Welcome everyone to the Poets Pub for a round of Poetics!

This is Dora from Dreams from a Pilgrimage and here we are at the start of 2024. The New Year stretches out before us like a snow-covered field, pristine, a blank page, untouched till we mark it with our footprints, our words.

We all have our particular reasons for writing and our particular styles. And if pressed, we would say we put on our writing personas, employing cadences of language and a way of seeing and thinking that best suits us philosophically, emotionally, at our heart’s core.

In taking a spectator’s approach to writing, Anglo-American Christopher Isherwood wrote in his autobiographical novel:

I am a camera with its shutter open, quite passive, recording, not thinking. Recording the man shaving at the window opposite and the woman in the kimono washing her hair. Some day, all this will have to be developed, carefully printed, fixed.

Christopher Isherwood, Goodbye to Berlin (1939)

Perhaps for some of us we are less a recorder and more the actor, wanting to leave our mark for posterity, to say, as it were, “I was here,” even if our writing is more of a type of journaling. The Czech poet Miroslav Holub writes of a woman on a train to Vienna writing in her diary, “notes about Rome and Naples”:

Ink marks like parthenogenetic aphids,
pages like blood smears
of homing pigeons.
. . .
It is her monument outlasting bronze,
five-dimensional reality, the last engraving
of primeval man on reindeer bone,

the last drop
of the fluid soul
before evaporation.

from Miroslav Holub, “Creative Writing,” translated by Rebekah Bloyd (2008); read the full poem here.

So how did Holub, whom the poet Ted Hughes called “one of the half dozen most important poets writing anywhere” (1988) and whose writing Seamus Heaney described as “a laying bare of things, not so much the skull beneath the skin, more the brain beneath the skull” (source), take on the specter of the blank page? He once told the Paris Review:

My poems … always begin with an idea, an obsessive idea of some sort. … I try to achieve effects of suspense with my long lines and tremendous emphases with my short ones.”

Miroslav Holub (1923-1998), source

We may feel ourselves giving in to the compulsive challenge of the blank page in order to plumb the depths of our being, though not exclusively so, as Seamus Heaney confesses in “Personal Helicon,” marshaling the extended metaphor of various types of wells, deep, shallow, even “fructified,” and others:

Others had echoes, gave back your own call
With a clean new music in it. And one
Was scaresome, for there, out of ferns and tall
Foxgloves, a rat slapped across my reflection.

Now, to pry into roots, to finger slime,
To stare, big-eyed Narcissus, into some spring
Is beneath all adult dignity. I rhyme
To see myself, to set the darkness echoing.

from Seamus Heaney, “Personal Helicon,” Death of a Naturalist, 1966; read the full poem here.

At times we may feel like Emily Dickinson, shunning the blank page, wanting to hear the resounding music of poetry rather than deploying it, but ironically, even that feeling must be written down and expressed:

I would not paint — a picture — (348)

Nor would I be a Poet —
It’s finer — Own the Ear —
Enamored — impotent — content —
The License to revere,
A privilege so awful
What would the Dower be,
Had I the Art to stun myself
With Bolts — of Melody!

Emily Dickinson (1830-1886) (source)

And when we’re all out reasons to tackle the blank page, Pulitzer prize-winning author of The Shipping News (1993), Annie Proulx, offers us one more:

You should write because you love the shape of stories and sentences and the creation of different words on a page.

Paris Review (source)

But let’s be frank: sometimes that blank page looks like a barren desert or an icy field that we tiptoe lightly across or charge fiercely over. Yes, but do we do so timorously like a mouse? Or as an elephant (gliding gracefully on skates of course!)? Or a spider dancing in a parched land trying to make it rain as the old native American myth has it? I speak not in jest. There is something of the animal in us when we write, delving with badger feet or soaring with heron’s wings, that places all our multitudinous reasons and ways of writing in simple perspective.

British poet laureate Carol Ann Duffy describes writing in terms of bees, and Ted Hughes, a fox.

Bees

Here are my bees,
brazen, blurs on paper,
besotted; buzzwords, dancing
their flawless, airy maps.

Been deep, my poet bees,
in the parts of flowers,
in daffodil, thistle, rose, even
the golden lotus; so glide,
gilded, glad, golden, thus –

wise – and know of us:
how your scent pervades
my shadowed, busy heart,
and honey is art.

Carol Ann Duffy from The Bees: Poems (2016) (source)

The Thought Fox

I imagine this midnight moment’s forest:
Something else is alive
Beside the clock’s loneliness
And this blank page where my fingers move.

Through the window I see no star:
Something more near
Though deeper within darkness
Is entering the loneliness:

Cold, delicately as the dark snow
A fox’s nose touches twig, leaf;
Two eyes serve a movement, that now
And again now, and now, and now

Sets neat prints into the snow
Between trees, and warily a lame
Shadow lags by stump and in hollow
Of a body that is bold to come

Across clearings, an eye,
A widening deepening greenness,
Brilliantly, concentratedly,
Coming about its own business

Till, with a sudden sharp hot stink of fox
It enters the dark hole of the head.
The window is starless still; the clock ticks,
The page is printed.

Ted Hughes (1930-1998), The Hawk in the Rain, 1957 (source)

Your challenge for today’s Poetics?

Using Duffy’s and Hughes’ poems as examples, write a poem using any animal of your choice (real or mythological) as a metaphor for how ideas and words take shape for you on a blank page. [Hint: Do we approach the blank page with stealth and craft, or a burst of attack? Hoard ideas like a squirrel her acorns? Drag glyphs onto our laptop screen in exuberant abandon to later edit and score into shape, beaver-like? Capture a stray thought like a . . . Well, you get the picture.]

New to dVerse? Here’s how to join in:

• Write a poem in response to the challenge.
• Enter a link directly to your poem and your name by clicking Mr. Linky below
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• You will find links to other poets and more will join so please do check
  back later in order to read their poems.
• Read and comment on other poets’ work– we all come here to have our poems read.
• Enjoy!