The Wily Filipino

Conversation.

I thought some of you might be interested in the running conversation between me and Eileen regarding a couple of lines I posted earlier. (Think of it is a dialogue between a student of anthropology and a poet.)

Eileen wrote "Ooooooh. Very nice" -- to which I wrote:

I'm glad you like it, Eileen -- but why? I mean, it's pretty raw (it came to me just as I was about to fall asleep, or just after I woke up -- can't remember), so there's no fiddling with fricatives or messing around with mutes. =)

Although now that I look at it, there's a clear link between "horse" and "grass" -- ahh, I still don't know how poetry works...

And then Eileen wrote:

Tangling with mutes? I love that slip if you meant to say "muse".

First drafts are supposed to be raw; editing (if any) can always come later but the first draft is when rawness -- non-censorship -- should be encouraged to help facilitate what the poem's gonna be.

My best poems just "come to me." I often think the poet's job is to just get out of the poem's way.

Why do I like it? I suppose because so much is expressed *between* the words, though the words are very effective for their imagery. What you've done is encouraged the reader to make the link between the two lines, so it's the reader that breathes the couplet into life. (I, for one, find this among the most difficult challenges in poetry -- perhaps from also writing frequently in prose that requires explications.)

In this kind of poem, regardless of your intent, you *trusted* the reader and, by doing so, created a relationship between poem and reader without you* interfering between that unmediated engagement.

(*this could relate to the poet's ego/personality)

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Dream poems are great -- partly for getting personality and self-consciousness out of the way. Relatedly, I drink for the same effect (see: my drinking is really a technical strategy because at least drinking allows me to be awake instead of being physically asleep, thus unable to write).

But don't lissen to me, Sunny. I'm drunk. It's the price of my job as.....the poet known as Ms. WinePoetics!

[Okay, I'ma actually drinking a cuppa java as I write this...]

My rambling response:

You're awesome, Eileen. Thanks for your extended commentary.

Later on I did think about altering "inadequacy" -- one syllable too many, I think -- but I liked this connotation of an inability to do something: to cover the earth? To untangle the horseflies? Not sure.

You write: "In this kind of poem, regardless of your intent, you *trusted* the reader..." The phrase "regardless of your intent" jumped out: the crotchety materialist in me raised an eyebrow ever so slightly. But then, as an anthropologist, I do *my* readings of everyday life in the same way, both heeding individual intentionality and being careful to situate people's behavior in the overarching social context, "regardless of [their] intent." (We cultural anthropologists like to think that we foreground our interpretive inadequacies anyhow.)

You also write about your best poems "coming to you." These lines -- can't say they're poems, really -- only come to me at the point when I'm about to fall asleep.

I've often wondered about how one theorizes creativity; I suppose the folks from the Society of the Anthropology of Consciousness would know this better. That post I promised earlier on Hirsch and Oliver and sleeping with poets [chuckle] -- unfortunately, I left my Hirsch book at home -- was going to be about the creation of poetry and the ineffable, and how this feeds into the "mystique" of the poet. This form of cultural capital may then be coupled with a parallel accumulation of sexual charisma -- but then the latter is probably squarely in the eye of this beholder anyhow. =)

So Eileen writes:

There's a difference -- or there *can* be a difference -- between writing a poem (which I thought what you were doing with that couplet) and reading a poem. The latter involves (more) looking *at* the poem. I don't know that one can look at a poem from the outside while you're in the process of writing it. I think the poet needs to become (in that moment) the poem itself. Later, you can look *at* it in the same way you might read someone else's work. Which is to say, perhaps the usefulness of an anthropological perspective has certain limitations when *be-ing* the poet/poem because one can't be separate from the work (though such perspective obviously can be useful in other ways, as your own brief reads of poems on this blog has shown).

[Of course, I don't know what I'm talking about. That's partly the challenge of Poetry -- the more one practices it, the less one knows it....at least from my standpoint.]

"Being the poem itself" -- whew! I can see being in the poem better; there's a suggestion of a poetic space, or better, interiority that both poet and reader can inhabit (and conversely, move inside and outside of).

Off-tangent note: since metaphor isn't something that's necessarily culturally universal, I wonder how other cultures conceive of creativity, or, at least, its associated images. (I suspect there are tons of anthropological work done on this already, but it's not my field.) Lightning bolts? Possession? Muses or higher powers? When I was writing my book I thought of it as "flow" -- I wrote most of the manuscript in a summer, in longhand, on unlined sheets of paper, index cards strewn all around me -- and words seemed to flow from some peanut-sized organ in my head into my pen and onto paper. (This was, however, aided by semi-monastic discipline by day and illicit activity by night.)

Posted by the wily filipino at June 6, 2003 09:40 PM