Coming After: Essays on Poetry

14. Thinking and Poetry

Thinking and Poetry I want to discuss how to think honestly in connection with how to write honestly. I want to oppose these two “how’s” to thinking and writing in accordance with received ideas: those that come to you from others, the outside; or your own old ideas, what you think you think and don’t question anymore. For it’s very difAcult to be honest inside yourself; you tend to slide over tough places hurrying, saying, “Of course X is the truth, A, B, and C thinkers took care of that for me,” or “At this point everybody knows . . . ,” or “I know what I think about that, that’s settled.” If that’s how the mind behaves how can there ever be a new poem? I’m convinced that as in reasoning, in writing both poetry and prose there must be a progression in which each unit is clearly rendered (what “clearly” means I’ll deal with presently) and words are clear as they occur. There must be something to hold onto so it might be assessed and even disapproved of by the reader. If a poem primarily creates a world to inhabit, that world should have well-deAned contours, or if the contours tend to dissolve the dissolution process should be clear and shapely. My wish for honest thinking sounds so . . . clichéd. It’s what I’ve always wanted of my own writing/thinking self and used to assume everyone else wanted and practiced to the extent that they could. I believed that poets must be engaged in a struggle with the truth, or truth as the present reality of this world: how to say this world. I believed this could only be done by being as ruthlessly honest as possible, within myself, and in the poem perhaps more gently, but certainly syllable by syllable, without jargon, jargon being words coined by specialists in other Aelds, which represented privileged knowledge, had little color, and were transitory. I thought we all wanted to think and speak for ourselves; I didn’t think we should be in agreement. But now I 158 believe that the world is full of subscription to the thought of others, and that originality and quality of thought and expression do not win and worse will not necessarily win in the future, which used to be the “real time” of the best poetry being written presently. The world, both the big orthodox world and the small avant-gardeish world, desires conformity of thought and style. And whatever mechanism preserved much of the best for use in the future is breaking down under the pressure of the existence of so much stuff, text, “thought,” “communication”; whatever is different or presently unappreciated may be smothered . Who will And it? Who at this point “knows” anything, reading so much? I see a world of literary and poetic hacks, become that under increasing careerist and businesslike pressure to “sound right.” We shouldn’t all use the same kinds of words in our poems and our thinking, shouldn’t produce quite so much, we should be puzzling a little more over each conclusion or line that we write. But the buzz of the dialogues already in process, the terms and styles, are so seductive it’s tempting to replicate: everybody will like you and what else counts but a group of like- ”minded” people, what else does reality consist of except such a group and its enemies? It should be the poet’s business to test, continuously, current assumptions, rather than assume them. I And being a poet something that must start again all the time; I’m always reinventing my practice, discovering what I believe is true and how to express it. I haven’t changed much since I Arst began writing: I never understand what to do or how to do it, I understand that I must start and will now by an awkward process make something , thinking hard and deeply about each part as I go along, sometimes quite fast though—you can think accurately writing rapidly. I remember quite well when I began writing. I took a prose-Action course as an undergraduate and was assigned to write two stories, having deliberately placed myself in the position of being forced to write. “Write a story.” How does one write? Unit by unit, I thought, that’s the only way I’ll get it done. Word by word, sentence by sentence, also, in terms of the...