Poetry’s Surprise | Sandy Weisman
I like surprises. Like my first-born baby. I had no idea what he would look like! No amount of preparation—the hoping, worrying, and a few vague images—compares to the birth day!
Writing poetry has a good surprise quotient as well, a bit like a birth. Something never seen before. Having too much certainty about the subject of my poem can sap the Aha! that happens when I realize what I’m really writing about.
No one explains it better than poet Mark Doty, through his essay “Souls on Ice”(on line), and accompanying poem A Display of Mackerel. Doty starts with a lot of descriptive language to get into the apparent subject of the poem—in this case, a display of mackerel at the grocery story that knocked him over. But it’s his questioning, his comparing, and his ‘as if’s’ that open up what he calls the subject beneath the subject. Requiring more and more writing!
During a workshop at Maine Media College this past summer, Doty gave us a list of ways to get underneath what inspired us, to discover why it inspired us. His advice: don’t settle for your first or second draft as a done deal. Extend that description, expand the analogies, change your tenses, contradict yourself. Insert a line like “It’s kind of like ….” All in the service of getting to the surprise that will come when you realize that the poem you began was just a little prelude to the meat of the matter.
A number of friends know that I’ve been inspired by geologic Deep Time this past year. Our human brains have a hard time thinking about the millions and billions of years spent becoming the planet we know as Earth. In a poem, “Since the Paleozoic”, I wrote:
Imagine yourself a mineral – gypsum or nickel
or cobalt – riding in the ocean lapping over edges
of Earth’s crust, dragged back out by tides, returning again
over and over and over.
This is your life.
Then, water cools or evaporates.
Maybe you’ve put on weight – who knows exactly? –
now you’re falling, falling until you hit the ocean’s floor below.
Slowly, slowly, in perhaps a million years you will lithify
as sandstone, await your future as mountain or canyon or
just a rock in someone’s palm.
When I read Mark Doty’s poems, I see how far I must go to make this poem lift off! To really find the subject beneath the subject. It’s exciting, the possibilities each poem holds for both the poet and the reader. I’m working on it!
Sandy Weisman is both visual artist and poet. She owns 26 Split Rock Cove, a privately-owned artist community of studios, artist living space, and workshops overlooking Mussel Ridge Channel in S. Thomaston, ME.
