Carol Moldaw: Dew Point

 

 

Dew Point

 

 

Because of the nipple crust riming a girl’s

breakthrough poem, I google Quetiapine.

 

From one student I learn what robotripping is;

from another, the names of clouds:

 

diamond dust, sundog, fallstreak halo.

At dew point, vapors collect, condense,

 

become visible, classifiable: cap and banner,

cloud-bow, fog bow, crepuscular ray—

 

yet the signs as to what our convergence

precipitates are fleeting, mercurial.

 

Despite his anchor-pierced clavicle,

the languorous boy sprawled across

 

a poem’s quilt needs no explication,

but what, I’m forced to ask in class,

 

is a tramp stamp? There’s knowing silence

until an ashen girl, with an unselfconscious

 

candor I knew once in myself, gets up

from the conference table, pirouettes

 

on an Ugg and crouches to expose

above tattered low-rise jeans and spanning

 

her iliac crest, a set of lilac tatted fairy wings.

And how had I missed Simko, Huidobro?

 

A poem might get its start from an image or a word, from a line, a thought, an idea; it might take off from a prompt, another poem, a painting, an experience, a dream, an event or events–historical, personal, fictional. It might come out of nowhere, be illogical, highly stylized or plain-spoken, but usually it brings with it a sense of inevitability and, initially, of infinite possibility. To write it, the poet has to embark on a series of discoveries, to choose between unknowns, be alert to the unexpected, but also needs to make decisions, choices that will lead in one direction and limit other possibilities: draft after draft, fork after fork in the road.

Virtually every poem I write goes through innumerable drafts. Drafting changes can be as small but significant as replacing “the” with “a”; they can be a matter of excising words, phrases, lines—or of adding new ones; stanzas might shift places or morph shape; lines might shrink or expand. A poem might shed most of itself and rise renewed, to take off in a new direction. Drafting, revisions, blind turns and dead ends don’t usually faze me; neither does putting an unfinished poem aside for a time and taking it up again, if my conviction’s renewed. I have a pretty high tolerance for the length and convolution of the process, as long as I sense that a poem is progressing. Progressing, toward . . . what exactly is it progressing toward? Not something ever predetermined or predictable, but something that ‘feels right’ when it appears, as it develops; that ‘coheres,’ albeit in surprising, mysterious, even arcane, ways. Does a poem progress toward an ideal self, a self the process—paradoxically–both uncovers and creates?

The concept of a poem having an “ideal self” sounds suspiciously Platonic, as if the ideal of that particular poem exists in the ether and it is up to the writer to draw it down, to manifest it; and it may be false; but, along with the particulars, that construal is what keeps me engaged until the poem seems fully created, at least to the limit of my ability. (What is ability? A combination of skill and vision, a balance of creativity and receptivity required to achieve the precarious, to pull it off?) Whether it is fortuity, craft or vision that propels a poem forward, and whether I frame the tool I use to assess its progress as a tuning fork, an inner compass, intuition or, again, craft, hardly matters. I test the emerging poem against something that doesn’t yet exist. I test it until I give up or am satisfied.

Sometimes, though, satisfaction is only a stage, a resting point—a mirage. At first, the poem does seem done: it somehow fulfills, exceeds and even might subvert the impulse that began it–it goes its own way. I am grateful, jubilant: I send it off; it is published or, if not, sent out again. I file it in both an electronic and a manila folder, with other “finished” poems. If the folder is long (or thick) enough, I begin to think about which poems belong together. I cluster them. After a certain amount of time though, and it could be any amount of time, but after the initial high-spirits have settled, sometimes even after the poem is ingrained, whether published or not, I begin to notice a slight unease when I re-read it, an unease that may not be over-all, but that occurs in spots. It could be certain lines or transitions, words, the way gestures are held together or action unfolds, the way meaning feels wrested, over- or under-determined. Unease, boredom, wariness, disbelief, even dread–all reactions tempting to ignore. Reading my own work, I’m on the alert for them.

“Dewpoint” was such a poem: a poem that seemed to have settled into itself but that, after a time, persistently niggled at me, that I couldn’t seem to get quite right, no matter how I played it. When I compare three (of the many) versions of it—the first full draft, the version published in Plume (Issue 22, April 2013), and the “final” version, now part of a manuscript called Beauty, Refracted, I see that I struggled and fiddled with the same areas and issues over and over. I would find solutions and then find those solutions lacking, taking the poem apart and putting it back together many times before settling on a version that—for now—I live happily with.

Initially, the poem had the working title “Cloud Collecting at the University”; then, “Poetry 255”; then “Tramp Stamp.” It began out of a desire to pay tribute to the students I’d had when I was the Louis D. Rubin, Jr., Writer-in-Residence at Hollins University in the spring of 2011.  It was a class of a few undergraduate women mixed in with a co-ed group of graduate students in creative writing. I conceived of the poem as a kind of love letter, to highlight the variety of things I learned from them and their writing. Though my job, which I worked hard at and enjoyed, was to influence them, to widen their perspective and deepen their process, it was their effect on me that I wanted to accentuate. I was surprised when the poem began to conjure up my younger self, and surprised at what a struggle that proved to be. It was easy to incorporate words and facts I’d learned from the students, but harder to express my feeling that they were at a special moment in their lives, open to many influences, which I appreciated in our confluence. Specifically, the things that gave me the most trouble were: the names-of-the-clouds riff; the placement of “Simko, Huidobro”; the portrait of the tattooed girl and the depiction of her motion; hitting the right note when I realize that I’m not sure what, exactly, the students learned from me; finding the right ending, neither too stated nor too oblique, arbitrary or predictable.

At first, the cloud names were separated by the names of two poets whom students had talked about:

 

from one  I learned what robotripping is;

from another, the names of clouds:

 

diamond dust, sundog, fallstreak halo.

How had I missed Simko, Huidrobro?

 

Cloud-bow, fog bow, crepuscular ray.

 

Later, around the time I came to name the poem “Dew Point,” I realized that the clouds’ formation was analogous to the student’s development, and I wanted to include something about that process, though I didn’t make the connection explicit. This is how it was published in Plume, with the lines about the poets still inserted between the clouds:

From one I learn what robotripping is;

from another the names of clouds:

 

diamond dust, sundog, fallstreak halo.

How had I missed Simko, Huidobro?

 

At dew point, vapors collect, condense,

become visible—classifiable . .

 

Cloud-bow, fog bow, crepuscular ray.

 

It wasn’t until after the poem had been published that having the poets in the middle of the clouds came to bother me, as did the trailing off of the cloud names into ellipses. In the final version, I moved the poets down to the end of poem (something I toyed with on and off throughout many drafts) and made more explicit the connection between the clouds and the students, reworking lines that, in Plume, had ended the poem (“. . .  As to what they, from me, /extrapolate, that too’s inscrutable”). I liked the idea that while, like the clouds, the on-going formation of these students was a result of convergences, unlike the clouds, they were not, or not yet, “visible, classifiable.” I had come to think that, as an ending, these lines sounded forced, both in how they were written and the meaning they imposed.  But slightly changed, moved up, put with the clouds, they gave the connection I wanted, without making too much of it:

From one student I learn what robotripping is;

from another, the names of clouds:

 

diamond dust, sundog, fallstreak halo.

At dew point, vapors collect, condense,

 

become visible, classifiable; cap and banner,

cloud-bow, fog bow, crepuscular ray—

 

yet the signs as to what our convergence

precipitates are fleeting, mercurial.

 

From there, the poem continues, as it had before, with a portrait of a boy who might have been part of the class, but, more to the point, appeared in one of the undergraduate girl’s poems (only it didn’t—I made it up).

While that might be the heart of the poem, the description of the girl’s tattoo could be seen as its climax, linguistically, imagistically and dramatically. I had the lines “above tattered low-rise jeans and spanning//her iliac crest, a set of lilac tatted fairy wings” fairly early, but the lead-up to those lines gave me grief far above their importance. What adjective to use to describe the girl? “Quiet gossamer-haired,” “glossy-haired,” “galante glossy-haired” (in Plume) were some of the things I tried before I recently settled on “ashen.” What was it that reminded me of myself at that age? (I never would have had a tattoo or exposed my lower back in class.) The first version was the most awkward, as I struggled to formulate an idea, a basis for the gesture:

until a quiet gossamer-hair girl

who (though it boggles the mind) recalls to me

 

a younger self . . .

 

This leaves the girl and I and the connection I feel between us all un-interpreted. I tried to address both this and the awkward wordiness in the next draft:

. . .

who improbably calls to mind a younger

 

more fanciful self . . .

 

Next, the version that made it into publication:

 

. . .

who for no apparent reason calls to mind

 

an abiding younger self . . .

 

Finally, I realized that “who” was part of the problem: it should be an attitude or gesture of the girl that reminds me of myself, and that gesture will say something that spans both of us, the way her tattoo spans her hip bones:

until an ashen girl, with an unself-conscious

 

candor I knew once in myself . . .

 

Describing her movement also took some work and diligence and false solutions, but that was mostly a matter of finding verbs with the exact right meaning and tone. “Unself-conscious candor” was a particularly satisfying change, as I felt I had nailed something both about myself at that age and about the girls in my class. The tattoo was not taken from any of them though, it was something my daughter’s first baby-sitter had. I didn’t know what it was called at the time—the phrase was in a student’s poem, and had to be explained to me, but not through a student’s self-exposure.

The ending gave me particular trouble, as I already mentioned. I do have a philosophical and aesthetic inclination to end poems with an image. It feels very pure to me, in a poetical sense, just to let an image resonate. At least one of my poet friends who read it thought I should end with the image of the fairy wings. But I’m wary of ending a poem on its climax and felt that in this case it was almost too sensationalistic, and would be taken to encapsulate the poem’s meaning in a way I found too narrow. For a long time, through many drafts, I tried to work with the “extrapolate . . . inscrutable” lines, though I fretted there was something falsely mysterious about them—a dishonesty, even in the use of “too,” as if I knew more than I was telling, and teasingly saying so. I kept trying to move the Huidobro line there, but I was unsure of ending the poem with a rhetorical question. I fiddled with the form of the thought, but couldn’t quite get the tone I wanted, the tone of an afterthought. Finally, I just added “and” to the beginning of the line and decided it was the best I could do. “And,” I hope, also implies “along with everything else I had missed, until I met these students.” Slightly arch, but, I thought, fitting.

For me, the distinctions between composition, drafting and revision blur. I’m not sure at what point I’m “writing the poem” and engaged in “drafts” and at what point “writing” turns into “revision.” Are drafts revisions, and revisions the same as drafts?  Is composition itself a process of revision—the initial carving out of words a revision of silence’s smooth marble? When I am involved in a poem’s early stages and have no idea where it is headed but am already making changes to the initial lines, is that a revision or a draft? Often, I’m unable to continue until I feel that these first stanzas are solid, ‘right’—though later I might find them not right at all and change them. My method of working is contrapuntal: write, revise, write, revise . . . until a full poem has emerged, and a new stage of revising—and writing—begins: revise, write, revise, write. Whether I am re-working a line as I begin a poem, searching for its particular music, tone, shape, character; or whether I am examining word choices, scrambling and unscrambling syntax, reconfiguring how sentences are laid down on the line, refining images after a poem has an entirety, doesn’t feel all that different to me. All of it is part of listening for the poem, of simultaneously uncovering and creating it.

 

 

 

Carol Moldaw’s most recent book is So Late, So Soon: New and Selected Poems (Etruscan Press, 2010). Moldaw (www.carolmoldaw.com) is the author of four other books of poetry, including The Lightning Field (2003), which won the 2002 FIELD Poetry Prize; and a novel, The Widening (2008). She lives in Santa Fe, N.M.