Recently I took a yoga class taught by my mother. The class had been going along in ways we and our bodies didn’t not expect, and we followed along, innocuously enjoying ourselves. My mind was both in the room and not in the room; it sent tried and true emissaries down well-worn paths. (I just heard somewhere that 95% of our thoughts are unoriginal/repetitive in nature.) I’m hungry. I wonder what I’ll have for dinner. I should read that book tonight. Restrain myself from more episodes of Mad Men. I wonder if so-and-so emailed me back. Et cetera. Then my mother asked us to roll our heads around on our necks (how nice for our beleaguered stems); she asked us to circle our hips in big wide circles (a melting in our spines, our haunches – very pleasant). Finally, she asked us to do both of these movements at the same time, but in different directions; if we swirled our heads clock-wise, our hips should turn against the clock, and vice versa. Suddenly there were little bursts of laughter and exclamation all over the room, as we all struggled to move our bodies in this goofy and unfamiliar way. Suddenly I wasn’t thinking about anything else but trying to master this new pattern of movement, though I did make occasional smiling eye-contact with some of the others sharing in this attempt. My mother explained that when we try out unfamiliar movements with our bodies, our central nervous systems are jarred from their dozing. In this moment of surprise, uncertainty, and stimulated focus, often the body’s muscles unwittingly release. They are no longer slogging along the same old tense paths, weeded with the same old tense thoughts, and so the muscles forget to keep their fists up. They let go.
This struck me as a decently good analogy for what it feels like to write a poem – and also for what I most hope to find in others’ poems. When I’m working on a poem, there is always a moment (if the poem is destined to go anywhere past the initial sitting) when my mind lets go. Thoughts and feelings are no longer individual and demarcated, but palpably flow (oh, such an over-used word nowadays, but I’m having trouble replacing it here!) through and between each other. The poem’s field is open and stimulated and spatial, internal and external at once, full of motion. And this state is only possible when I’ve begun to actually (well, metaphorically) look for something – when I’m not just writing about a subject, but have stumbled onto a real question or a hint of beyond-me-ness that I don’t know how to (but want to) approach. In other words, my existence wakes up to itself and to the world. The tight hamster-wheeling stops because I am putting all I have into this energized focus, and the gift, if it comes, is that everything releases into connectivity for a brief but open window. (Boy, the process sounds so euphoric when I describe it this way, you’d think I wouldn’t want to do anything else, ever. And yet… even now I’m in the midst of a dry spell. I suppose it takes initiative on the part of the internal muscles. Action must precede absorption. Focus feels riskier than distraction. Which is precisely why it is more worthwhile. Though, truth be told, Mad Men is a very good show…)
“The Child is the father of the Man,” writes Wordsworth, hoping his inward “leap” at the sight of a rainbow won’t diminish as the years’ rainbows accumulate. I heard on the radio once (I wish I could remember which program it was!) that the reason time feels slower and more expansive to us as children is that we are constantly encountering new phenomena, having first-ever experiences that lead to fresh (original, on the local level) thoughts. And when we are trying to make sense of so much new data, we have to focus much more closely than when we are breezing through the everyday. And when we focus that closely and energetically, time stretches, dilates and, internally anyway, slows down. In one experiment, a group of children, a group of middle-aged people and a group of elderly people, were quizzed on their internal clocks. Each (individually, apart from others) was asked to speak up when they thought one minute had passed. Children consistently stopped the clock somewhere around ninety seconds, if I’m remembering correctly, whereas the middle-aged folks were fairly accurate and the elderly stopped the clock much too soon. This might account for why summers once felt more akin to unearthly green forever-domes of time and space than a few hot months when maybe we get to take a vacation. The elderly’s acclimation to the world and its contents means birthdays come closer and closer on each others’ heels. My grandmother (who is ninety-one) told me just the other day how quickly the weeks seem to pass now.
I turned thirty-four last weekend, and do find I am worrying more about acclimation, of not needing poems quite enough because my nerves, along with my need to understand, to make sense of the world, have settled and become more manageable. But when I told a friend of mine about this fear last week, on the night of my birthday, in fact, he said something like, Well, okay… so that’s where you are right now. You can’t change how long you’ve been in the world, or that you are more comfortable with your place in it. So the question is, where do you go from there? I liked what he said because it seemed to offer a good challenge. How do we continue to be urgent in our poems when our lives feel a bit less new or thrashy (that’s ‘thrashy,’ not ‘trashy’…)? How do we find ways of turning our heads against the grain of our hips every now and then, and not fall into the trap of only writing poems that rely on what we know, or think we know, about how poems should work? How do we keep grasping toward unknowing in art and life? It seems of utmost importance that we come to provisional answers to these questions, not once, but many times during a lifetime. To quote William Stafford, “...it is important that awake people be awake.”
A.R. Ammons’s book-length poem Garbage, written when he was sixty-three and at a poetic crossroads, takes on some of these questions in a way I endlessly admire. It’s both urgent and charmingly meandering. So I’ll close by leaving you with an excerpt from the sixth section of Garbage. It must be the best description I’ve come across of the time-dilating, space-wacking experience of a poem in the early stages of its making, if one is truly open to progressing with a child’s instinct for not knowing.
… on writing a poem—you sit vacant and
relaxed (if possible), your mind wandering
freely, unengaged and in search of focus: you
may sit this way for several minutes till the
void unsettles you a bit and you become impatient
with the intrusion of an awareness of yourself
sitting with a touch of unwelcome exasperation
over a great blank: but you keep your mind
open and on the move and eventually there is a
trace of feeling like a bit of mist on a backroad
but then it reappears stronger and more central,
still coming and going, so the mind can’t
grab it and hold on to it: but the mind begins
to make an effort, to shed from itself all
awareness except that of going with the feeling,
to relax and hold the feeling—the feeling
is a brutal burning, a rich, raw urgency:
the mind knows that it is nothing without the
feeling, so concentrating on the feeling, it
dreams of imminent shapes, emergences, of
clust’ral abundances, of free flow, forms discernible,
material, concrete, shapes on the move, and
then the mind gives way from its triggering, and
the mechanisms of necessity fall into, grasping the
upheaval, the action of making; the presence
of pressure appears, forces open a way, the
intensity heightens, groans of anguish and
satisfaction break from the depths of the
body, and the sweet dream occurs, the work
payloads, the fall-away slips through, the body
contracts and returns, ease lengthens throughout
the byways, and the mind picks up on the
environment again, turns to the practical
policing of the scene, restores itself to
normalcy and the objective world…
