Where The Poems Come From
…a human being confronts a form
that wants to become a work through him.
Not a figment of his soul
but something that appears to the soul
and demands the soul’s creative power.
― Martin Buber, I and Thou
I.
I’ve had roughly 22,000 days in this life, fairly docile, devoted to paying attention, and observing what’s going on around me.
This poem-making process is purely passive: contemplation from a child’s crib, sitting in a classroom, or standing in the breezeway outside of my third grade classroom at Foothill School for acting out, riding in a car as a passenger, driving a car, say from Bend to Berkeley, sitting in an airplane on the tarmac while the pilot files the flight plan, or, lately, quarantined at home, at my desk during a pandemic.
I must be paying attention in a special way. I must be “drinking it all in.”
Perhaps poets, and writers, are gifted with sensory imprint. Maybe writers know intuitively this surveilliance (to watch, strongly) is something we will want to to tap into later.
II.
Seclusion is key.
I need my observations to ferment and distill in isolation. They must become as original as God’s seven days of creation.
“…without form and void” (Gen 1:2) are prerequisites. There are few predicates for a poem, especially a magical one.
III.
And then the dreaming. On balance, there have been 22,000 nights for my body to sleep, and my brain to engage in lyrical warehousing: every single speck of surveillance, sorting and stacking millions of images, sounds, tastes, threats and ironies.
I wrote about this once, in a poem called “The Factory of Sleep.” (see below)
Think about it, your body goes to sleep every night, but your brain does not. Your brain has been awake your entire life.
IV.
And then the soul clocks-in, emerging from unknown depths, without formal identification, without portfolio, barely on the payroll.
Beyond the kleig lights of Ego, the soul takes its place simply at a bare, kitchen table, and then it’s a kitting operation, final assembly like Motorola or Boeing, with language applied.
Words or entire lines, aggregated as components in tiny bins and racks,
awaiting cranes and lifts, welding rigs or soldering.
V.
The poem is complete.
The only thing missing Is adding a blank page, when I wake.
The Factory of Sleep
In sleep we manufacture
memories, deciding which pieces
of the day to keep:
danger, love, kindness.
We extrapolate the what-ifs,
walking further down the road
than we would have dared
in daylight. Forget Morpheus
and tranquility. Upon the pillow
a vast factory pours
liquid ore and sorts the scrap
into bins, begins a new shift;
there’s even a loading dock
with workers in helmets
and goggles, manning forklifts
and pallet jacks. We imagine
our dreams to be cinema,
but they might be the stuff
of assembly lines, of reactors,
chemical vats, and spot welds,
of vast Gulf Coast refineries
with a maze of pipes
and pumping stations, more
industrial than artist studio;
so noisy that we should be
wearing earplugs lest it wake us.
This essay originally appeared in Laying Low (2021). “The Factory of Sleep” was originally publised in Wingspan (2017)
Image by author: Apparation, Project Artaud, San Francisco
