Answers to Unasked Questions

T. ALAN BROUGHTON

I have been writing poems for almost forty-five years, but every time I sit down in front of a blank page to begin a new poem, I am baffled and anxious. I only vaguely recall writing the last poem and how I began it. If I have just been reading the work of a poet I admire, I am embarrassed to think that I would have the nerve even to try to make a poem. I can glance at the five books of my own poems on the shelf nearby, but that does no good. I only wonder how I got away with it.
     But if I find a word or two, a phrase, maybe a hesitant line, something takes over-a necessity calming all concerns of the superficial area of the mind that worries about itself and its relationship to others. Suddenly nothing matters but the strange territory I've begun to explore which will reveal its landscape to me over the hours, often months, ahead. But I will come out again, clutching the map that is a poem-never to be more than a schematic rendering of an experience too rich for words to convey-and I will know again that I have been permitted to go beyond the confines of a very narrow, daily self into some area shared by all of us. If I'm lucky I will bring back enough of that common experience tinted by my own peculiarities to make the map an appealing point of entry for others who might want to take my journey accompanied by corresponding feelings gathered from their own lives.
     One of the best ways I have found to allay my anxieties and reassure myself that poems can be written is to read what other poets have said about writing. Often they articulate matters I have known for some time but have not been able to express, and at other times, like older and wiser brothers and sisters helping a sibling through perils they have already experienced, they give me the courage to proceed. Recently, after a long period of time in which I served as a very busy administrator and had too little space in any day to do the kind of writing I need in order to know I am a writer, I began rereading the poetry and prose of Edwin Muir (1887-1959). There are a number of his poems that have always been important to me-"The Horses," "The Brothers," most of the poems in One Foot in Eden. But I had also read and been moved by An Autobiography, a book that is passionately reticent, both a just and exact rendering of a life and a presentation of a voice that earns trust and admiration. In it I found a brief paragraph that took me back to all I seemed to have forgotten in the foggy atmosphere of bureaucratic and private concerns.
     Muir is explaining how a poem, "Ballad of Hector in Hades," came to be written many years after an event from his childhood but expressed in terms that would seem to have nothing to do with the event itself. The ballad describes Achilles chasing Hector around Troy and is written in the voice of Hector who has returned after his death to "run the deadly race over again." Muir saw in the poem his own feelings of shame and eventual relief coming from a childhood chase and squabble with a schoolmate named Freddie Sinclair. Of course, neither Freddie nor Edwin are in the poem, but as Muir says of the literal event: "almost thirty years afterwards I was so ashamed of that moment of panic that I did not dare to speak of it to anyone, and drove it out of my mind. . . . On that summer afternoon {my fears} took the shape of Freddie Sinclair, and turned him into a terrifying figure of vengeance" (Muir 42). In the poem Hector is about to be caught again by Achilles, but for Hector the end, after the terror of the chase, is release: "Two shadows racing on the grass, / Silent and so near, / Until his shadow falls on mine. / And I am rid of fear." Similarly, Muir must have found release in the making of the poem and turning his shame into words and understanding. Here is what he says the experience of writing the poem came to mean to him:
     
     I wrote the poem down, almost complete, at one sitting. But I have wondered since whether that intense concentration on little things, seen for a moment as the fugitive fled past them, may not be a deeper memory of that day preserved in a part of my mind which I cannot tap for ordinary purposes. In any case the poem cleared my conscience. I saw that my shame was a fantastically elongated shadow of a childish moment, imperfectly remembered; an untapped part of my mind supplied what my conscious recollection left out, and I could at last see the incident whole by seeing it as happening, on a great and tragic scale, to someone else. After I had written the poem the flight itself was changed, and with that my feelings towards it. A psychologist would say that this was because I had suppressed my knowledge of my cowardice, and that it could trouble me only so long as I suppressed it. That may be so, but what it was that made me stop suppressing it is another question. I think there must be a mind within our minds which cannot rest until it has worked out, even against our conscious will, the unresolved questions of our past; it brings up these questions when our will is least watchful, in sleep or in moments of intense contemplation. My feeling about the Achilles and Hector poem is not of a suppression suddenly removed, but rather of something which had worked itself out. Such events happen again and again in everyone's life; they may happen in dreams; they always happen unexpectedly, surprising us if we are conscious of them at the time. It is an experience as definite as conviction of sin; it is like a warning from a part of us which we have ignored, and at the same time like an answer to a question which we had not asked, or an unsolicited act of help where no help was known to be. These solutions of the past projected into the present deliberately announced as if they were a sibylline declaration that life has a meaning, impress me more deeply than any other kind of experience with the conviction that life does have a meaning quite apart from the thousand meanings which the conscious mind attributes to it: an unexpected and yet incontestable meaning which runs in the teeth of ordinary experience, perfectly coherent, yet depending on a different system of connected relations from that by which we consciously live. (43-44)
     
     There are certain phrases here which I find intensely suggestive, revealing a great deal both about how a poem works and how a poet goes about making it work.
     
     1. "Intense concentration on little things." It is in the concrete and vivid detail that poems live and through which they convey emotions and make their ideas vivid. As in our dreams, the poem is located in the things of this world, no matter how altered. In those seemingly small but active details (the facts of memory), a poet can find the poem, and it is through them that the reader will be able to enter and experience the vision of the poem.
     2. "Part of my mind which I cannot tap for ordinary purposes." The poet remembers but cannot make himself remember what he has not consciously remembered. The detail is there, recorded and waiting for the need to be released. Likely as not, the poet does not consciously know that what he has chosen will release those details, and only afterwards will the connection between a fleeing Hector and a terrified young boy become apparent. What poets learn to do, and why they learn to structure great gaps of empty but uninterrupted spaces into their daily lives for 'writing,' is to be available for those releases, hoping to find some key to open the cell door. That is why most of the writers I know trust the phrase, the glimpse of a scene, a scrap of memory located in any of the senses, that catch his or her attention but seem to have no reason for doing so. Getting it down, then finding some silent time to follow as the hint opens out is essential.
     3. "Seeing it as happening to someone else." Even when we write in the first person, we are inventing that person as we go. The use of 'I' once it is a word on the page is not far from 'he' or 'she.' This, of course, is even more so when the person is given the name Hector or Molly Bloom. The scale changes. That 'I' is only thinly covered by our personal skin. Under it is the vast and rich ocean of 'we,' the species and all its experience.
     4. "Something which had worked itself out." Often I question why, in a time when I write novels no one wishes to publish and there are so many fine poets writing that the best quarterlies can publish only 3% of whatever is submitted to them, do I keep writing. But it is not as vexing a question as it seems. How else would I know who I am, or more importantly, what it is to be a human being? My quirk is that I must learn these things through words. Others have equally valid ways that waste less paper. But again and again what brings me joy is not so much the satisfactory completion of a work of art (rarely does it ever seem finished or satisfactory and 'art' is a word that can make me jumpy), but that click of realization when something that has been long carried in my mind has worked itself out, completed its own journey by using whatever words I have been able to provide. This is why one must never believe that where the poem began is where it should finish. The beginning is usually only a suggestion of the poem that wants to work its way into light.
     5. "An answer to a question which we had not asked." I can think of no better definition of a poem, both for the poet and the reader.
     6. "Depending on a different system of connected relations." For the poet, those connected relations are metaphors, the unexpected juxtapositions not just of images, but also of ideas, experiences, emotions, rhythms, sounds, all that make up the craft of a poem and of our lives. All of us are making those connections all the time, second by second, although in our waking and conscious minds, we cannot pay attention to all of them or we would drown in inattention to matters like crossing the road safely, being present and civilized in the varied company we keep, making sure that we arrive once more in shape to lie down on bed or bench and let our dreams sort it all out. Some of us wake and sit down to let this happen also in poems.
     
     I am indebted to Muir for his discussion of writing in that paragraph. I was reading his poetry and prose at a time when my relationship to my own writing was becoming unfocussed, and not just because I was Chair of a large department. I had not stopped writing. I never do. In that sense I have never had 'writer's block.' Is the problem for me that I continue to write when I shouldn't, and like marathoners who talk about 'junk miles' when they are merely lifting their legs and not accomplishing anything toward conditioning or practice, I might as well not be writing at all? A certain numbness surrounds the words-I do not hear their sounds and rhythms acutely, I choose the wrong words for the emotions I wish to convey, and I suddenly do not dare even to look at past work for fear that I will see it all as inert and worthless. So I continue to write, becoming more and more a puppet on the cold hand of habit. This had happened to me more than once, but never as severely as during a period shortly after my father's death.
     He was born in 1900 and died at the age of ninety-three. I had written about him often over the years, both directly and indirectly through the various figures of fathers or depictions of fatherhoods in poems and stories. Some of the poems, especially as he aged and I anticipated, with dread, his death, were poems that already mourned him, even if some of them were about the failures of our relationship as much as they were about its successes. I think he understood that all of them were gestures of love in its various forms, although he rarely discussed my work with me even though I sent him almost everything I published. He was a meticulous and brilliant scholar, and I suspect he often shook his head in disbelief at how crazily I could bend facts in order to attempt to create what Picasso calls the 'lies that tell the truth.'
     When he died I think I expected myself to write some moving, extended song of mourning and praise. Certainly I had enough practice at it over the years, and nothing would have pleased me more than to make something worthy of him. What was it all for, the years spent reading, practicing, learning my craft if I couldn't do it? Some writers demand an epic of themselves and spend years preparing for the attempt. I felt as if I'd spent my life since birth preparing for this one poem, but instead I was doing the same old things-elegies about this or that, novels about persons I didn't know until words turned them into characters.
     Two things helped release me. The first was words from my father himself. In his late eighties he had written an autobiography, typing it out laboriously during his summers in our cabin in the Adirondacks, pecking away at an ancient Remington electric typewriter with letters so worn that a's and o's and e's were nearly indistinguishable. I had read it in a photocopy he gave me shortly before he died, a very cursory reading that was frustrated by the difficulties of deciphering. After he died and when my own writing was flagging, I decided one tribute I could perform would be to type the manuscript onto a disk and try to see if it might be published, or at least I could distribute it in legible copy to his friends and our relatives. Suddenly I was paying close attention, not only facing the responsibility of interpreting the typography correctly but dealing with the shock of hearing his own voice in the phrases. Some of them were stories I had heard, some I had heard but paid no attention to, many were aspects of his professional life that he had not burdened me with but which fascinated me now that I was far advanced into my own career in teaching and writing. But somehow the two of us were also passing beyond grief into an acknowledgment of a very long and fortunate life, a celebration even in its moments of pain and frustration. His life and my life in its attachment to his were becoming objectified, if that word can be purged of its colder meanings that might imply indifference. Above all, the work was releasing my imagination, as if having to imagine into his existence through written words removed the dull and leaden wall that his death had placed between myself and the capacity to imagine into and beyond myself.
     Secondly, I was reading Muir. His poem "The Brothers" seemed to transfer itself into my own situation, although certainly the details of family attachments that it depicts were different. Then I came across the paragraph quoted above, and for a few days I would pick it up, read it, think about it, then put it away-only to return with a few more instances from my own past experience echoing what he had to say.
      I cannot find a rational way to explain how those two events came together-the typing of my father's manuscript that became anything but a mechanical process, the reading of Muir that developed into a conversation with someone I wish I could have known as friend and mentor. But when I had finished the typing, I put both it and Muir aside and returned to writing. I began by trying to revise some recent work but shelved it recognizing immediately that it was not working and I had no interest in making it work. I tried a few tentative poems based on jottings I had made in the past months, something that often works for me even if I cannot recall what the strange notation really was about-the phrase or image or suggestion seems to have an energy of its own. In the writing of one poem, before I began putting words on the page, I found myself asking questions. I had no idea to whom the questions were addressed at first. But I began to recognize details from my father's life that I had been reading. I knew I was talking to him then, and I could begin writing. I wrote a few versions of the poem, have revised it often, am putting it aside for a while longer realizing that if I ever include it in a book, I will certainly revise it further.
     It is not the poem that I had been demanding I write for my father. What I think I have come to understand is that over the years I have already written it-piecemeal, if you will, so that this poem is only another in a sequence that probably will end only when I do. But what a weight that lifted from me. Some time in the next few years I will take phrases and moments from his autobiography and will write a sequence of poems that will weave my own words with his-a wreath for both of us and for the intersections of our lives. That will be hard and full of its own reluctances, but I already feel the energy gathering for it. I could wish that I had the talent of a Muir or any of the extraordinary writers I read and teach, but I do take pleasure in knowing that we share a dedication to the art of poetry, and that their words in poems and essays are a refuge of advice and solace. They remind me that the best poems are ones that indicate they have come to us out of their own necessity, that they have (no matter what their tone) an urgency because they come from those areas of the mind and its experience that know best. We cannot 'make' them happen, but we can learn to be open to them, and this means that writing, ironically, must become a habit, a routine in which we make the time to sit and let the unhabitual and often disturbing aspects of life rise up into words. No doubt this partially explains why so many writers resist writing, even dread it, until the actual writing begins. But when the poem is working well it is answering questions we had not asked, often because we had not dared to.