Essay: The Making of a Poem

In my mid-sixties, I’ve arrived at the conclusion that my best writing is not about having a talent for it. Talent is secondary. My best work comes about from paying attention to the world around me.

And not only paying attention, but there’s something to do with how I store what I observe, and how I retrieve it onto the page. The poem you’ll read below, a meditation on the letter S, was written an hour ago, and it’s first draft, verbatim from how it came out of my head.

I will most likely change very little about this poem. I may alter a word or two, but I’ll let it sit in a Google Word folder, until I put together my next poetry collection.

It astonishes me that nearly-finished writing comes this easily, but does it?

I’m visiting a college buddy who lives on a quiet, dead-end street in Cincinnati. He’s off teaching high school this morning, and I have the house to myself, in what we jokingly call “writer in residence,” an informal Yaddo near the Ohio River, a ten-minute drive from the Red’s baseball stadium and Findlay Market.

It’s cold outside this morning, 31 degrees. I’ve had my coffee (Lavazza, ground from beans an hour earlier). I watched a mindless half hour from a Midsomer Murders rerun on Brit Box. Next, I drifted from the television to Facebook, where my friend Peter posted about the December 12th anniversary of the 1901 Guglielmo Marconi wireless event, the first transmission of a wireless signal across the Atlantic Ocean.

Boom! (a minor sonic boom heard in the Writer District in the brain)

That’s my starting point, those three dots invisibly crossing the ocean, the opening salvo of our modern era.

Yet it’s not the technology that intrigues me, it’s the letter thatMarconi chose, the letter S.

I now have my first three lines, my subject and my title, and I know instantly that I have a poem on the line, like it’s a trout on my lure.

I move onto some informal research on the origins of the letter S (similar to research I’d conducted earlier in the year with the letter D for an entire collection of poetry). The poem follows the chronology of what jumps out at me as important, bringing in the Phoenicians, and those two wonderful words sibilant and palatalized.

It took me back to a linguistics course I took in college, reflecting my love of language.

This reinforces the title and the poem’s subject, my personal meditation on a letter of the alphabet that we use frequently.

I began thinking of words that I like that use the letter S: essence, substance, sensational.

This is where the poem is fun, and the trout on the line is leaping above the water, in all its glory. This where the writing is playful, and there’s amusement with everything before me that I can manipulate using the short lines of a poem, the distillation.

I begin thinking about the importance of the letter S, versus its place in the alphabet, in 19th position. The letter S doesn’t surface early; you have to wait for it.

And now for the big finish, the final three lines, my homage to the letter S as a “constant consonant” (using alliteration), and then considering the coiled shape of the letter, which is also an allusion to the Garden of Eden.

The day before I’d read an essay about the importance of silence and listening in Native American cultures, in contrast to the constant verbalization and blathering of Europeans who helped remove Native voices from this Continent. The word “silence” literally begins with the letter S, with the double meaning of starting and initiating.

We don’t know silence without the letter S.

It’s a simple, declarative phrase to end this fifteen-line, sixty-word poem, where the letter S is used thirty-six times.

The Letter S

Marconi’s three dots,
Cornwall to Newfoundland,
following the curve of the earth,
simple and historic ellipsis…
Started by the Phoenicians
as voiceless sibilant,
sometimes palatalized,
the essence of hiss,
substance of soul and guess,
a sensational reminiscence.
I wait for you to surface,
19th on the list, constant
consonant of all saying
in a serpent’s shape,
silence begins with you.