Stop Being So Efficient

What poets do, you can too.

One day, when she was in her garden, the poet Ruth Stone saw a glimmer of a poem. But she had no way of writing it down so she ran into her kitchen, found a pencil and jotted the lines. She said that she “caught that one by its tail.”

When I heard this story, I wanted to give Ruth Stone a butterfly net. All around her, poems were floating, and she was trying to catch them. On that farm in Vermont, she caught some beautiful poems and when she was 89, she won the National Book Award.

Her intuitive mind was always ready: flighty, loose, and associative.

Poets cultivate this receptivity—that’s the butterfly net—and then they shovel words onto a page. The Butterfly Net” is what to use when you want to be receptive to a-ha moments. It’s also a powerful tool for intuition-building and collecting information. “The Shovel,” on the other hand, is what you use to wrangle inspiration into craft and attach language connect the bits. Shoveling involves moving words around until they shift away from what you intended and surprise you.

My concept of the Butterfly Net comes from philosophy, psychology, linguistics, and neuroscience. Books about consciousness too. Magic books offer insight as well, though more for illusion setting: the behind-the-stage efforts it takes to create something that feels real.

Sometimes I ask college students, “Where do ideas appear and what happens to them after that?” Most say that they have more ideas than the ones they “capture” by writing. They forget them. Other inspirations, students say, aren’t even that great, but they push them into something workable— especially when deadlines loom. These ideas become class projects, papers, or new procedures for research. They shovel notions into craft.

Lots of poets have written about inspiration but few have created working models of how to find it. One of my favorites is poet Richard Hugo’s small classic, The Triggering Town. In this collection of essays, Hugo likens the process of making poems to imagining small towns and furnishing them with real and imagined details. You pull from memory and imagination, from a place that is both your hometown and not your hometown. From there, your little poem takes hold, and another, “real” subject emerges, and the poet needs to be receptive enough to follow where it leads.

Hugo blends the use of butterfly net and shovel, swapping back and forth. With practice, the craft becomes second nature and improvisation happens. Sometimes he ends up with poems about baseball fields and rivers. Other times, the poems stay in small towns. This might point to why poets do this work: they’re attracted to speculation, surprises and the sense of being lost for a little while.

Deep down, creative people crave to be lost in what they are making. That’s the adventure.

I have a friend, an executive in the C-Suite at Microsoft, who writes poems. One day, he captured a couplet. He tried it out on me. “Excellent,” I said. “More net? Or are you ready with the Shovel?”

Then, my friend used the shovel to dig out the implications of his ideas. He took hold of that little couplet by the hind legs and held it up. Then he tried out a few more couplets and some reading he was doing on things outside of poetry, and he tried to shape something. The shovel is the hard work of extending the poem. It’s of digging around until something else shows up and takes root.

Romantic poet Percy Bysshe Shelley cautions against the assumption that “the finest passages of poetry are produced by labor and study.” He pushes against the formula of “a careful observation of the inspired moments, and an artificial connection of the spaces… by the intertexture of conventional expressions.” That’s what “the limitedness of the poetical faculty” imposes. Open your minds, poets! Let your connections and conventions drift!

This wild mind is a fleeting one. Stay in the garden awhile, Ruth Stone. And carry a pencil, for heaven’s sake. Then your net can become a shovel, and the shovel can transform into a net.

Here’s a little poem by Ruth Stone about this sweet plight:

PRIVATE PANTOMIME 

I will reach into the grab-bag of unconscious things 
And pull forth what? Here, a featherless bird 
Supine in the palm of my hand with bony wings 
Folded inert, beak agape. What sort of raw word 
Explains pinfeathered skin and the certain death 
That rides in the quivering flesh? I turn it out. 
It falls with a weighted thud. Blood and the sight 
Of such weak eyes waiting, puts my humor about; 
And I thrust both my hands into a pair of gloves, tight.


Source: Poetry Magazine, 1957.

Photo by Arthur Wang on Unsplash