Musings, Part 1:
Where Poetry Comes From
BY SHARI LAWRENCE PFLEEGER
As poets, each of us has known those buzzy days when we can’t write fast enough. The words fly out of us from some secret bodily chamber, vibrating with who-knows-what, flowing, electrically-charged, to our mouths, ears and fingertips, or blurted out by that inner voice that sometimes scolds, often congratulates, and eventually helps us find the right words at the right time. Sadly, we have also known days when the words just won’t come. They are off on holiday somewhere, immune to our pleadings, too far away to hear our plaints. We feel parched and tired, as if we’ll never again feel fresh and alive. But happily, the promise of re-energized words keeps us going, feeding that need to place words on the page, or electrons on the screen, and then help them to dance, to invent new music, movement and meaning.
Emerson knew this feeling:
“Good poetry could not have been otherwise written than it is. The first time you hear it, it sounds rather as if copied out of some invisible tablet in the Eternal mind than as if arbitrarily composed by the poet. The feeling of all great poets has accorded with this. They found the verse, not made it. The muse brought it to them.”
Ralph Waldo Emerson (Complete Works, Volume 7: Society and Solitude, p. 52)
Of course, our poetic technique involves more than merely waiting for the muse to pay her visit. In this series, I examine how – for me – a poem comes to life, stays alive, and thrives. In subsequent musings, I’ll look at other aspects of poetry: its value, its music, and more.
My muse seems to be summoned in many ways. But sometimes she just shows up, unexpected and unannounced. Often, ideas pop into my head when I’m out in nature: out for a run or bike ride or walking through my neighborhood to see what the flora and fauna have to tell me. Mary Oliver was inspired by nature; she started each day with a walk in the woods: “For me, the door to the woods is the door to the temple.” (Mary Oliver, Upstream)
Words also trigger poetic ideas for me. I’ll wonder about a word’s derivation, or its multiple meanings, and a poetic ballet results, the poem dancing on the word’s etymological underpinnings. Cataract as clouded eye or roaring waterfall? I wove both into a poem about my son’s potential. “Shadow” -- derived from the old English meaning “covering with great wings” – morphed into musing about our need for both darkness and light.
Ideas and relationships suggest metaphors to me. While walking through an Australian wildlife refuge, I thought about the three kinds of mammals there: monotremes, marsupials and placentals. The result? A triptych of poems using the mammals’ differences as metaphors. Carlo Rovelli’s books on loop quantum gravity explain physics’ concepts using unusual metaphors: chain mail, star fish, and more. The result? A series of poems reworking those metaphors into life lessons. And reading about mathematical knot theory resulted in my first Blue House Journal poem, Knot Theory, about my immigrant aunt.
Even poems can trigger ideas for other poems. In reading Elizabeth Bishop’s work, I have been inspired to write similar poems – not just in style, but in substance. Sometimes I’m challenged by poetic forms: I challenged myself to write a heroic crown of sonnets, and the result was my recent book about Yorkshire. Or world events: The 150th anniversary of Lewis Carroll’s Alice Through the Looking Glass led to my “Five Haikus Through the Looking Glass.”
From where do these bolts from the blue come? Emerson tells us that,
“This insight, which expresses itself by what is called Imagination, is a very high sort of seeing, which does not come by study, but by the intellect being where and what it sees, by sharing the path, or circuit of things through forms, and so making them translucid to others.”
(Essays, Series Two: The Poet, https://emersoncentral.com/texts/essays-second-series/the-poet/)
And we open ourselves up to our imaginations by simply relaxing and letting the inspiration happen,
“… by abandonment to the nature of things; …[T]here is a great public power, on which [the poet] can draw, by unlocking, at all risks, his human doors, and suffering the ethereal tides to roll and circulate through him: then he is caught up into the life of the Universe, his speech is thunder, his thought is law, and his words are universally intelligible as the plants and animals. … if in any manner we can stimulate this instinct, new passages are opened for us into nature, the mind flows into and through things hardest and highest, and the metamorphosis is possible.”
Ralph Waldo Emerson (Essays, Series Two: The Poet, https://emersoncentral.com/texts/essays-second-series/the-poet/)
So when you are stuck – when the muse is visiting other poets, when your inkwell is dry and your spirit is flagging – just relax and do a deep dive into something interesting. Think about where a word came from, what it sounds like, how it translates to other languages. Take a stroll through your mind palace to review stored ideas and memories. Sing a song backwards, or create an erasure poem from a news story. Somewhere, you’ll find a seed to plant. Then think of Ralph Waldo Emerson conversing with Hercule Poirot: Abandon yourself to whatever happens next, and go where your “little grey cells” take you.
SHARI LAWRENCE PFLEEGER returned to her long-time passion for poetry after a long career in technology development, research and policy. Her poems reflect both natural and constructed worlds, often describing interactions with family and friends. A Ripon Poetry Festival prize winner, her poems have been published in several literary magazines and in four anthologies of Yorkshire poetry. Her book of Yorkshire sonnets, published in collaboration with photographer Jannett Klinke, was launched in October 2021 at the fourth Ripon Poetry Festival. Shari is a board member for Alice James Books, a place of belonging for poets who inspire change. She lives, writes and rides her bicycle in Washington, D.C.