It is really important to me that this blog become more than
about my poems. I’m hoping some of my poet friends will share their work on
this blog, and I want to spend time talking about and reviewing poetry.
Lately I’ve been reading Michael Burkard’s work. He is not
the most famous of American poets—many of us probably know him more for the
autobiographical tidbit that Burkard was Tess Gallagher’s second husband,
before she married Raymond Carver. But Burkard is a very interesting and
original poet who deserves more attention. I’ll spend some time reviewing his
work in a future blog post.
Burkard seems to be connected, to a certain extent, to the
American surrealist movement. The Kenyon Review also pointed out his
connections with the great Swedish poet, Tomas Tranströmer. Recently Burkard
has remarked that he has moved away from revising his work, and feels that
revision has weakened the immediacy and power of some of his work—certainly a
surrealist notion..
Now, I’ve always
been suspicious of poets who say they don’t revise. Elizabeth Bishop used to
claim that “One Art” arrived to her as a completed finished work, but scholars
who have examined her papers have shown that the poem actually received
significant revision between first and final draft. That being said, the flawed
poem (I have a gift for litotes) in Tuesday’s blog was a poem created without
revision.
I’ve always felt
that Frost’s poem was actually a complaint against, if not the capitalist
system, then a complaint against the life choices capitalism forced the poet to
make. When I hear the “promises to keep” line, I think of contracts, and of the
kind of promises one must make and keep in one’s working life.
So the genesis of
Tuesday’s poem was the desire to contrast the image of Frost’s “farmer poet on
a horse” with a more modern scene. In this case I chose a vehicle that no poet
without a trust fund could afford. I had the closing line “miles to go before I
charge,” in my mind from the beginning.
The idea of
stopping to urinate was natural. This allowed me to make explicit the concern I
have that life in late capitalism allows no time to simply stop and reflect—every
move has a purpose, even if the purpose is prosaic. I also wanted to capture the
courseness of today’s culture, and contrast that with the gentility of New
England we often associate with Frost.
After that, rhyme
scheme and form drove most of my work choices. The little shake of the horse’s
head in Frost’s poem, brought me to the shaking activity associated with
urination. However, when it came time for me to choose a word for penis,
everything sounded overly vulgar, or overly euphemistic. So instead I used the
reference to the classic SNL skit, which had a Christmas theme which I felt
linked well with the poem.
Finally, I want
to comment on the phrase “musky barge.” No, there aren’t many words that rhyme
with “charge,” but the Tesla is quite bargelike in comparison to other electric
cars, and I loved the allusion to Tesla founder Elon Musk.
Failed poem or
not, it taught me something about my own writing processes.
So I wonder, how
much does form drive your poetry, and how much does inspiration drive form?
