This Or That
As both a poet and essayist, I struggle with Samuel Coleridge’s criterion for poetry in writing poetry, as well as prose pieces, that is, putting “the best words in the best order.” I write a poem and then feel after completing it, Why write another poem on any subject since I have captured a bit of something here in “memorable speech.” At least so I think. Why not just quit now? I, of course, must ultimately leave the question of my poems’ quality and success up to my reader, I know, but nonetheless, I need to satisfy myself enough initially, if only briefly, to write the next poem.
I write an essay and think I have a lot more to say on this or that after I finish it, but this is enough for now. I write a poem and question its brevity. Not enough verbal adequacy in either case. Neither suffices in capturing any final “word” on any of my subjects since subjects by nature, are both mercurial and infinite. Which is, as any serious creative or critical writer comes to realize soon enough, is both the blessing and curse of writing. I know, for instance, that I, for one, could write about a single subject forever if I so desired, whether it be about plums or ants or love. All subjects are inherently irreducible in objective, subjective, and imaginative ways. Mix the three and the muses go wild.
Soren Kierkegaard wrote that “purity of heart is to will one thing.” This raises the question, at least for me: So, just how can writing serve as an alembic for “purity of heart, especially when there are infinite subjects about which to write, many of which are so desultory and even wicked that they pose a seductive threat to any purity of heart? Emily Dickinson answered this question by writing obsessively about what she called her “flood subject”, namely, immortality, which, in turn, permitted her to write about any Earthly subject, material or otherwise—flies, loneliness, pain, happiness, ecstasy, death— as synecdoches and metaphors, as well as just things themselves. This nexus between the actual and abstract is precisely where the liquidity of the subject matter flows. Precisely where one thing becomes another while remaining itself with no less sovereignty in the irony of being, which Dickinson would, no doubt, capitalize.
And then there is the oxymoronic admixture of prose and poetry, the prose poem, which the wizardly master of the form, Russell Edson, defined as a “cast iron aeroplane that can actually fly.” Forms function as anodynes for the agony of both prose writers and poets. I switch back and forth to keep my spirits up and my muses appeased, at least for the time being.
Always the next poem or essay because the last one was only an ellipsis. Any writer knows his or her future in the “business”, whether personal or professional, rests precariously on the precipice of uncertainty. Will the muse visit again? Will the next poem or essay resonate with my readers? “If you have to be sure, then don’t write,” advised John Berryman to his student W.S. Merwin, which Merwin recounts so memorably in his poem “Berryman”.
So, I keep scribbling in the dark beneath the bright light of my desk lamp after many decades of failing repeatedly, and not always better, striving for what Philip Larkin called in his poem “Talking In Bed” “a unique distance between myself and isolation” where “It becomes still more/ Difficult to find/ words at once both true and kind/ Or not untrue and not unkind.”
