I see a relationship between impressionism, some kinds of abstract paintings, and the poetry I want to write—of just suggesting something. Giving only enough information/detail to set the readers’ imagination working. I don’t want everything spelled out. I want mystery in my poems (and my prose)—new worlds.
Here’s an example:
Big Lucks
She told me to
surrender but
I didn’t know
what the word meant
I found a bird
with a knot
in its chest
that I tried to
undo but a kite
ran away
with me I
thought a monster
would save
me One jogged
past named Mary
She had mustard
written across
her chest and the
moon dropped a boy
into a bag
It seemed better
than giving birth
in a zoo All
that junk lying
around in a
subway Some janitor
got ambitious
and threw the cat
into the box
I now am holding
I love this Rothko quote: “Mark Rothko, painting his stripes in Greece, was asked: ‘Why don’t you paint our temples.’ He replied: ‘Everything I paint is a temple.’”
I’d like to think that everything I write is one. There seems some evidence for the idea that we are changed by the things we create—actually shaped by them. Ralph Ellison shares this idea. He says the novels we write create us as much as we create them. When I’m working on a novel, I feel as if the characters I’m interacting with have as much influence on me as people I’m involved with in the outer world. So I share Ellison take on the way our narratives are shaping us as we shape them.
Recently, my husband and I got into a discussion of poetry and our different approaches to it, his training being in new criticism, mine in more contemporary work. He recognizes that I’m onto something Melville was alluding to in Moby Dick—the gap between language and what it tries to depict…how language organizes and creates our way of seeing.
After this conversation, we looked at some poems I’d written recently, and he was reading them differently. This time he was able to grasp what I was doing. We talked of how our training can shut us down, put blinders on us. He said, “Joseph Brodsky believes language has a life outside of us and uses the writer.”
I agree. I think it’s true that in the beginning was the word. Language is absolutely mysterious in its relationship to humans and the things it touches.
