The Rag-Picker's Guide to Poetry: Poems, Poets, Process

How Far Out It Goes

92 Thomas Lux How Far Out It Goes It has always been difficult to talk about what the process of writing a poem is like for me, other than that every poem takes many drafts and that I try to follow Mr. Frost’s dictum “No surprise for the writer, no surprise for the reader.” I also favor stamina and doggedness. I’ll try to do a little more here by writing about these two poems because my colleagues at the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson asked me to. I was on the faculty for well over twenty years, and I am deeply indebted to the program and to the dozens of other poets and fiction writers there, faculty and students, who taught me so much. The PIeR ASPIRINg See if you can see how far out it goes. See? You can’t see the end! I’d take you out there but it’s a six-hour walk and the work’s redundant: one board laid down after another. When the sun is high the boards are hot. Splinters always pose a problem walking any other way but straight. What keeps me working on it, driving piles, hauling timber, what’s kept my hand on the hammer, the barnacle scraper, what keeps me working through the thirst, the nights when the waves’ tops pound the pier from beneath, what keeps me glad for the work, the theory is, despite the ridicule at the lumberyard, the treks with pails of nails (my arms How Far Out It Goes 93 two centimeters longer each trip), the theory is this: it’s my body’s habit, hand over foot, paycheck to paycheck, it’s in the grain of my bones, lunch bucket to lunch box. It’s good to wear an X on my back, to bend my back to the sky, it’s right to use the hammer and the saw, it’s good to sleep out there—attached at one distant end and tomorrow adding to that distance. The theory is: It will be a bridge. I don’t think the subject of an ars poetica, i.e., an attempt to describe the nature of poetry, was listed among suggested topics/angles we use to speak about our poems, but I’d like to try with this poem. The title evolved from something I found in quotes in my notebook: someone referred to a pier as a disappointed bridge. I was struck by the image. My poems often begin with a title, a few words that suggest something. I like to think of poems as bridges, a fundamental and not overly original metaphor for one thing that connects to another thing, often over perilous heights and across scary waters. At one end of the bridge is the writer, at the other end the reader. It’s a persona poem as well as an ars poetica. Persona was one of the topics/angles for this anthology. Two for one! The guy who is building the pier is on the land end of it talking to someone and telling him/her about the pier. He’s a little bit agitated. The speakers of my poems are often agitated. The poem uses hyperbole (a fun tool in our toolbox) and understatement (not as much fun but necessary lest the hyperbole become merely hyperbole). I’m trying to wring a little irony out of the “splinters” line: it’s not always best to avoid splinters by walking straight only. The line is also deliberately all trochaic, to give the effect of tumbling forward. He (the speaker) is trying to figure out why he keeps building (writing) his pier even though it includes manual labor (let’s face facts: poetry, writing, is work), isolation (some nights he sleeps out on the pier to save a total twelve-hour round-trip walk to and from work!), and ridicule when he keeps buying more boards at the lumberyard . He even suffers a certain level of bodily harm: elongated arms! Do you, citizen reader,have any idea what a pail of nails weighs? Serious elbow problems could result, I was told by an orthopedist. He doesn’t make any grand statements about the enormity of his task; he doesn’t babble about the spheres; he 94 The RAg-PIckeR’S guIde To PoeTRy likes the work, which does not include a quill pen or...