"Free Play" in Poetry

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"Free Play" in Poetry Daniel Brown (bio) A good poet once told me that when he sits down to write, he has nothing in mind (unless you count the knowledge that he's sitting down to write). If he's lucky, some words will emerge from this void. If he's doubly lucky, a subject will emerge from these words. If he's lucky cubed, he'll find the subject worth pursuing—at which point he'll have an incipient poem on, and in, his hands. If we're to take Robert Frost at his word (something one does at one's own risk), he too came to his writing desk—a lapboard, actually—with nothing in mind. A poem began as he said in a letter of 1916 to Louis Untermeyer, with only "a lump in the throat; a homesickness or a love sickness." In an achieved poem, "an emotion has found its thought and the thought has found words." This might seem an unlikely account of how Frost actually got a poem going. When he started to write a certain well-known poem, did he really have a lump in his throat but not a birch in his head? In his 1939 essay "The Figure a Poem Makes," he in fact says something quite different about his poems' inceptions: that they begin with his "remembering something I didn't know I knew." They begin, that is to say, not with an emotion, as quoted in the first account, but with what comes after an emotion: a thought. So Frost was amenable, on some days anyway, to a poet's knowing something about a poem's content before he begins it. But he was adamant about what a poet shouldn't know in advance: how his poem was going to end. It was, as he said in "The Figure . . .," but "a trick poem and no poem at all if the best of it was thought of first and saved for the [End Page 304] last." A poem, rather, "must be a revelation, or a series of revelations, as much for the poet as for the reader." The idea that a poet should learn where his poem is going in the course of its getting there is a commonplace (if not a shibboleth) these days. The idea is often stated as such, as in the familiar writing workshop injunction to "let the poem tell you where it wants to go." Sometimes it's given a personal twist, as in James Merrill's saying he found it too boring to know a poem's destination ahead of time. Sometimes it's couched as a recommendation that the writer of a poem be passively, even Zen-ishly, receptive to impressions and inspirations as he or she goes along. Sometimes the idea is set within a larger theory of poetic creation, as in Richard Hugo's "Triggering Town" concept, with its dictum that "Your words . . . will generate your meanings." However it's presented, the idea is that a poem's path shouldn't be "thought of first," but should find its way in making its way. I hasten to say that I have no problem with this idea: how could I, given the many fine poems that have been written in accordance with it. But I don't think the idea is inviolable as a guide to a poem's creation. I think fine poems can be written even—maybe even especially—when something of their progress is known in advance. This view wouldn't seem to be widely held. In fact, when I try to think of poets I can cite in support of it, only two come to mind, though they're both worth attending to. One of them, Philip Larkin, said that if he didn't know the ending of a poem a third of the way into his writing of it, he'd toss the poem as a lost cause. My second witness would be seen by most as even more authoritative than Larkin, though what can be placed into evidence is not his testimony—he has nothing to say, pro or con, about knowing a poem's path...