death. We don’t know what caused the death, and that is not necessary to know in this poem.

Note too, how “breath,” at the end of the first line, ironically rimes with “death,” at the very end of the poem. And of course the phrase “out of breath” is another irony in this dramatic poem. (Poets are known for their fondness for irony and paradox.)

It’s a very physical, active poem, isn’t it? Dramatic for sure. After all, it’s about skipping rope, about youth and vigor, and about kids having a good time doing something they love to do—giving themselves to the total pleasure of play. The great Greek poet Pindar said it well: “The season of youth is brief.” And of course this is especially true when it comes to the death of a child. The poet—and all of us reading—would hope that, for the sake of Elizabeth, who skipped rope, death could be tripped up, not an innocent little girl. But of course we mortal humans are not in charge of such things.      

         

Why not try writing a poem in which you imitate, with its rhythm and/or repetition, something you’ve heard or seen and felt. Try to find some correlation between the words and phrases and images you use, and what you are speaking of. What about going for a walk, or listening to a song? Or taking your dog for a walk? Or even reading a book to a child or grandchild?

Or, why not write a poem about swimming, or baseball, or some other sport—be the swimmer or the ball player, or write from the point of view of a spectator. Emphasize verbs and nouns. Emphasize action, drama.   

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[NOTE: Correction. In my 5^th blog article (POETRY TENDS TO BE PLAIN-SPOKEN AND PERSONAL) I said, referring to a poem by James Wright, that the person spoken of had jumped off a bridge and drowned. Not true. Actually, in Wright’s poem, “To the Muse,” the speaker is thinking of a childhood friend who drowned. And in fact, I misquoted slightly from those last lines of the poem (I was quoting from memory in this case). So for the record, here is my correction for my 5^th article: 

     There’s a poem by James Wright in which the speaker is looking down into a river, thinking of a childhood friend who drowned. Here are the last lines:

 Come up to me, love,

out of the river, or I will

come down to you.]

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