Recently, I read an interesting review of Peter Sacks, the literary critic turned poet turned visual artist. "An Artist's Archeology of the Mind" by Joshua Rothman documents Sacks' intensely private and solitary art practice, and the time he spends with each canvas to paint, layer textiles, lay in text, cover, burn, and reveal the complexities of history, landscape, and the mind.
Rothman mentioned a book of literary criticism that Peter Sacks wrote, examining the form of elegy. Rothman quoted the poet T.S. Eliot, and from Eliot's essay about poets:
The poet’s mind is in fact a receptacle for seizing and storing up numberless feelings, phrases, images, which remain there until all the particles which can unite to form a new compound are present together….
The review is great, and I believe that what Eliot says is true. The individual poet's attention turns to disparate things: images, phrases, sounds that finally coalesce into a poem. Eliot's essay always uses he/his pronouns to indicate poets, a convention considered appropriate in his era, but it is clearly sexist. However, Eliot was a master of his craft, and for that, his thoughts are worthy of consideration. Further along in the essay, T.S. Eliot writes:
…the poet has, not a “personality” to express, but a particular medium, which is only a medium and not a personality, in which impressions and experiences combine in peculiar and unexpected ways. Impressions and experiences which are important for the man may take no place in the poetry, and those which become important in the poetry may play quite a negligible part in the man, the personality.
The particular medium, the genre of poetry, is built from a disparate collection of things, chosen by the poet. The poem begins to take on its own life. T.S. Eliot further says:
It is not in his personal emotions, the emotions provoked by particular events in his life, that the poet is in any way remarkable or interesting. His particular emotions may be simple, or crude, or flat.
The purpose of a poem is not to express feelings, in other words. Poets are not different from other people; they aren't more sensitive than others nor have better refinement of feelings.
The business of the poet is not to find new emotions, but to use the ordinary ones and, in working them up into poetry, to express feelings which are not in actual emotions at all.
It is a concentration, and a new thing resulting from the concentration, of a very great number of experiences which to the practical and active person would not seem to be experiences at all; it is a concentration which does not happen consciously or of deliberation. These experiences are not “recollected,” and they finally unite in an atmosphere…
This thought has been echoed by several poets. Lorine Niedecker's poem, "The Poet's Work" goes like this: "I learned/ to sit at desk/ and condense// No layoff/ from this/ condensery." This is true in my experience writing poems: one writes and revises, takes out words, takes out lines, and searches for a metaphor and a pattern, a set of images, a pattern of rhythm and sound that makes the poem into an instrument that the reader experiences. The best poems connect to the body and breath. They have a physiological element. T.S. Eliot ends his essay with this thought:
There is a great deal, in the writing of poetry, which must be conscious and deliberate. In fact, the bad poet is usually unconscious where he ought to be conscious, and conscious where he ought to be unconscious. Both errors tend to make him “personal.” Poetry is not a turning loose of emotion, but an escape from emotion; it is not the expression of personality, but an escape from personality. But, of course, only those who have personality and emotions know what it means to want to escape from these things.
The emotion of art is impersonal. And the poet cannot reach this impersonality without surrendering himself wholly to the work to be done. And he is not likely to know what is to be done unless he lives in what is not merely the present, but the present moment of the past, unless he is conscious, not of what is dead, but of what is already living.
As with any creative work, discovery is part of the making. A good poet is willing to suspend previous ideas or plans for the poem, is willing to ignore convention, to put aside personal feelings, and is first and foremost, attunes the attention to emerging opportunities or elements that arise within the making of a poem.
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