I don’t know why it happens, or how—just that it does. Maybe it’s a left-over from my poet laureate days when I wrote ‘occasional poems’ (otherwise known as ‘poems -to-order’—you know, the kind they told me I’d never have to do?) Give me an occasion or event, and I’m there with a poem, fresh off the laptop. I have poems for everything from birthdays to new houses, from weddings to funerals, from high school dedications to adoption days, from Thanksgiving to Christmas, and everything in between. Maybe I should pack it all in and write greeting cards for people who can’t find the words. It seems I am good at that. Back to the question: what and why and how. I don’t know. Maybe it’s magic. People read what I write and understand. And are sometimes moved.
Those same people have asked how I write; how I think up my metaphors; how I choose words; how I sit down with a blank sheet of paper and put it all together. There is no true answer here. It happens. But when I think about it, it’s a little like music. I recently saw the play “Amadeus” and, if you look at the play as a meditation on creativity, you realize that Mozart’s genius was a gift. One that baffled and angered Salieri. Mozart wasn’t a person to be admired; he didn’t deserve it, but--through no fault of his own-- he had the gift. He could hear music in his head and record it on paper or perform it on the piano. Ask him how the magic worked? He couldn’t tell you. It was either right--or not.
To a far lesser degree, that’s what poetry is for me. I’ve always been a good speller—not because I studied, but because I just knew. A word looked right, or it didn’t. In poetry, the words sound right, or they don’t. If they don’t, I have to change them around until they do. That is emphatically not a teachable skill. Particularly if you subscribe to the idea of free verse. You can force a rhyme, but it’s not going to sound right. Better to make up a word that fits, a la Ogden Nash, than to cram three syllables into a two-syllable space just to make it rhyme. How can that be explained to someone who doesn’t hear the discordant ‘CLANG!’ that produces? How do you acquire an ear for poetry, or an eye for art, or a feel for people’s emotions? If you listen to music, if you study art, if you read and recite poetry, you can appreciate it, you can approximate it, but you can’t quite get inside it, inside the seemingly effortless bubble that appears to exist around the born-to-it musician, artist, writer, or poet. Magic.
Sculptors can see the object in a block of stone. Mozart heard instinctively where the notes should be. An artist can visualize the lines and light and shadows in a composition. A poet can see, and hear, and feel the texture and emotion of the words, and arrange them for maximum effect. And can tell when they are right--or not. You can tell that a poem is good if you feel it, if it pulls an emotion out of you, or wakens an echo somewhere inside. I recite things in the car; I talk them through with myself; I read aloud and rearrange the lines on the page--sometimes months after I write them. Sometimes I throw things out.
I just received an email from a friend who had sent one of my poems to a friend whose husband had just died. She said her friend asked her to read it at the funeral service, and she wanted my permission to do so. Of course. Of course. Betsy doesn’t email; Betsy doesn’t text. Where she got my poem, I have no idea. Maybe she’s a secret Facebook stalker. But for this poem, she emailed me. It touched her and she passed it along to her friend. Another piece of magic.
And here I am, three thousand miles away, totally flummoxed. I wrote a poem about a friend who had passed on months ago, and somehow arranged my imperfect words in a pattern that spoke to someone I’ve never met. I put words on paper and they say an inexplicable something that offers some version of comfort to a stranger.
If that’s not magic, I’m not sure what is.
