What the Poet Knows
Walking along Market Street in San Francisco early one morning, to catch a #38 Geary Bus to work, I discovered the cover image and a book title. It was almost biblical, a voice in the wilderness, a road to Damascus conversion (Acts 9).
The image and phrasing was electric, the way it rose from the ground, grabbed me by the collar and shook me. Or maybe snake-bit describes it. I saw the metal utility grate, street-worn and smudge-stained, and I knew I had that ineffable thing before me: Transit Power.
Thousands, if not millions, of San Franciscans (plus commuters like me, and tourists) have walked over that metal grate on that sidewalk (there’s one or two every block along the MUNI transit lines), and yet I‘m probably the only one to do something about it.
On a practical, municipal level, the “Transit Power” grate is a sign for those repairing electric trolley lines, which you might recognize by the overhead crackling of twin posts that trail a MUNI bus like reverse antennae.
For the poet, “Transit Power” is allegory, imbued like the biblical Armageddon (End Times) or Gehenna (Hades).
“Transit Power” represents the metaphorical energy source that keeps all things moving or in creative formulation. In a word, God, or my God, at least.
How did T.S. Eliot come up with a J. Alfred Prufrock? Why was Robert Frost the first one to discover and articulate the idea of The Road Not Taken? What did Ezra Pound see in the Metro Station in Paris that had eluded many others who saw exactly the same scene:
The apparition of these faces in the crowd:
Petals on a wet, black bough.
There’s a Writer myth of a lonely scribe, suffering, tormented and isolated in a spare room, staring at a blank page, waiting on a Muse or inspiration. I’m not buying it.
My poet’s labor (if any), is about paying attention to everything and then somehow linking those observations to words and phrases in my head, connecting what I see to an interior and personal language.
I’m not doing that in isolation. I’m away from my desk at home in Berkeley, walking down Market Street in San Francisco, driving south on highway 101 between Salinas and Soledad, in Steinbeck country, or hiking in the Sierra Buttes above Downieville.
Is this what is meant by talent? Is this a gift?
There is some talent involved in writing, but most that comes from writing, at least once a day, year over year, for decades
Writing is not a gift.
We all write. Everyone knows how to write things down.
This is different. I’m grateful that it has found me and claimed me.
Jon Obermeyer published Transit Power, his 12th collection of poetry, in 2022.
