Metaphors of Craft, by Sandra Beasley

Once, a friend was giving me feedback on a poem that would appear in my first collection, Theories of Falling. He had concerns about the leaps of narrative that my draft was making, the wild associations between image and intent. 

 "Look," he said, "to write a poem is to build a wall. Every image is a brick in that wall." He made a gesture of wedging a brick in place, then troweling the cement around it, then shaving off the excess. Methodical. Neat. "When you lay your last image down, there's your story."

As much as I respected this poet, in that moment I knew I would be leaving this workshop group. I didn't want to build poem like walls. I wanted poems that could jump nimbly from idea to idea. I wanted, as Piet Mondrian termed one of his great, jazz-inspired geometric works, a little more Broadway Boogie-Woogie.   

In the years since then, I've realized that the poet was not trying to be didactic. He was just sharing his own metaphor of craft--the shorthand every writer uses to describe his process. Whether it's a matter of weaving a basket, jump-starting a gyroscope, or letting a horse out of the gate, each of us develops a mental model that describes our journey from source inspiration to finished product. This model helps us understand when we're ready to start a new poem, and when to know when a draft is done; when to push, when to rest. 

Some writers are able to articulate models as an explicit mantra. In Writing the Bones, Natalie Goldberg compares writing to baking a cake: "You have all these ingredients, the details of your life," she says, "but to just list them is not enough." For most of us the model remains nothing but a flicker, a gut guide. 

 

So what's my model? My brain, I've come to realize, is an oyster. It captures some bit of grit (a notion, a face, a sound) and then worries at it, over and over, coating it with language, until the grit grows into a pearl. That's when a poem is waiting to meet the page. 

This model helps me grasp why I start drafts after midnight: for me, writing is a process of (semi-)conscious accretion that reaches critical mass, inclined toward lyric intensity rather than narrative structure. I still dislike prompts--but then, I dislike cultured pearls too. And it's my responsibility to give this oyster a healthy bed, which means a reading diet that pumps nutrients in the water. (Goodbye, Us Weekly. Hello, Threepenny Review.)

Not too long ago, a reporter asked me to contrast being a poet and an essayist. I thought back to a recent visits to the Jentel Artist Residency and Virginia Center for Creative Arts, where for the first time I was working in prose (primarily memoir) rather than poetry. At each meal, artists would chat about the their progress. I realized the language I used with them had not been the language of oysters. It was the language of...omelets. Instead of grit sifted from the outside world, this material was being delivered in smooth, polished units of memory that belied the messy yolk within.  

 

"I've cracked the egg," I would say in triumphant moments. Meaning that, while I'd made a mess of my life on the page, at least now I was committed. Time to cook, to make the mess palatable. Time to think about whether I want to dish up these narratives scrambled or over easy, slightly soft or boiled hard, and what rhetorical structures best matched those modes. 

With a change of models comes a change in drafting rhythms. I jump into prose first thing in the morning--before my contacts are in, before my hair is brushed. It's not a natural way of life for me. But at least this model gives me a way to get a handle on it; eggs, after all, are a breakfast food. 

What is your metaphor of craft? My bet is that you have one already, embedded in your process. Delineate it. Trust it. Can it tell you something about yourself, as a writer, that maybe you had not come to terms with before?

Comments

[Christopher Phelps]

A great, shapely post, Sandra. Wise and welcoming.

You made me realize I've never pondered a metaphor for my own craft. Sitting here in the early wees, the best I could de-embed was right undernose: a seedbed, but for birds. Every poem seems to hover around and wait for me to throw some seed. When I do, birds land. I don't know which, or whether they'll get along with each other or me or what they'll do after feeding. Ibis and ducks seem to mingle pretty well, at least in my backyard. Sometimes the ducks will look in my windows, necks stretched, heads cocked, doing their best impression of a curious heron doing its best impression of a nosy human.

[Trish]

Experiencing over a dozen years of writers' block (what happened to the unstoppable flow of my adolescent mind?), my metaphor is currently buried treasure with a blurry map. It's a struggle to figure out where to look, and then there's still a lot of digging through dreck before I find anything valuable. I am going to think about this more; maybe if I change the metaphor I can change the reality, too?

[Donald Maclean]

Brilliantly written, and the oyster metaphor is fem-licious. (that would be a new word, and of course, all poets have license to invent those, granted in perpetual time by one Edward Estlin Cummings.)

So of course, Sandra's column asks each of us, what is your metaphor of poem making? For me, one is a Billy Collins espresso accompanying a Neil Young pen -- swift, at dawn, caffeine conjured, guitar galvanized (either gentle unplugged or the searing hurricane of a crazy horse racing), and even fierce.

And when finished swept away under a tree, like the one Robert Frost describes in "Directive,' to be found later - days, months, years, then changed with those one, two or three vital voicings that make the breaks fly. Which you can't see immediately. No way. Has to be left in the dirt for your boot heels to work over.

And workshops for poem makers? Never for me. It is a singular art. With singular voices. Power packed by individual force.