The Poem Becoming A Poem

Painting by William Merritt Chase


One Summer: Musings about Avoidance,
Temperament, and the Poem Becoming a Poem


by Stephen Dunn

The Georgia Review, Winter 2005



There's something to be said for avoidance,
even besides its obvious virtue – not doing
what you're supposed to do. Last summer,
for example, I planned to write a memoir
about my grandmother's secret, which I had
only recently learned, and instead made
phone calls, lingered with my coffee, or
found myself writing something else. One
morning, turning away from my notes, I
wrote this line: "Night without you, and
the dog barking at the silence..." Next
morning: "Maybe genius is its own nourishment,
I wouldn't know." Both lines led to poems,
one a love poem, the other about Glenn Gould,
neither of which had anything to do with my
grandmother. Apparently I had tapped into
some rich vein of psychic refusal, a source
of energy that seemed transferable to
subjects not related to it. Of course I
needed to believe that I actually wanted
to write the memoir. When it was clear after
a while that I didn't, my avoidance-as-
compositional-method lost power. But I was
able to fool myself for several weeks. I
wrote more poems that summer, many of them
keepers, than I had during any comparable
time. It should come as no surprise that
"what if" and "let's see where this goes"
were far more seminal than
"here's what happened."

Avoidance suggests psychological fear,
something unresolved that tempts us while
declaring stay away. I was avoiding something,
but so what? As Fitzgerald has Gatsby say
about Daisy's marriage to Tom, "it was only
personal" – a strange disconnect that
nevertheless freed him to pursue the wildness
of his dream. Such suppression of reality
would come back to haunt Gatsby, but that's
another matter entirely. At the time, it
gave him permission to go forward. Whatever
my reason for resisting grandmother's secret,
it kept leading me elsewhere, if not forward.
And, that particular summer, elsewhere was
where the unexpected, the loose ended, the
half known, resided. Avoidance led me into
unforeseen areas, which is only to confirm
that poems originate in unlikely ways. Then
it helps that you've devoted your life to
developing and honing the skills that might
take you further.

Like opium or free writing, avoidance may get
you into a poem, but rarely out of one. After
all, it takes a lot of things-in-place just to
become a merely decent poet: a passion for and
a suspicion of language, for starters; empathy
for otherness; contempt for sham; comfort with
artifice; some balance between truth's cruelty
and irony's armor; a love both of exactitude
and ambiguity. If we're not beginning poets,
all of these qualities should be ingrained in
us before the poem begins. They must remain
the poem's informants – behind the poem, not
in it, unconsciously guiding its decisions.
Something galvanizes them if we're lucky.
That something could be anything – "a wild
horse taking a roll," as Marianne Moore
says, or an uprising in 1916, or something
utterly serendipitous, like the way language
in the act of finding companionable language
also finds meaning.

Of course, I don't think of any such things
when I compose. And I try to forget about my
heroes and their daunting qualities: Jeffers'
ferocity, the artful delicacy with which Larkin
distills and orchestrates his bile, Dickinson's
quirky incisiveness, Dante's perfectly imagined
hell, Shakespeare's capaciousness. Heroes can
become hindrances. They, too, need to be
unconscious, informing elements – assimilated,
ingrained, part of who you are.

Avoidance, indeed. Some things need to be
forgotten in order to proceed. One summer I
couldn't shake "That is no country for old men,"
kept hearing it in my head every time I sat
down to write. Yeats was too much with me.
I took a lot of naps.

Some therapists, for our own good, might
want us to confront what we tend to suppress.
When I'm writing, I'm happy to be the healing
profession's adversary. It may be true that our
lives are more important than our poems, but
not when we're working on one. Besides, no poet
wants to end up with a poem that is the equivalent
of learning how to cope. Poems need to be better
than acceptable, better, certainly, than their
authors. In the broadest sense, they should offer
the reader a good time, which, by my lights, can
include a sadness, or even the horrific,
wonderfully enacted. I never understand when
people say that a good poem about a depressing
matter depressed them. I'm a sucker for the world
as it is brought home anew, whatever it takes to
deliver it. Paul Celan's "Death Fugue" elates me.

Restraint, avoidance's mentally healthy cousin,
has, in many quarters, a good reputation. I
have been one of its practitioners. But there
must be something large that enlists our
restraint, else it be like building a corral
for a mouse. I will grant restraint its
virtues without listing them. We, the
congenitally restrained, though, can't be too
proud of ourselves for being so. Wouldn't we
rather be praised for what's lesser in our
natures – those times we've been excessive
or expansive? Don't we love to reach that
moment in a poem that makes us feel as
though we've just gotten back home, safely,
with stolen goods, all traces of how we got
there hidden? Aren't we most pleased when
our restraint serves some wildness?

Stevens said some poets prefer a hard rain
in Hartford to a drizzle in Venice, and
vice versa. He wasn't elevating one over
the other. He meant that, in varying degrees,
we're all unconscious servants of our
temperaments. Perhaps, but within a temperament
I have to believe there's room for a good deal
of variety. I like rock music, for example,
but not heavy metal. I love Hopkins' passionate
syntax, but I come to it with George Herbert's
metabolism. I'd like to own one of de Kooning's
"Woman" paintings and also Vermeer's "Girl
with a Pearl Earring." I suppose that my
temperament inclines me to spend a longer
time in front of the Vermeer; I love how
quietly it invites contemplation. But the
first time I saw one of the de Koonings my
response was entirely and excitingly visceral.
It disturbed, shocked. Now I find myself
smiling in their presence. Like a disastrous
love affair thought about years later, the
encounter has become comic. I've found
another way to live with it.

I suspect that I'm a drizzle person with a
hankering for a good storm, quick to put up
his umbrella. But would I prefer the drizzle
if it were in Hartford? In the Bronx? Isn't
context ready to confound almost anything we
feel sure of?

I've always been tempted to be what I'm not,
first out of a sense that I wasn't much of
anything, then out of a conviction that it was
possible to create oneself. I can think of a
few achievements I never achieved, lies I
eventually turned into facts out of sheer
embarrassment of being caught. (Don't ask me
to cite them.) I can also think of those
times I got caught. Certainly, though, as
writers, we can expand who we are by
entertaining or impersonating who we're not.
Witness any persona poem, all those women
reinventing Penelope to reinvent themselves,
all those contemporized Oedipuses discovering
how to see in the dark. And to write is to
reach into the dark. Occasionally we touch
something we didn't know we sought. Sometimes
we get bitten, or worse. Sometimes there's
nothing. We move forward, our imaginations as
feelers. We make things up to find what is
or isn't there.

Poetry writing is more humane than life.
It's full of second chances. Your sentence,
so to speak, can always be revised. You can
fix the inappropriate, adjust every
carelessness, improve what you felt. How
perfect for someone like me: unabashed
avoidance one afternoon, a little excess
in the evening, a few corrections in the
morning. The various ways I've embarrassed
myself, crumpled up, in the wastebasket,
never to be seen.

But there is of course the final product.
If you're ambitious for your work, there is
no hiding. The issue is not that I've revealed
aspects of my life (though I may have); rather,
it's my skill and sensibility, which, combined,
constitute style. And nothing is as personal
or as individuating as style. My final product
must be evidence that I've switched my
allegiance from content to handling of content,
that whatever intensity I've mustered has
become increasingly aesthetic. Or, rather,
there should be no evidence of this, just
the poem standing for itself, tinged with the
residue of a style, hopefully in some way
distinguishing, if not distinctive.

For the record, the grandmother memoir finally
got written, late that summer, as a poem. Much
of what I've been musing about here went into
the writing of it. In order to get started, I
needed to veer into it, take it and myself
by surprise. I'll not go through the many
drafts of this poem, the many tinkerings and
rearrangements, except to say I'd been thinking
about the Buddhist saying, "If you meet the
Buddha on the road, kill him," and began with
it, then discovered that it needed to be
withheld until later. Buddhism, in fact,
would play a minor role in the poem, yet it
was the beginning of some narrative latitudes
not available to me had I stayed strictly with
my subject. Purposefulness, that enemy of
invention, suddenly had a harder time getting
its way. I was free to let one perception lead
to another perception, the facts of the matter
now merely the cargo, not the engine. What was
at stake were ways to be true to my poem
while being true to my grandmother's secret,
and I confess my allegiance quickly tipped
to the poem, as I've indicated it should,
because only attention to the poem qua poem
makes its contents significant.
Writing poetry is about giving yourself
permission for what you've found yourself
to be doing. It follows, therefore, that it's
an act both promiscuous and self-regulating,
and that's how I like it. (Perhaps my avoidance
of the memoir form was that it wasn't
promiscuous enough.) My first wife used to say
I wanted two of everything. It was a
conservative estimate. But what I wanted and
what I ended up doing were often vastly
different, as they are in poems themselves –
matters of compromise and adjustment. Of
course I want to be who I am and many things
I'm not. Drizzle man wants to be thunder man,
and thunder man wants to conceal the
lightning that caused him. My wishes, however,
may not matter.

By early September, I'd reverted once again
to the exigencies of my temperament. I
remembered the pleasures of light rain and
muted colors. The lure of subtlety. A
measured response. Auden, Frost, Williams,
Donald Justice – my mentors, unbidden, were
tapping me on the shoulder. And, as ever,
there was Apollo insisting I clean up after
the fabulous party that had spilled into
the street. Might as well dance a Danse Russe
whenever I can, I concluded, might as well
bend a few birches.


Stephen Dunn

Posted over on Poetry Daily