How does a poem begin?
Archibald MacLeish famously said, “A poem should not mean, but be.” And T.S. Eliot opens ‘East Coker,’ part II of his Four Quartets, “In my beginning is my end.” So how, then, can a poem begin anywhere or for that matter, mean anything. Answer? It can’t. Because it is, for the most part, forever in flux, in process. Oh, we can start writing at a given point in a day, of a calendar year, and so forth. But is that the beginning of a poem, and does that mean anything? Not much. What matters—and there is such thing—is that at some point in our day to day life as a writer, we hook into a passing comet, or, it may be, a poem, and suddenly realize we are riding a crest, a wave, heading to, or over, a near or far horizon, and the exhilaration is tremendous. We are suddenly caught up in what feels like a whirlwind, and maybe it is, for all we or Toto know about the matter. Because suddenly we are not at anything like a beginning or an end, but rather in the middle of a cyclone, weightless, terrified, joyful, and about to die. What could be better than this? Not a beginning, surely. And, preferably for the moment at least, not an end! In 1963 I wrote a Noh Play called Cannabis Sutra in which the figure referred to as Waki relates a dream:
Early before sunrise
I woke to the light of a dream
The dream
was of sunrise,
sunrise over the sea
I lay on a raft
feeling neither cold
nor fear
nor the water
that lay around me
Only the sun
held my attention, rising
in what must have been the east
though there was no sign
no way of knowing
what way
east was
but that the sun
rose out of water
suddenly whole
Poems are born like that --not of a grand idea, but from a state of chaos and disorientation—‘suddenly whole’.
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