Writing on Demand

Sometimes I’m offered a “project,” an assignment, which I accept. I admit my collusion. But something feels amiss from the beginning. The word “project” for one. My soul has an ambiguous relationship with projects. I like them because they give me something to start with. I can think of it as an assignment in English class. I used to love essay assignments. They would bring out the competitiveness in me. I would start out to write the best damn essay on earth. Sometimes I’d write a really good one and the teacher would hold it up to the class and tell them why it was good. I would sit there and pretend to be embarrassed. That’s the up-side of assignments.The downside is more subtle. There’s the potential audience lurking, waiting for their poem. The air shifts around the desk, blowing one way or the other. The still air of not-knowing has been disturbed. I am uneasy, self-conscious. Pity the poet who’s been asked to write an inaugural poem. Which is one of the reasons why they’re seldom any good.  Which is also why performance poetry makes me nervous. Sometimes performance poems are great fun, sometimes there’s a good one, a really good one. But on the whole, you can feel the wind of hope blowing in the poem, the poet pushed forward on the proscenium, toward you. I want to feel the poet sitting still, utterly without hope, waiting for no reason for the poem to unreasonably arrive among all the possible words.That said, I just wrote four poems, on assignment, each one in response to a painting in a women’s art exhibit, to be read at a reception there. Here is a way I have found to make such an assignment work okay for me: I must become antagonistic to the piece of art, as a way to counter the forces of hope. I must believe that the piece in the frame is the enemy of the poem I am about to write, that I will not let that painting enter my poem. I will glance at that image as a duty to the art and then I will write against every impulse that the art might prompt in me. I cannot say what I mean by this, exactly. It is just how I feel as I begin.Of course the image enters the poem. It has already planted itself in my eye. But I won’t speak directly to or about it. Here is one poem I wrote for this exhibit. For this one, I looked at a painting of a crow’s head. I was remembering when we lived near the Elk River in Maryland, in the woods:Wakened by CrowsEspecially in the woods,the sky of our sleep breaking,piece by piece. Nothing visiblein the leaves but the blacknessmoving gradually off as lightstarts to ping back its noticethat the edges are going to remainforevermore bareand rustling.My father would cawand the crows would answer,and he’d stand there like a boy,shit-grin-delighted,caw-caw,caw-caw.This is left, this is left,of the old life, is what he heard.You could see itin his eyes. He shot a crowonce, for no reason,he said, and he cried at its denseblack, its perfectly curvedbeak, its intelligence, dumbto further inquiry.I was a child, listening,waiting to be seen,but it was only   the calling,only voice, and the voicewas air, and the air was nothinghuman, and I was standingunder the pines and hemlocks.How hard it was,I wanted to tell you, to wakefrom that disappearing,to answer the old lifewith this one.The poem doesn’t touch the painting. However, I wrote another one in response to a quilt square in which the quilt does become part of the poem. So I am a liar about how I always do one thing or the other. I have no technique, really, and approach every such assignment with dread and some pleasure. It beats looking at a blank page with a blank mind. We all have to start somewhere, and somehow.Inaugural poems. I told a student recently to write as if she were whispering into someone’s ear. I was looking for that intimate voice that looks closely, that isn’t so sure of anything—the opposite of the declamatory, the certain, the overtly political with its big ideas. Here’s a poem I wrote about this a while ago: FOR THE INAUGURATION OF WILLIAM JEFFERSON CLINTON, 1997Not having been asked to write the inaugural poem,even though I am from Arkansas, I will take what’s here,the birds at the feeder, not saving the world but onlybeing it, each kind of bird taking up its careerto fill out some this-or-that of creation on a small scale,like this poem nobody asked for and few will hear.Cold birds, eating extra for warmth, finely detailedto catch the sun. Ridged out in friction-gear,they jerk from position to position, as if the eye’sfirst impressions have been caught before the brainsmooths them out. The chickadee clamps a preciseseed and tosses its shell, nothing amazing.To start up a fanfare would be to see it as specimen,to deflect one’s attention from the exact life performingits dip, crack, toss. The long beak of the wrenis extended by a thin white stripe traced full-swingdown the head, so the wren seems half beak. I needto get these lines, delicate as a Chinese painting.Any poem would quiver with delight, with the chickadeein it, or wren, but wouldn’t want to do anythingabout it. That’s the hard thing about writing a poemthat’s supposed to inspire the country at a crucial time,that’s supposed to hammer like a woodpecker. No onecould hear, with its hammering red, black, white!It doesn’t bode well for the quiet poem, or the insectinside the bark, or the old tree crumbling to dustinside itself while the public word tree holds it erect.Still, I think when the bleachers no longer rise augustalong Pennsylvania Avenue and the meandering oceanof confetti has been swept up, it is good to cross a bridgein your mind, to something earlier, oblivious to emotion,something like wrens going on inside the language.(from Breathing In, Breathing Out, Anhinga Press, 2002)