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153 The Eccentric Discipline Michael Waters During the past decade or so, I’ve been writing, often but not always, sometimes without intention, syllabic verse. I don’t count syllables as I draft a poem, but have found that certain cadences, those of decasyllabic lines or their variation—alternating lines of thirteen and seven syllables, for example—insist themselves as the poem takes shape. “There are those who say that you cannot hear syllabics,” Eric Pankey has stated, “that as a form it is only an obstacle for the writer. But I believe that we can train our ears to listen for the most subtle patterns in the language, syllabics being only one such pattern.”1 For a long time I have written by ear, allowing the sounds of words to suggest other words as the poem progresses, trusting “the sound of sense,” as Robert Frost called it.2 Such chiming effects help to keep the entire poem in the foreground, each word snug in its line, each equally important. “A poem is not a poem,” John Logan insisted, “unless it has an essential surface to it which is musical in character.”3 Rhyming all along the lines while the lines themselves remain taut yet shapely creates a tension that may suit the emotional content of my work. The fluidity of the diction ripples across linear paths like water winding through a creek bed. Each line surprises, hurtling forward or slowing to gather more force or shifting direction, yet seems the inevitable result of all preceding lines. “As systemsgo,syllabicversehaslittletorecommendit,”writesBradLeithauser, “exceptforonepuzzlingthing:Itworks.Withsomefrequency,theeccentric discipline it imposes seems to push everyday utterance into memorability.”4 “Beloved” was written in the fall of 2005 on the island of Malta, where I was enjoying a five-week residency fellowship at the St. James Cavalier Centre for Creativity. I wrote each day, starting in early morning, then strolled the waterfront promenade for several hours in late afternoon, a walk that became part of the process of revision. I carried the poem with me and stopped often to add a line, or delete several, or strike one word and substitute another, then stopped again to replace the stricken word. )DOFRQHU&KLQGG $0 michael waters 154 I had made several decisions, all arbitrary, regarding my writing before arriving on Malta: I would work every day, almost all day; I would move forward every other day with a new poem rather than keep deepening into one poem, as was my habit (otherwise I might work on only one poem the entire residency); I would keep the poems short; and I would avoid syllabic scaffolding. I came home with fourteen new poems, all short, all but two strictly decasyllabic. Go figure. My wife, Mihaela, accompanied me to Malta. She had grown up in Romania , not leaving until 1996, when she was twenty-four, seven years after the violent revolution that ended with the execution by improvised firing squad of dictator Nicolae Ceauşescu and his wife, Elena, on Christmas Day 1989. Her stories of life under communism were fascinating and horrifying, andIfeltstronglythattheyshouldremainhers,tobetoldinherownpoems, in her own style. Yet in writing this love poem, I filched, with permission, one detail from that life: she had to bring her own lightbulb to the library in order to read there. All other details in the poem are imagined, except for the reference to the death of Ceauşescu and the fact that Mihaela and I would have dinner with Toni Morrison in 2001. The title is borrowed, of course,fromthenovelofthesamenamebyMorrisonbutmightbemistaken for a sticky bit of romantic drivel until that association is revealed near the poem’s close, muting the sentimental gesture. The decasyllabic lines mean to urge the poem forward, both vertically and horizontally, their cadences inexorable, while the threat of imminent violence is mitigated by the leap from Romania to New England, that brief opening of landscape and promise that becomes, with the book’s absence, suddenly and cruelly impossible, until the evocative prose of another novel braces the girl. I revised this poem during the act of composition rather than taking it through one complete draft, then another, then another . . . Revision often reveals how craft and luck seduce each other. “I have never started a poem yet whose end I knew,” Robert Frost stated in an interview, and Theodore Roethke expressed the same inchoate method in iambic pentameter, his own ten syllables advising what perhaps remains the best approach to writing a poem: “I learn...

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