People often ask me how I come up with my poems. While I can’t provide a set rule for how poems come to me, or how I write them, here’s a little story about how one poem came to me.
One snowy January day I was looking for a sales slip in order to exchange a Christmas gift. As I sorted through the mess on my desk (the clutter in my study having reached Mephistophelian proportions), there was a thought in the front of my mind, that I had seen the slip recently but could not find it now. When out of the back of my mind there floated a line: Around this house things won’t stay found.
Well, as a line of poetry this is hardly worthwhile, but I’ve learned not to ask questions. I jotted it down and went on with my search.
I still don’t think much of the line, but in a couple of ways it shows how the mind generates poetry as a way of dealing with external reality. First it has a twist in the way it looks at things, in the way things appear to it. Things are not “lost”; rather they won’t “stay found.” The line is not going to take the confusions of life lying down. It talks back; it is a retort to chaos. In the current parlance the line “has an attitude.”
Second the line was born simultaneously as a thought and as a pattern of sound. The rhythm of the words is as much a part of the meaning of the line as is the thought. “Around this house things won’t stay found.” Four strong strokes that express a mood. And the sequence of vowels: “Around this house things won’t stay found.” Ou — ou — o — ou. Four more stresses that reinforce by repetition the natural emphasis already in the individual words. Finally, the rhyme of the first and last words — “Around this house things won’t stay found” — picks up the whole thought as if with ice clamps. This is a declaration spoken in exasperation, not inviting disagreement.
(I never did find the slip.)