No.49 - May 2021
Poets who teach or give readings sometimes face unanswerable questions, such as “what does that poem mean?” Or “what is poetry for?” Or even “what makes that a poem?” We often deflect such imponderables with a joke, a sturdy-sounding quotation, or a helpless shrug. If feeling snooty, you could turn to T. S. Eliot, who supposedly responded to a query about what a certain poem meant by saying “If I could have said it any better, I would have.” That sounds sensible enough, but I doubt anyone enjoys the smug attitude. Personally, I’ve always been more fond of the approach of Shelby Stephenson, a former Poet Laureate of North Carolina, who at a reading once defined his motive for writing poetry as “Why, to defeat Sin and Death, of course.” Yup. Me too.
Still, my own slant, as someone who both reads and writes the stuff, and who had a long career in the classroom wrestling with these matters, is to seek ideas and procedures that apply equally well to the reading or writing of poems. Which is to say, I am less interested in theory than in practice (“praxis,” in academese). And the older I get, the more I return to the notion of surprise as a satisfying nutshell of what I most deeply want from a poem, whether it’s one of my own raw drafts, or someone else’s masterpiece, presented in a book or at a reading.
If that sounds fairly obvious and even simple, that’s because it is. Yet there is a rather voluminous body of critical literature out there, much of it excellent, that elaborates and illustrates that kernel of truth. (At the end of this essay I’ll mention a couple favorites, in case you’re interested.) Surprise: it’s hardly an original concept. Perhaps most significantly, we find it embedded in the notion of a poetic turn, that moment when a poem swerves in some way to question itself, venture a conclusion, shift direction, change tone, adopt a new voice, or otherwise offer some contrast.
A turn enables drama, which always involves tension and change—preventing the poem from settling into the kind of static state of dogma, platitude, or political rhetoric at its least poetic. I think this idea lies behind Robert Frost’s remark that every poem is as good as it is dramatic. Drama by definition is constructed of conflicts, reversals, revelations—which is to say, some sort of turn. Turns keep things lively. A poem utterly lacking any kind of turn is usually unsatisfying: shopworn, predictable, simplistic, or just lacking in fruitful tension.
As for drama, countless lyrics consist entirely of little dramatic scenes. Here’s a not-too-famous example from William Carlos Williams:
This bare-bones scene gives us a marriage pared down to essentials. The turn is obvious, when the woman cuts the flowers right after the speaker begs her not to. The tensions here are multiple, within the simple and direct presentation. I appreciate the tonal mix of affection and exasperation, for one thing, which seems a tacit recognition that love is no single thing. The man and woman here are arguing, you could say, about truth versus beauty, with the man adopting a conventionally romantic attitude and the woman speaking more pragmatically, even a bit arrogantly. She won’t listen to his plea to preserve the flowers; she speaks without tenderness; and yet, note how the poem ends. She presents him with the flowers as a double-edged kind of love-gift. It is a token of love, even if not the one he wants from her. Williams’s awareness of love's complexity produces the sort of poem I call "middle-aged," for I doubt that every young reader will appreciate its mixture or romance and reality. It’s neither gushy nor cynical, just affectionately clear-sighted.
Still, why surprise? My favorite brief recipe for what I look for in poems is to mix together two comments from twentieth-century masters. Robert Frost was fond of saying, at readings or in interviews, that he wrote poetry to “see if I can make them all sound different from each other.” That seems at first blush a craftsman’s view: poetry as pure technique, playing around with language—a focus on technical matters apart from any concern with profound thought, moving sentiment, or social responsibility. Frost was of course too canny to believe that that was the whole story. In part, when making such public comments I believe he was fending off far-fetched interpretations of his poems. He was also bragging a bit—quite justifiably—about his technical prowess. And certainly he was resisting being drawn into discussion of his private life.
W.H. Auden, in contrast, memorably defined poetry as “the clear expression of mixed feelings.” That’s a view of poetry as psychological exploration, seeking after truth, even the sometimes wrenching exploration of troubling feelings. Furthermore, there’s the assumption that one’s feelings usually are mixed, especially about important matters like love, faith, politics, and so forth. Auden would agree with Yeats in this regard, who noted that bad poetry comes from the quarrel with others; real poems come from a quarrel with ourselves.
I hope it’s needless to say that both these views are partial and don’t come close to describing these poets’ entire works. Auden was every bit a skilled poetic technician, just as Frost was author of some of the most honest, heart-scalding poems we have. But where these two definitions come together is instructive. It lies in the idea of discovery. By playing around with words, poking at inner contradictions and ambivalences, working formal and technical materials, a poet can ultimately discover what he or she truly believes and knows. It is one way to come upon truths deeper than mere clichés and platitudes.
To put it another way, one motive for writing poems is precisely to better discover what one’s motives are. As a character in E. M. Forster says, “How do I know what I think until I see what I say?” That may sound frivolous to those who want poems to tackle big emotions and large truths, but I think it’s the opposite. Forster, Frost, and others are describing one sturdy way to probe and express those very things, definitely including Auden’s mixed feelings.
As Frost memorably put it, “no surprise for the writer, no surprise for the reader.” That’s become one of my central touchstones as a poet. Furthermore, I like the idea because it encompasses both intention and effect; it applies equally to poet and reader. Emily Dickinson, in her gnomic way, seems to be of the same opinion, when with characteristic pithiness she locates surprise as the source of power, both spiritual and, I’m sure, poetic:
So “surprise” rhymes with “paradise.” Whether it is a new idea introduced in a sonnet’s couplet, a striking turn of phrase, or an emotional turn that even the poet didn’t see coming, both readers and poets can be challenged, delighted, occasionally confused, or otherwise kept awake by surprise. We can be summoned to look at the world as freshly as our common parents did in Eden.
A tall order, of course. It’s helpful if you’re a genius, like Dickinson. But I see turns of various kinds—and there are countless types—in just about every successful poem, even the briefest and simplest. At the most basic level, surprise comes in poetry as it does in a joke, with an abrupt swerve of meaning, a twist of language, an unexpected resolution. As Emily Dickinson famously wrote, "the truth must dazzle gradually"—and it is in the adverb that follows "dazzle" that she practices what she preaches, offering the rich paradox of a slow dazzling. Many short poems, such as epigrams and haiku, operate almost entirely on the virtue of surprise. Consider this epigrammatic jewel by Sarah Cleghorn, written in 1917, in the bad old days of the most oppressive forms of child labor. She calls it, reticently, simply "Quatrain":
The surprise here includes what Cleghorn omits as much as what she includes. Written before the child labor laws as we know them existed, in a time of journalistic muckraking about such exploitation, this poem chooses not to sound outraged. Its irony is quiet, tidy, reserved. Her epigram has the tact not to be smug. She simply presents a situation, and lets the inescapable irony resonate. How many poets could have resisted moralizing the point, thus deflecting attention from the situation to the fine sensibilities of the observer? Her tactical understatement is surprisingly effective. It is discernible in the tone, the scrupulous qualification ("almost every day"), the childlike diction, the unobtrusive meter and rhyme. The last line’s bombshell thus hits home with sudden force.
All in all structure of this little social satire is essentially the same as a joke, except here the punch-line’s surprise is the opposite of funny. Something very similar happens in many classics of haiku and senryu:
That's by seventh-century Japanese poet Kakinomoto no Hitomaro, as translated by Kenneth Rexroth. Here's a tiny lyric by the American poet David Ignatow, that seems to me to work quite similarly:
The turn of thought here is surprising, but so is the swiftness of perception and economy of expression, all without any show-off diction or wild imagery.
As a poet, my challenge is thus how to achieve the kind of surprise that moves me in the poetry of Dickinson and others. The task comes in two parts, as I see it: first I must create the conditions in which surprise is more likely to happen; and next, I must recognize a fruitful surprise when it occurs. When Frost talks about playfulness with language, another way of putting it is to say that he is creating the proper conditions for surprising himself. And when Auden refers to the "clear expression of mixed feelings," he is speaking of interpreting the poem once it's drafted: recognizing the valuable surprise in what he has written.
Both seem necessary parts of the equation. And both easier said than done, to be sure. In any case, I’d like to close by looking a bit at my own practice, not as indicative of my genius but because I know it inside out. There is of course no single way to achieve surprise. As I often told my students, there are many routes to the top of the mountain. A colleague at Ripon College used to tell students who asked “How do I get an A on this paper?” something that sounds right: “I can tell you how to get a B. But for an A you have to surprise me.”
So what I offer here is as much an attitude as a method. But, for me, it is an essential attitude, and one that I grow more attached to with every passing year. Not only that, though—it has the added attraction of being fulfilling and more than occasionally fun.
To illustrate, then, here is one of my older poems, originally written in 1986, and published in my book Second Wind in 1990:
Since I wrote it, I can't argue for the quality of this poem, but I can vouch for its origins. It feels like an honest one, in that it surprised me both during the writing and afterward, ultimately touching on some mixed feelings that I recognize within myself. I happen to remember exactly what prompted it, which was a delightful student typo. In a bibliography, someone’s fingers slipped, and the magazine National Wildlife appeared as National Mildlife. So, taking that as my prompt, I started fooling around in my journal, as I often do, setting out to imagine what the magazine National Mildlife might look like. On the conscious level I was just playing: enjoying describing this fictional world which was mild, not wild. I had fun coming up with words like “roughhouse” and “hooligan,” which seemed like the way a mild person might describe violence. I relished juxtaposing to them items like “dictionaries,” “timothy,” “balloons,” and “milk,” which were my notions of unthreatening, mild-mannered things. (By the way, since some readers have wondered: “timothy” is not a person’s name, but a common pasture grass, which is why it’s lower case.) The poem struck me as essentially light-hearted, the sort of thing I might get a laugh with at a reading. I’m always up for some humor.
Yet even as I enjoyed riffing on things that might be considered mild, I knew that I needed to introduce some kind of turn in order to give the poem tension, and in particular to end it successfully. But as usual in such cases these were back-of-the-mind thoughts. I just kept scribbling, improvising as I went. Knowing that I could use some contrast to pure mildness, I found myself wondering how people in this mild and sheltered valley might regard the outside world. “Sometimes, though,” I scribbled to signal my turn, and continued with images and metaphors contrasting with what went before. Thus it was the ending snuck up and surprised me. I was simply trying to come up with things that felt right descriptively, and these ones, particularly the last, seemed suddenly to darken the poem. Fresh from my unconscious mind, the final simile was dark indeed:
Well, this certainly wasn’t exactly funny. Nonetheless, as soon as that simile emerged from my pen, I knew I had my closure. It just felt right, and I have learned to trust that, at least at the drafting stage. In any case, these fictive children don’t actually commit suicide, they just wonder about it. I managed to convince myself that this final turn was ultimately affirmative: isn’t it wonderful, I said, that most who contemplate self-destruction don’t actually follow through?
I titled the poem “National Mildlife,” and sent it off to a journal, where it was duly accepted. But the editor did request one change: she found the title too frivolous. It wasn’t at all a humorous poem, she insisted. This may sound strange, but I honestly hadn't thought of that: wedded to the original prompt, I was still regarding this poem as essentially light in tone. But her criticism struck home, when I looked harder at the ending. So I changed the title to something more neutral, “The Valley Where We Live.”
And only later, after it was published, did I come to see what the poem "really" means. In other words, it took a while for me to recognize what's perhaps obvious to any careful reader, and the reason involves my own mixed feelings about innocence and childhood perception. Putting on my critical hat, I realized that, unbeknownst to its author, the poem was re-telling the Eden story, which is itself re-told in every coming of age tale. I came to see it as in fact a critique of adult notions of childhood innocence. For at least as I remember boyhood, ignorance is ¬not¬ bliss; the innocent don't generally want to continue being innocent, but instead desire to grow up, experience and explore the wider world. In such recognitions there is perhaps a covert rejection of my own nostalgia for childhood, as recounted in earlier poems.
Moreover, the common adult vision of childhood innocence is, as I knew from once being a child, often simplistic and sugar-coated. I remember plenty of incidents of violence, anger, terror, and other non-mild emotions from my own boyhood—which was not particularly tortured, and was certainly, in adult terms, very privileged. It just didn’t feel that way to me at the time. So in the long view, I believe my little poem doubts whether true "mildness" is even possible: I fear that human nature may in fact veer toward violence naturally, a tendency we have to labor to circumvent.
That it took me so long to see the surprise in my own poem does not dismay me. It seems normal, in fact. In my teaching days I often recommended this method of free-associative drafting to my students. The advantages seem obvious. You can create the conditions for surprise by not worrying about theme and coherence when composing a first draft. Writing rapidly without much deliberation, you can avoid the agonies of composition that every writer dreads. Writing can be fun, even if revision isn't always.
By being playful about it, by assigning myself technical exercises and writing from prompts, I am able, when I’m lucky, to surprise myself productively. I find I can also touch on sensitive material that would likely not emerge from more direct methods. My conscious mind, like most everyone's, is too interested in self-justification. I want to look admirable, wise, and sensitive. I need to surprise myself to get at the sort of subtle or disreputable mixed emotions that are at the heart of many good poems.
One of my personal touchstones in these matters is something the great essayist Montaigne wrote:
I confess that a central motive for writing is in hopes of one day achieving that strong and generous ignorance, which is linked inextricably in my mind to both wonder and surprise.
As promised above, two good books that touch on the themes of this column:
Michael Theune. Structure and Surprise: Engaging Poetic Turns. Teachers & Writers Collaborative, 2007.
Ellen Bryant Voigt. The Flexible Lyric. University of Georgia Press, 1999.
Still, my own slant, as someone who both reads and writes the stuff, and who had a long career in the classroom wrestling with these matters, is to seek ideas and procedures that apply equally well to the reading or writing of poems. Which is to say, I am less interested in theory than in practice (“praxis,” in academese). And the older I get, the more I return to the notion of surprise as a satisfying nutshell of what I most deeply want from a poem, whether it’s one of my own raw drafts, or someone else’s masterpiece, presented in a book or at a reading.
If that sounds fairly obvious and even simple, that’s because it is. Yet there is a rather voluminous body of critical literature out there, much of it excellent, that elaborates and illustrates that kernel of truth. (At the end of this essay I’ll mention a couple favorites, in case you’re interested.) Surprise: it’s hardly an original concept. Perhaps most significantly, we find it embedded in the notion of a poetic turn, that moment when a poem swerves in some way to question itself, venture a conclusion, shift direction, change tone, adopt a new voice, or otherwise offer some contrast.
A turn enables drama, which always involves tension and change—preventing the poem from settling into the kind of static state of dogma, platitude, or political rhetoric at its least poetic. I think this idea lies behind Robert Frost’s remark that every poem is as good as it is dramatic. Drama by definition is constructed of conflicts, reversals, revelations—which is to say, some sort of turn. Turns keep things lively. A poem utterly lacking any kind of turn is usually unsatisfying: shopworn, predictable, simplistic, or just lacking in fruitful tension.
As for drama, countless lyrics consist entirely of little dramatic scenes. Here’s a not-too-famous example from William Carlos Williams:
The Act There were the roses, in the rain. Don't cut them, I pleaded. They won't last, she said. But they're so beautiful where they are. Agh, we were all beautiful once, she said, and cut them and gave them to me in my hand.
This bare-bones scene gives us a marriage pared down to essentials. The turn is obvious, when the woman cuts the flowers right after the speaker begs her not to. The tensions here are multiple, within the simple and direct presentation. I appreciate the tonal mix of affection and exasperation, for one thing, which seems a tacit recognition that love is no single thing. The man and woman here are arguing, you could say, about truth versus beauty, with the man adopting a conventionally romantic attitude and the woman speaking more pragmatically, even a bit arrogantly. She won’t listen to his plea to preserve the flowers; she speaks without tenderness; and yet, note how the poem ends. She presents him with the flowers as a double-edged kind of love-gift. It is a token of love, even if not the one he wants from her. Williams’s awareness of love's complexity produces the sort of poem I call "middle-aged," for I doubt that every young reader will appreciate its mixture or romance and reality. It’s neither gushy nor cynical, just affectionately clear-sighted.
Still, why surprise? My favorite brief recipe for what I look for in poems is to mix together two comments from twentieth-century masters. Robert Frost was fond of saying, at readings or in interviews, that he wrote poetry to “see if I can make them all sound different from each other.” That seems at first blush a craftsman’s view: poetry as pure technique, playing around with language—a focus on technical matters apart from any concern with profound thought, moving sentiment, or social responsibility. Frost was of course too canny to believe that that was the whole story. In part, when making such public comments I believe he was fending off far-fetched interpretations of his poems. He was also bragging a bit—quite justifiably—about his technical prowess. And certainly he was resisting being drawn into discussion of his private life.
W.H. Auden, in contrast, memorably defined poetry as “the clear expression of mixed feelings.” That’s a view of poetry as psychological exploration, seeking after truth, even the sometimes wrenching exploration of troubling feelings. Furthermore, there’s the assumption that one’s feelings usually are mixed, especially about important matters like love, faith, politics, and so forth. Auden would agree with Yeats in this regard, who noted that bad poetry comes from the quarrel with others; real poems come from a quarrel with ourselves.
I hope it’s needless to say that both these views are partial and don’t come close to describing these poets’ entire works. Auden was every bit a skilled poetic technician, just as Frost was author of some of the most honest, heart-scalding poems we have. But where these two definitions come together is instructive. It lies in the idea of discovery. By playing around with words, poking at inner contradictions and ambivalences, working formal and technical materials, a poet can ultimately discover what he or she truly believes and knows. It is one way to come upon truths deeper than mere clichés and platitudes.
To put it another way, one motive for writing poems is precisely to better discover what one’s motives are. As a character in E. M. Forster says, “How do I know what I think until I see what I say?” That may sound frivolous to those who want poems to tackle big emotions and large truths, but I think it’s the opposite. Forster, Frost, and others are describing one sturdy way to probe and express those very things, definitely including Auden’s mixed feelings.
As Frost memorably put it, “no surprise for the writer, no surprise for the reader.” That’s become one of my central touchstones as a poet. Furthermore, I like the idea because it encompasses both intention and effect; it applies equally to poet and reader. Emily Dickinson, in her gnomic way, seems to be of the same opinion, when with characteristic pithiness she locates surprise as the source of power, both spiritual and, I’m sure, poetic:
Not when we know, the Power accosts — The Garment of Surprise Was all our timid Mother wore At Home — in Paradise.
So “surprise” rhymes with “paradise.” Whether it is a new idea introduced in a sonnet’s couplet, a striking turn of phrase, or an emotional turn that even the poet didn’t see coming, both readers and poets can be challenged, delighted, occasionally confused, or otherwise kept awake by surprise. We can be summoned to look at the world as freshly as our common parents did in Eden.
A tall order, of course. It’s helpful if you’re a genius, like Dickinson. But I see turns of various kinds—and there are countless types—in just about every successful poem, even the briefest and simplest. At the most basic level, surprise comes in poetry as it does in a joke, with an abrupt swerve of meaning, a twist of language, an unexpected resolution. As Emily Dickinson famously wrote, "the truth must dazzle gradually"—and it is in the adverb that follows "dazzle" that she practices what she preaches, offering the rich paradox of a slow dazzling. Many short poems, such as epigrams and haiku, operate almost entirely on the virtue of surprise. Consider this epigrammatic jewel by Sarah Cleghorn, written in 1917, in the bad old days of the most oppressive forms of child labor. She calls it, reticently, simply "Quatrain":
The golf links lie so near the mill That almost every day The laboring children can look out And see the men at play.
The surprise here includes what Cleghorn omits as much as what she includes. Written before the child labor laws as we know them existed, in a time of journalistic muckraking about such exploitation, this poem chooses not to sound outraged. Its irony is quiet, tidy, reserved. Her epigram has the tact not to be smug. She simply presents a situation, and lets the inescapable irony resonate. How many poets could have resisted moralizing the point, thus deflecting attention from the situation to the fine sensibilities of the observer? Her tactical understatement is surprisingly effective. It is discernible in the tone, the scrupulous qualification ("almost every day"), the childlike diction, the unobtrusive meter and rhyme. The last line’s bombshell thus hits home with sudden force.
All in all structure of this little social satire is essentially the same as a joke, except here the punch-line’s surprise is the opposite of funny. Something very similar happens in many classics of haiku and senryu:
A strange old man Stops me, Looking out from my deep mirror.
That's by seventh-century Japanese poet Kakinomoto no Hitomaro, as translated by Kenneth Rexroth. Here's a tiny lyric by the American poet David Ignatow, that seems to me to work quite similarly:
I wish I understood the beauty in leaves falling. To whom are we beautiful as we go?
The turn of thought here is surprising, but so is the swiftness of perception and economy of expression, all without any show-off diction or wild imagery.
As a poet, my challenge is thus how to achieve the kind of surprise that moves me in the poetry of Dickinson and others. The task comes in two parts, as I see it: first I must create the conditions in which surprise is more likely to happen; and next, I must recognize a fruitful surprise when it occurs. When Frost talks about playfulness with language, another way of putting it is to say that he is creating the proper conditions for surprising himself. And when Auden refers to the "clear expression of mixed feelings," he is speaking of interpreting the poem once it's drafted: recognizing the valuable surprise in what he has written.
Both seem necessary parts of the equation. And both easier said than done, to be sure. In any case, I’d like to close by looking a bit at my own practice, not as indicative of my genius but because I know it inside out. There is of course no single way to achieve surprise. As I often told my students, there are many routes to the top of the mountain. A colleague at Ripon College used to tell students who asked “How do I get an A on this paper?” something that sounds right: “I can tell you how to get a B. But for an A you have to surprise me.”
So what I offer here is as much an attitude as a method. But, for me, it is an essential attitude, and one that I grow more attached to with every passing year. Not only that, though—it has the added attraction of being fulfilling and more than occasionally fun.
To illustrate, then, here is one of my older poems, originally written in 1986, and published in my book Second Wind in 1990:
The Valley Where We Live A doe stands in the garden, nibbling lettuce we don't care to pick. OK, we say to the sun. Between the deer's legs rabbits walk their awkward way. The valley where we live is steep but not cloistered. Anything mild may enter: rain showers, balloons, snails, dictionaries, timothy, milk. Any born violence soon rises of its own energy and spins off the rim of our horizon. We make up gentle nicknames to their memory: dust devil, hooligan, zigzag, roughhouse. Potatoes turn earth itself sweet, we say, burying our mild dead where we must. We like poplar trees, how they take the quaking wind and calm it with slender semaphore. Sometimes, though, wandering the upper paths, we hear from beyond our valley muffled shouts, insistent chant of engines run uphill. Then the poplars shudder without wind. Then we pace our sheep-cropped lawns meaning to do whatever we have forgotten. Like children standing the first time at a cliff's windy edge we wonder what it is keeps us from leaping.
Since I wrote it, I can't argue for the quality of this poem, but I can vouch for its origins. It feels like an honest one, in that it surprised me both during the writing and afterward, ultimately touching on some mixed feelings that I recognize within myself. I happen to remember exactly what prompted it, which was a delightful student typo. In a bibliography, someone’s fingers slipped, and the magazine National Wildlife appeared as National Mildlife. So, taking that as my prompt, I started fooling around in my journal, as I often do, setting out to imagine what the magazine National Mildlife might look like. On the conscious level I was just playing: enjoying describing this fictional world which was mild, not wild. I had fun coming up with words like “roughhouse” and “hooligan,” which seemed like the way a mild person might describe violence. I relished juxtaposing to them items like “dictionaries,” “timothy,” “balloons,” and “milk,” which were my notions of unthreatening, mild-mannered things. (By the way, since some readers have wondered: “timothy” is not a person’s name, but a common pasture grass, which is why it’s lower case.) The poem struck me as essentially light-hearted, the sort of thing I might get a laugh with at a reading. I’m always up for some humor.
Yet even as I enjoyed riffing on things that might be considered mild, I knew that I needed to introduce some kind of turn in order to give the poem tension, and in particular to end it successfully. But as usual in such cases these were back-of-the-mind thoughts. I just kept scribbling, improvising as I went. Knowing that I could use some contrast to pure mildness, I found myself wondering how people in this mild and sheltered valley might regard the outside world. “Sometimes, though,” I scribbled to signal my turn, and continued with images and metaphors contrasting with what went before. Thus it was the ending snuck up and surprised me. I was simply trying to come up with things that felt right descriptively, and these ones, particularly the last, seemed suddenly to darken the poem. Fresh from my unconscious mind, the final simile was dark indeed:
Like children standing the first time at a cliff's windy edge we wonder what it is keeps us from leaping.
Well, this certainly wasn’t exactly funny. Nonetheless, as soon as that simile emerged from my pen, I knew I had my closure. It just felt right, and I have learned to trust that, at least at the drafting stage. In any case, these fictive children don’t actually commit suicide, they just wonder about it. I managed to convince myself that this final turn was ultimately affirmative: isn’t it wonderful, I said, that most who contemplate self-destruction don’t actually follow through?
I titled the poem “National Mildlife,” and sent it off to a journal, where it was duly accepted. But the editor did request one change: she found the title too frivolous. It wasn’t at all a humorous poem, she insisted. This may sound strange, but I honestly hadn't thought of that: wedded to the original prompt, I was still regarding this poem as essentially light in tone. But her criticism struck home, when I looked harder at the ending. So I changed the title to something more neutral, “The Valley Where We Live.”
And only later, after it was published, did I come to see what the poem "really" means. In other words, it took a while for me to recognize what's perhaps obvious to any careful reader, and the reason involves my own mixed feelings about innocence and childhood perception. Putting on my critical hat, I realized that, unbeknownst to its author, the poem was re-telling the Eden story, which is itself re-told in every coming of age tale. I came to see it as in fact a critique of adult notions of childhood innocence. For at least as I remember boyhood, ignorance is ¬not¬ bliss; the innocent don't generally want to continue being innocent, but instead desire to grow up, experience and explore the wider world. In such recognitions there is perhaps a covert rejection of my own nostalgia for childhood, as recounted in earlier poems.
Moreover, the common adult vision of childhood innocence is, as I knew from once being a child, often simplistic and sugar-coated. I remember plenty of incidents of violence, anger, terror, and other non-mild emotions from my own boyhood—which was not particularly tortured, and was certainly, in adult terms, very privileged. It just didn’t feel that way to me at the time. So in the long view, I believe my little poem doubts whether true "mildness" is even possible: I fear that human nature may in fact veer toward violence naturally, a tendency we have to labor to circumvent.
That it took me so long to see the surprise in my own poem does not dismay me. It seems normal, in fact. In my teaching days I often recommended this method of free-associative drafting to my students. The advantages seem obvious. You can create the conditions for surprise by not worrying about theme and coherence when composing a first draft. Writing rapidly without much deliberation, you can avoid the agonies of composition that every writer dreads. Writing can be fun, even if revision isn't always.
By being playful about it, by assigning myself technical exercises and writing from prompts, I am able, when I’m lucky, to surprise myself productively. I find I can also touch on sensitive material that would likely not emerge from more direct methods. My conscious mind, like most everyone's, is too interested in self-justification. I want to look admirable, wise, and sensitive. I need to surprise myself to get at the sort of subtle or disreputable mixed emotions that are at the heart of many good poems.
One of my personal touchstones in these matters is something the great essayist Montaigne wrote:
Anyone who wants to be cured of ignorance must first confess it. . . . Wonder is the foundation of all philosophy, inquiry its progress, ignorance its end. I'll go further: there is a certain strong and generous ignorance that concedes nothing to knowledge in honor and courage, an ignorance that requires no less knowledge to conceive it than does knowledge.
I confess that a central motive for writing is in hopes of one day achieving that strong and generous ignorance, which is linked inextricably in my mind to both wonder and surprise.
As promised above, two good books that touch on the themes of this column:
Michael Theune. Structure and Surprise: Engaging Poetic Turns. Teachers & Writers Collaborative, 2007.
Ellen Bryant Voigt. The Flexible Lyric. University of Georgia Press, 1999.
© 2021 David Graham
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His email address is grahamd@ripon.edu. Letting authors know you like their work is the beginning of
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