Like many millennial-ish poets, I began writing poetry under the guidance of the deep imagists, particularly Robert Bly and James Wright. In the first poetry workshop I attended—this was 2001—the professor assigned us “Snowbanks North of the House,” and I read it perhaps forty times that week. Then, for what felt like the next decade after, I returned to it time and again, attempting to unlock the particular magic the poem contained. Bly seemed to be scratching at the surface of something which existed beyond the physical realm. And while I’d grown fairly adept at comprehending and pinpointing the voices of other poets—Plath and Cummings and Hughes and most of the famous postmodernist heroes—I could never quite pin down how Bly infused such a seemingly simple poem with that odd combination of mysticism and mundanity that created a feeling so resonant I became addicted. The interplay between the ideas evaded my best undergraduate efforts. For instance, I recall a number of lonely hours gazing upon the lines:
The energy leaves the wine, and the minister falls
leaving the church.
It will not come closer—
the one inside moves back, and the hands touch
nothing, and are safe.
My collegiate education included very little reference to Jungian archetypes and French Symbolism, so when I later learned the theoretical and poetic underpinnings of deep imagery, I realized how unprepared I’d been to learn from its style. But the very conscious effort to decipher deep image poems without any assistance was, perhaps, the best writing education I ever received. Rather than understanding the work as part of a larger poetic and intellectual lineage, I deconstructed it like a beginner guitarist learning to play a song by ear. I would get close sometimes, but could never replicate it exactly, and instead attempted, by sheer concentration and osmotic repetition, to learn how the poems operated according to the relationships between their ingredients.
In my system of explication, the vagaries of lines like “It will not come closer” became puzzle pieces that didn’t quite fit anywhere. Rather than dissecting the poem for a specific theme or extended metaphorical symbolism, I simply took as a rule that such assertions belonged in this type of poem. The equation between the poem’s prosody and its plainspoken voice required odd interjection; that was the rule. Under the auspices of this rule, if the voice became more tonally invested in its subject matter, fewer ambiguously ominous utterances needed to be placed in the poem. Likewise, the more a poet infused the work with rhetoric or personality, the less the poem required moments of befuddling obfuscation. Simple!
Pure coincidence, honestly, that many of my little rules turned out to be true. They were prescriptive diagnoses, born from the underdeveloped and uncultured mind of a poor, first-generation college student who couldn’t fathom a world larger than the tiny, northern New York towns he’d grown up in. To me, my collegiate classmates seemed not only prepared for the level of erudition and discourse required to approach these texts, but were also psychically aware of each other’s preparedness. They mentioned poets, artists, musicians, and writers I’d never heard of. They knew the names and defining characteristics of artistic movements. Since I knew nothing, I kept my mouth shut for fear they’d discover my ignorance.
Indeed, ignorance and naivete informed the majority of my poetics. In many ways, they continue to inform it, though I no longer consider either detrimental to poetry. Rather, the poetry I like best seems to bloom from somewhere near the limits of the poet’s understanding. Take, for example, “A Little Tooth” by Thomas Lux, which is one of my favorite short poems of all time:
Your baby grows a tooth, then two,
and four, and five, then she wants some meat
directly from the bone. It’s allover: she’ll learn some words, she’ll fall
in love with cretins, dolts, a sweet
talker on his way to jail. And you,your wife, get old, flyblown, and rue
nothing. You did, you loved, your feet
are sore. It’s dusk. Your daughter’s tall
This sighing summary of parenthood relies on obscuring emotion behind instructive descriptions of specific, poignant moments. A reader could claim that one of the poem’s primary engines is its engagement with its own ignorance; the narrator points toward the stupidest parental question of all: “where has the time gone?” In doing so, Lux reclaims the question from the clutches of cliché and places himself in the position of a person who is truly without answers.
What I’m advocating for here is that poets—particularly beginning poets, but really poets at any stage of their development—forfeit the part of the ego that desires to be studied, precise, and/or correct in their works and ideas. Rather, learn to love your ignorance and to wade through it as a botanist wading into a swamp in hopes of finding a rare flower. This sort of learning seems to be disappearing in the internet age and is wildly undervalued in formal education. The poems which I’m most proud to have written sprang from the impulse to admit my stupidity publicly. I wrote them not because I had something definitive to say, but rather in proclamation that I don’t have any answers or advice to offer. A rhetorical questioning permeates such work. I’d like to say that all good poems contain some level of this self-ignorance, but that wouldn’t be true. Certain poets tend to cleave to the dictum of, “write what you know,” while others feel more comfortable writing toward what they don’t. Both modes can produce engaging work; I’m not promoting the superiority of one mode over the other, but merely stating that I tend to be happiest when I read and write on subjects about which I have no definitive understanding of their ethical or emotional meaning and, rather, search for said meaning through the process of writing the poem. In short, the poem as a site for wrestling with stupidity.
And since ignorance breeds more ignorance, I must also admit that another gigantic portion of my sensibility was informed by a series of other misunderstandings and misreadings of craft and critique from my early poetic education, both in workshops and in the texts I studied independently. For instance, in an undergraduate workshop, I vividly recall a teacher praising the language of a student’s poem for its ability to sonically reproduce and reinforce the emotions elicited by the images and descriptions in the piece. The teacher did not elaborate upon what this meant and so, for months after, I was haunted by the implications of his statement. Years later, after graduate study, I understood that the teacher was merely alluding to the uses of assonance, alliteration, consonance, and other devices in the poem. But in my ignorance, what I heard was that there were specific vocabularies unrelated to feeling which contained the mystical sonic ability to relate specific emotions to a reader and, therefore, writing an “ideal” poem about any given subject matter required building a word-hoard whose sonic elements would sound “correct,” even if the poet didn’t know how or why.
In order to test this “sonic correctness” idea, I practiced it by reading Spanish poetry from bilingual editions aloud. I could not read or speak Spanish, but this didn’t matter; I made no attempt to understand the poem. The goal of this oral performance was to see if, based purely upon the sounds the poem made, I could figure out the emotions alluded to in the English translation on the opposite page. I’d read it aloud a few times in Spanish and make a guess at its “base emotions” before reading the English version. And though I didn’t know if Spanish-speaking peoples thought of the “S,” for example, as a devious sound—mind you, at this point in my life, I’d never been on an airplane, let alone conversed with a person from another country—I figured that any language that employed the Latin alphabet couldn’t be too dissimilar. This was dumb, of course, and the results were entirely inconclusive.
But perhaps the most important and instructive of my many poetic stupidities came from a misinterpretation of Charles Olson’s “Projective Verse.” We were assigned this essay in an advanced poetry workshop, and I read it perhaps ten times in an attempt to comprehend it. The teacher hadn’t provided us the context surrounding the essay’s creation, so I wasn’t aware that it was a fairly straightforward reaction to the ongoing debate between formal poetry and free verse in the 1940s. Rather, I took it as a more specific treatise on the composition of free verse itself. The most famous assertion in the essay was the most problematic for me:
(2) is the principle, the law which presides conspicuously over such composition, and, when obeyed, is the reason why a projective poem can come into being. It is this: FORM IS NEVER MORE THAN AN EXTENSION OF CONTENT. (Or so it got phrased by one, R. Creeley, and it makes absolute sense to me, with this possible corollary, that right form, in any given poem, is the only and exclusively possible extension of content under hand.)
Certainly, Olson’s writing style contributed to my puzzlement. The text is littered with comma splices, randomly dropped capitalizations, sentence fragments, and other grammatical errors. But beyond this, the idea of form as never more than an extension of content seemed intractable. After hours of lonely cogitation, I decided that what Olson meant was that every type of content for a poem required a very specific form. So, extrapolating from this, the use of any poetic tool or figurative device might alter the entire structure of the poem. A certain rhetorical stance on a certain subject using a certain set of metaphors would require a very defined line-length, stanza length, and use of repetition and sound. Essentially, I took Olson’s meaning to be that a projective verse poem had a prescriptive “correct” way it could be constructed. If the poet altered a single ingredient, the poem would require a complete rewriting. I understood Olson’s idea backwards as “content is never more than an extension of form,” which, in free verse, is a very, very puzzling idea indeed.
In my attempt to respect and learn from the work of Olson and other late modernists, I had unwittingly established a poetic principle that was completely unachievable. I began believing that for every possible topic of a poem, an exact, ethereal, perfect form existed. Writing a poem under these circumstances was literally impossible; it removed every element of control from me, the poet, and placed it instead in the hands of readers who were dead and could never tell me whether I was going in the right direction. The only way to gauge my poems’ success was to read a majority of the work of these writers—Eliot, Bishop, Williams, Stevens, Sexton, the Black Mountain School, the New York School, and so on—and judge myself against their writing.
Even now, I sometimes feel the tug toward this unattainable perfectionism when I write. I’m embarrassed by my ignorance and blindness to other styles of thought, but not by the childish impulse to learn and discover how to better my writing by whatever rudiments at my disposal. The awe for poetry and for the world in which it’s created has remained, and this is important to me. And while a number of the things I learned began from a place of ignorance, many of the lessons were of the utmost importance. I gained the ability to write at the limits of my understanding (or, at least, to attempt it). I learned to pay attention to sonic elements in free verse poems. I gleaned a connection between tone and form. Perhaps most importantly, I learned that a poet’s vocal register is a figured construct built from the amalgam of all these elements.
The question I arrive at, after all this time and rumination upon my stupidity, is: would I have continued writing if I had understood these texts? Or was my childish ignorance of the true meanings of these poems itself the gift? Without the ever-looming thought that poetry contained a real, unknowable genius inside it, beyond my poor-boy understanding, would I have kept chasing meaning, trying to tune my tools to exactly the right frequencies of expression? Probably not, no. But then, for all those brilliant poems I studied, if they were written by brilliant minds who knew how to brilliantly deploy their brilliance to cover brilliant topics, what kept these poets writing after they’d stated what they knew? What, if not the chance to confront their own abject ignorance through the writing process, made it exciting for them?
