Notes On Process

       My favorite point of origin is a dream. Like everything in life, dreams come and go; for me, they go more easily than they come. Over the years, I’ve learned to handle them carefully: when I wake up, dream in hand (as it were), the rules are: first, not to move, second, not to swallow—the second more urgent than the first. Something about swallowing wipes the dream away.

       Then—the moment I spend my days preparing for, with clipboard loaded by my bed (to minimize my movements), pen tied to the clip, darkness in the room.

       (An aside about darkness. My mother the photographer taught me about darkness. I spent hours in her darkroom (one word), that space where the images stored on paper magically appeared, susceptible to her every ministration and manipulation. My poetic career took root—and refuge—in that room, and pays homage to it still.)

       My days pay happy service to that moment, that gift, ensuring the transport of delicate cargo over that Lethe, the trip from dream state to waking state—technically the hypnogogic state. That’s where this writer, this poet, takes her stand—lying down! In bed, in the dark, I dredge up ancient skills: the handwriting of a hamfisted child shows up on the page (as pictured to the left), rendering the dream as best it can, wandering, returning, pondering, returning, rooted in rhyme and the exigencies of meter.

       Yes, the exigencies of meter. The motor that makes the engine run, that brings life, verbal life, to the voiceless image. The instrument of translation, like Google Translate only Kate Translate. In goes the image, out comes the poem, engineered by the algorithm, as it were, of meter. The pieces need a structure—an infrastructure they have to fit. What comes in piecemeal has to go out patterned, as the pieces of a jigsaw puzzle are patterned. Each piece itself fits the pattern of, say, male and female forms, upbeats and downbeats, the alternating places other pieces fit into by virtue of their own similar alternations. 

       Here’s where meter appears, meaning in my case iambic pentameter. The Spanish—more authoritarian in these matters—the Spanish speak of arte menor and arte mayor, basically, short lines and long lines, or, in our case, ballads and sonnets, popular forms and elite forms. In sonnets, we have arte mayor, the elite form that has dominated English poetry since Shakespeare. Long ago, after some ten years of writing around meter, the iambic came to dominate me, too, a process I see as the surrendering which art demands. The exigencies of art per se: Francis Thompson’s hound of heaven chasing him down; God; obsession; whatever you call the presence in whose service we can find ourselves—and find ourselves free. 

       Guess what, folks: meter is freedom, or can be. I love rules; once you’ve learned them—no, once you’ve mastered them—you have a crack at freedom. And if you can squeeeeze through the crack, you’re in—what to call it—you’re in nirvana. 

       Surrendered to meter, we essay rhyme. We stop saying it’s too hard in English, a barely inflected language; we stop saying it’s too obvious, too puerile; we take the yoke on ourselves and find it’s light; that is, we surrender. The truest freeman is the willing slave. Ah, we say, no one should be a slave; we need to be free to resist—and its common corollary, we need to resist to be free. But poetry has taught me another lesson: how not to resist is being free.

       The physicists speak of superconductivity, a state of matter where an electric current can run through that matter without resistance. All my tricks, all my twists and turns—clipboard, darkness, meter, rhyme—are an attempt to achieve a similar emotional state, to let images flow without resistance, without judgement. A condition where, in a sense, I have nothing to say: my only job there is to get out of the way, to vacate the room. 

                     God, whose vital spirit

                     visits everywhere,

                     can only come to visit

                     when you are not there. 

       Physicists speak of how the Big Bang might have come out of nothing: nothing is unstable. And so, each morning I write, each morning I surrender, let nothingness be, I can experience Little Bangs: the shape of the poem coming around a corner, a new face opening its eyes and gazing at me. By not being there at all—and only by not being there at all—I can play God. It doesn’t get any better than that. 

       As Dorothy Sayers puts it in “Gaudy Night:”

       “Isn’t the writing of good prose an emotional excitement?”

       “Yes, of course it is. At least, when you get the thing dead right and know        it’s dead right, there’s no excitement like it. It’s marvellous. It makes you feel like God on the Seventh Day—for a bit, anyhow.”

       So I wake with the image and the line. What to do? Where to begin the process of turning the daily, the mundane, into the eternal, the sublime? I take refuge in the community of poets, who, long before me, have woken similarly—in bed, after a war, on the sofa—and learned how to handle images, how to accomplish that translation, that turning. (After all, the word verse itself means “to turn,” as in turning your oxen at the end of a field.) 

       The community of poets is a conversation; civilization itself as a conversation sustained over centuries, that is, outside of time, mundane time, time marked by the moon. A taste of sublime time, sun time, where art lets us play with creation itself, where, in turn, we allow art to play with us, through us, all over us . . .  

       When I turn over to pick up my clipboard, I accomplish wonders: I put my life down, my whole damned life, and join the conversation. 

       Let me unpack this poem a bit. Viewed from a distance—the third person—the speaker stands before her God, her judgement, that is, her writing, that summary of a life writers have the privilege of creating. 

       Imagine a tall, narrow bookcase: a coffin. She views her body of work, that is, her corpse—and meditates on how to release it, bring it to life, resurrect. This is what art is all about, what religion has been about since before the Egyptians. This is her tomb, her pyramid. The poem as near-death experience. 

       Here in her tomb, she can still see, she can still hear—and she hears the corpse cry out: Release me! The body as prisoner, the body of work imprisoned in the pages that, “tidied, bound,” also protect it, in the coffin that keeps the worms out. She starts to understand, to articulate their imprisonment. 

       Ancient herself, she can now see across horizons, sees she’s served time, she’s done her time. It’s her seeks release, the twist in the Mobius strip: her body of work as her. If there’s a crime—if she’s been falsely imprisoned—if the evidence is incomplete—she needs a lawyer, an advocate, someone who, seeing her innocence, her authenticity, can proclaim she speaks the truth, her body of work speaks the truth, deserves to be freed from its prison, its coffin, freed to rise into that heaven we call publication.

       So here you have it, my Rosetta stone. A plea for help in three languages. The heiroglyphics—the sacred speech—of poetry; the demotic script of literary explication; and finally, the Greek, as it were, the direct address of these paired prayers for recognition. 

       By this logic, I seek my Champolions, readers with a passion to decipher an imprisoned body of work and and bring it—blinking, blinded—out into the living light of day.