I have the third draft of a poem almost ready to post. Just one troublesome line.
Awhile back I said I felt it was a mistake to try to write a poem "about" any subject. I think this went along with something I'd read in Richard Hugo--"Never write a poem about anything that ought to have a poem written about it, a wise man once told me.... Not bad advice but not quite right.... " I mentioned having made a list of things I wanted to write poems about, and having approached them in that way I'd found they resisted, or came out wooden and artificial, unsatisfying. From this experience I concluded that authentic poems were "triggered" (in Hugo's sense) as you wrote, or unexpectedly by something external.
I was not quite wrong (or almost right) in my understanding of that.
Because that list of subjects is still here. And one day I started fiddling with one again, from square one, sneaking up on it perhaps. And something wonderful (in my own regard) blossomed.
And as I drove up to the mercantile the other day I had a little epiphany, and scribbled it down so I wouldn't forget. And I know this isn't original. I've probably read it a hundred times in the writings of other poets. But sometimes a concept just doesn't sink in until you discover it for yourself.
This metaphor: It's like the difference between a sculptor saying "I think I'll carve a horse into that great stone" and then flying at it with hammer and chisel, and another saying, "I believe there's a horse inside that rock" and then coaxing it out.
A poet should try to develop the latter sense--to know in one's stomach that a poem lies within a subject, and to stop at nothing to release it.
And so when one builds an idea list such as the one I made, ideally it's because one senses the poems lying in wait.
Addendum ten minutes later:
Hm. Then there's sympathetic resonance. Surely poems are latent everywhere, live and move and have their being in all things. And the ideal poet--the Platonic poet, say--would sense this potential in every subject, every object, every experience. But individual humans, who mature within unique and uniquely limiting and shaping circumstances, can sense these potentials in this and that, according to the person they've become. And probably this is good and sufficient. Or maybe that sense can be developed, or develops on its own with time and practice, and one begins to "see" in more and more things and experiences finally the latent work awaiting expression.
Addendum 5 hours later:
Oh but don't be silly. Things and experiences are just things and experiences. How can there be anything "within" them but more of what they are, latent or not? And poets are just persons, not diviners of potential poetic energies.
OK, then. What I mean, then, what I must mean, is... that... the work, the poem, lies within the perceiver. We all perceive. We all have the artwork latent within us. And the poet or artist or crafter (or whoever admits the experience) is the person who is easily triggered. The person for whom the work comes forward upon one's perceiving or experiencing the trigger, and who recognizes it and then endeavors to express it.
Addendum ten minutes after that:
And hey--how can there be a "Platonic poet"? That's hilarious, considering Plato himself would ban all poetry, calling poets "the imitators": Poets, he said, "do not lay hold of truth" but project images of "love-making and anger and all the desires and griefs and pleasures in the soul which we say go along with our every action." And this is bad, said Plato, because it nourishes "what it ought to dry up, and makes them rulers in us."
All right, then. A Platonic Plato's poets.
See? I don't need no stinking commentors. I can carry on a lively discussion all by myself.
>sigh<
12:39:52 PM 
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