Marshalling Muses: Notes Toward the Fortitude of Craft

If I have a missionary zeal about anything, it is this. Technique is very important to me. I've not spent my life as a poet just to put words together any old way.

—Robert Hayden

Craft is the vehicle which carries and guides inspiration. Inspiration without craft is poetry without control, poetry that can't be steered but easily runs off the road into a ditch, down an embankment. The writing may feel to the poet as if the text is secure, but the work, unwieldy and lacking all restraint, soon enough falls, which is to say as art it fails. In its rush, inspiration inadvertently picks up all the detritus of the mind: its habits, its lazy memories, its facile triggers, its head nodding duty to the mother and her aphorisms, its paternal clichés. Craft demands revision, which acts as a sieve, duly culling the debris from the authentic voice. It is through revision that we interrogate and press the text. In this, we refuse the hubris of thinking every first thought alchemical, holy, or inviolable. Craft does not pour from the heavens. Craft is our responsibility. How easy it is to lay it all at the feet of a Creator and throw our hands up, empty such responsibility. If such were the case, the writer, who has created nothing, should take no credit, though we know this is not the case. How easy to allow inspiration to be the alpha and omega, directionless, going nowhere other than the place where it began, simply stopping the process after we drop the pen. And that's the problem. Ease.

Craft is the work of the poet, and it is not easy. Craft insists upon investigation and a review of the map. To be open to craft is to be willing to foray into the conventions of poetry and hopefully its deep structures. It requires a kind of humility to admit that there is something to be learned and chutzpa to develop the discipline such learning necessitates. It's hard. And it should be. Yes, yes, poets love to write poetry; however, if inspiration is to meet its full measure, craft must be considered. Of course this means that poetry must be studied, and, ultimately, study requires a kind of rigor. I say "a kind of" because rigor has been used as code for an absence of black aesthetic or practices. It is also seen by some as a call for cold assessment based upon white American ideas of what entails work. Further, the word "rigor" contains the kind of rigidity that is antithetical to the writing (and revision) of poetry which requires a fluidity of mind, a flexibility in one's comprehension of language. So I'll call our approach to study fortitudinous, less a rigidity of mind than strength of mind. The application of craft takes fortitude. And fortitude is what a poet in the Callaloo Creative Writing Workshop must bring to the table: an ability to keep writing through the stripping away of ego, through the pain of discovering that a resonant poetic means one's inspiration must have somewhere to go, and that to get somewhere will take startling effort intellectually and emotionally.

This year, the examination of craft was particularly well balanced by a thorough exploration of individual inspiration, without which, especially in the lyric poem, craft has no value. As inspiration needs a vessel, so craft is set off by what imbues it. Daily sessions were arduous and much was expected. Our participants did not disappoint. They were daily willing to apply the pressure of craft to their inspired works, and the result was a diverse, meaningful, and carefully-wrought body of work that takes conceptual risks. As the workshop opened, Dr. Charles Rowell, who directs the project, stated his expectations: honesty in critique, forthright assessments, and a fierce attendance to the text. In other words, he expected the powerful work of Callaloo to continue, for its grindstone tradition to be carried forward. Those expectations were met and surpassed by our poets in the way each...