Exploring
Literature
Tim
Bellows
Five
Golden Bells of Making Poems
Dear
Todd,
What makes a poem ring out in the ear, in the memory? The “rules”
aren’t complex at all. I wanted to send along a few thoughts
on what makes poetry happen.
In the poem—as it unfolds itself—we might stay close to
these four
suggestions and say . . .
*things
not possible in the material dimension—as in Jorge Luis
Borges’ “The Suicide”:
Tonight
there won’t be a star left.
Night won’t be left.
I shall die, and with me
The whole intolerable universe.
Can
it be that the physical universe will die when one man dies? Not
really. But there’s a strange sense in which it is true. Borges
is
writing in extremes to make a point about his odd view of death as
the end of consciousness.
*shockingly
contradictory things—perhaps reversing our thought
suddenly or putting two things together that don’t quite go together.
Check out Neruda’s words: “like the pines and like the masts
. . . .” And Amy Newman uses “blood and bone / and wish.”
When we link what’s not normally linked, we create a freshness
in the texture and expand meaning into the surprise for heart and
soul.
*screamingly
concrete phrases such as Rita Dove’s:
The
general
pulls on his boots, he stomps to
her room in the palace, the one without
curtains, and one with a parrot
in a brass ring.
Such
word-arrangements make the essence of great poetry. We’re located
in the actual world by Dove’s specifics, by physical detail:
we have particular kinds of motion (pulling and stomping) and a particular
room (it’s “without / curtains”), and the parrot there
is exactly located “in a brass ring”).
*words that make singing sounds—not just talking sounds. Here’s
a
segment of my “A Boy to his Girl (in Front of her Front Door)”
(Interim,
1990):
I
stumble just
standing in front of you.
Your
blond colors,
long woven rope
like
the meat of a living tree.
Your eyes, gray ocean lights.
It’s not hard to see, that is to hear, that I used words with
sounds in
common: stumble, just, and front . . . Your and colors . . . woven
and rope . . . meat and tree . . . eyes and lights. . . .
This is a fairly subtle use of sound; it’s almost offhand—no
heavy rhyme pattern. Yet the singing is there, almost accidentally
discovered in the writing.
Finally, what magical “glue” draws all these elements together?
The
word-maker must be drenched in what mystic poet Rumi calls “infinite
Love, / without which the world does not evolve.” He talks about
an “urgency / of every love that wants to come to perfection.”
And Isadora Duncan, the ground-breaking American dancer, takes it
a step further with “Art is not necessary at all. All that is
necessary to make this world a better place to live in is to love—to
love as Christ loved, as Buddha loved.”
If we send poems—to friends, to magazines, to urselves—drenched
in love, then we’re doing “All that is necessary. . . .”
To me, joy,
enthusiasm, passion, sincerity, and playfulness amount to this “All”—so
don’t analyze too much; as Ian McEwan says, “[E]nter a state
of controlled passivity . . . relax your grip.”
Yes, relax, be receptive to what the universe wants to lightening
through your poem. It may demand that you break all my small rules.
Be ready.
Well, there’s my rant for the day on poets’ craft. Share
with your students?
With
goodwill,
Tim
Copyright
© 2001 Tim
Bellows
All Rights Reserved