Essays

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The front of the classroom was where I first got interested in the notion of travel as a point of insertion in discussions of poetry. Students found it less intimidating to observe the various moves a poem makes as it journeys from its opening to its close than to reduce the poem to a thematic paraphrase, the kind that allows us to throw away the poem itself and get on with the rest of our lives. To view a poem as a journey brings us closer to the way the poet experienced the poem as it was composed, that is, as a series of maneuvers, the zigging and zagging of the poem’s progress, its tacking into the wind of an uncooperative diction to get where it must go. The poem is not a code of meaning, but a navigation from the gambit of its opening lines to the destination that was unknown but there all along. It is typical for contemporary poets to say that they don’t know where they are going when they begin a poem. The claim rests on the belief in spontaneity, as if anything were purely possible in the act of composing. But the consensus is that knowing where the poem is headed amounts to a degree of calculation that, given the romance of the immediate, dooms the effort to failure. The poet should begin by not knowing much, and he or she will profit, in the phrasing of William Matthews, by maintaining the benefits of their ignorance for as long as possible. Foreknowledge eliminates the possibility of surprise. As Robert Frost said, no surprise for the writer, no surprise for the reader. An interesting question is how a poet can plan for surprise. You can’t cover your eyes with your hands and then ask, “Guess who?” William Butler Yeats recognizes the vital importance of a sense of travel and surprise in poetry when he distinguishes between poems written by the will and poems written by the imagination. In a poem written by the will, the poet knows where he is going and flaunts his determination to get there. Here is an example of the approach—chosen almost at random by flipping through an anthology—called “Long Island Sound,” written by Emma Lazarus, the poet who put the famous inscription on the Statue of Liberty:

I see it as it looked one afternoon In August,—by a fresh soft breeze o’erblown. The swiftness of the tide, the light thereon, A far-off sail, white as a crescent moon. The shining waters with pale currents strewn, The quiet fishing smacks, the Eastern cove, The semicircle of its dark, green grove. The luminous grasses, and the merry sun In the grave sky; the sparkle far and wide, Laughter of unseen children, cheerful chirp Of crickets, and low lisp of rippling tide, Light summer clouds fantastical as sleep Changing unnoted while I gazed thereon. All these fair sounds and sights I made my own.

You have heard of the man who mistook his wife for a hat? This poet has mistaken a body of water for a Christmas tree. Take all the nouns from the poem—breeze, tide, sail, moon, waters, currents, cove, sun, sky, children, crickets, cloud (which is kind of an impressionistic poem in itself)—and line them up on one side of the page; then take all the modifiers—fresh, soft, far-off, shining, pale, quiet, luminous, merry, cheerful—and line them up on the opposite side of the page. You have the makings of a good gang war, a rumble, the Sharks and the Jets, the Crips and the Bloods, the Adjectives and the Nouns. The smart money is on the Nouns.

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