Matt Robinson : part five

How does a poem begin?

In my process, a poem usually begins with a small thing: a word or a phrase or a fragment of language. Maybe a partially sussed out metaphor. It grows from there. So it begins, and often hones in on and around, bits of detail.

On that note, and I hope this isn’t too much of a tangent: I think there needs to be a level of detail and a certain specificity included in a poem and its language and metaphor to ground it. To make it a tangible thing. (I mean, really, for the artful lying of metaphor to work, I think we need enough detail to be able to grasp that our perceptions and understanding are being stretched or flipped or challenged or interrogated. But maybe I am wrong.)

BUT, and this is a big BUT: I think, for me, there ultimately still needs to be a movement — no matter the direction(s) — between those minute, tangible detail(s) in the poem and some kind of greater idea(s). Otherwise it’s just a list, a catalogue of observations. There’s nothing wrong with strictly observational or list-ish poems, but I want a little more. So, a poem starts with a detail, and then moves on from there.

For me, it’s in that liminal, transitional, osmosis-y-tug-of-war sort of dynamic space where things get interesting. That, for me, is where the energy of a poem gets generated. The tension between those two worlds and ways of thinking is at the core of what makes a poem work, in many ways, for me.

I suppose the bottom line is that when I am writing I don’t want a poem or a poetry that deals solely in “big” ideas or issues. I certainly don’t usually “start” there. No matter how important, that seems too airy or ungrounded or something of that sort. Conversely, a simple listing of details or recounting of everyday bits of whatever, seems almost pedestrian. 

There are, of course, writers who do both of those discrete things very well — better than I ever could — but that isn’t how I am wired to compose or communicate. I’m interested, I guess in the ever-shifting relationship between the everyday domestic and quotidian details of things and how the accumulation of them, their interplay, speaks to what we have constructed as larger truths or something. I want, as cliched as it is, the sum to be greater than the (catalogued) parts.