I used to be a poet. That is, poems would happen, often in the strangest ways. For instance, I would notice a line repeating in the back of my mind. Usually about the time I finally noticed it, it would dawn on me that the line had been thrumming along subconsciously for some time, waiting for me to take note.
There's an Italian tradition regarding the muse and poetry called "the one line given." Presumably, the muse gives you one line to begin with and then it's up to you to fashion the poem. And strangely enough, that's how it would happen. I might be at work, plugging away at some mundane task, then would suddenly realize I had a line going through my head. So, I would duly stop work and quickly write the poem. If you dare ignore the muse, she'll stop talking to you.
That's the other thing: such poems would come very quickly, so quickly that I often didn't know what the poem said until I'd finished transcribing it and then had a chance to re-read what I'd just written. To my amazement, many a time there was a complex rhyme scheme that I'd been totally unaware of while writing. The poems would come so quickly I almost couldn't keep up with them. One line would come at a time, but I'd have to get it down quickly because as soon as that line arrived, the next one was on its way. In other words, I wasn't composing with my conscious mind. It was a little like taking dictation except one was listening with an inner ear.
These poems all came unbidden from the unconscious. It's like one part of my mind was communicating to the other in the only way it knew how -- through poetry. That's partly why I never sought to publish any of these poems -- it all seemed like a matter of internal dialogue. Internal memos, so to speak. "Wanna know what the state of your soul is? Read this!" The messages were addressed to me.
Once I awoke in the middle of the night with a line, and the entire poem quickly followed. Another time, I awoke with the title to a poem. Just the title. Then over the next six weeks, I noticed a kind of liquid feeling, first down in my legs. As the weeks went by the liquid feeling moved up my torso. One afternoon, the liquid feeling reached my chest and out came a poem about God being the glass-blower and we -- you and I -- being the liquid glass taking various shapes.
Another time, I felt a poem gestating inside me over several weeks. An errant thought or a feeling would arise out of the blue and I'd go, "Ah...that's part of the poem." I never wrote any of this down, just noted it when it happened. I felt like a pregnant woman -- I could literally feel the poem growing inside. Then one day I gave birth -- there it was, the poem I'd been feeling all along.
They weren't all written so organically. Sometimes I gave myself an assignment to write in a specific form, such as a Persian ghazal, or a sonnet. But even then, I was surprised by what emerged. It wasn't necessarily what I was intending when I sat down to write. For instance, in the sonnet, I was intending to write a paean to harvest. What came out was much darker.
I don't really remember the genesis of the following poem, except it was about a woman many years younger than me, who I felt was stripping me bare -- it was almost like being eaten alive. It was merely a friendship, but it was a case of the other person taking their nutrition from you without giving anything back. I didn't articulate it to myself in quite that way; it was more a visceral felt-sense.
What I do recall is that it was one of those poems that comes out so quickly, you're not entirely sure of what you're saying. I was stunned in re-reading it to see rhymes at the beginning and end of each stanza. I did not choose to do that consciously; the poem dictated itself in that way. Creation can be such a mysterious process. So, here's the poem:
There is a woman I would know
if she would, running roughshod
through my garden, devouring
what has taken me so long to grow.
She doesn't recognize the fences.
Samples the fruit wherever she
finds it, lust of tongue and life,
lives in the taste of present tenses.
Mind supple, stricture of reins
pulling at the bit, still unsure of
her direction, purpose, form, yet
pulse insistent in the veins.
And time, that enemy, river we
swim in, stream unrelenting,
at two ends of the twisting pole,
looking back, or ahead, she
Can't see what I can. Lance:
this moment of sun, sweat, rain
and chill, gone. Life in the fist
for her; mine, in the distance.
