I pulled out a workbook on the weekend, something to get me back into writing poetry. Prose is my more common medium, but poetry has the focus to delve into a moment, to explore an experience. In part this is because the focus on a few words holds my attention. Prose carries me forward along a line of thought or a piece of action. I slip past the details.
But finding that focus can be hard. There is work that has to get done on time, like preparing Sunday's service and supper. There are other things distracting my attention. And my brain goes into vacation mode where it prefers playing silly computer games.
I needed help to work on focus. The workbook I pulled out is a collection of thoughts and exercises from spoken word artists, people who work with a variety of performance styles. There are reminders to attend to the audience and good reflections on preparation for the act of performing. The artists are keen to point out that crafting the piece is only part of the work. Providing an oral version is a separate work that takes attention.
The particular prompt that caught my interest this time was about relationship. The concern that Sheri D. Wilson, who also edited the workbook (The Spoken Word Workbook: Inspiration >From Poets Who Teach, page 169) expressed was the way a writer starts to think of themselves as solitary rather than part of a community.
This feeling is understandable: writing is work that is done alone. A writer picks up a pen or a keyboard and focusses on getting words out of their head. Whether the venue where the writing is done is a busy coffee shop or a quiet room at home, the recording of thought is one person and a page.
While some writing is designed to be shared--like a sermon or a weekly column--a poem focusses on itself, on the attempt to delve into an experience and if not capture it, at least explore it. A poem is more internal than a play.
In this reflection, Wilson says that the first time a famous poet asked who inspired her, she was offended, thought she was being asked who she copied. Later, she understood that poets are part of a community, inspired and influenced and in a way carried, by all who have worked in poetry before. A poet is part of a collective.
Her suggested exercise helps ground a writer in that community. She asks seven questions, beginning with what sounds we hear and whose footsteps, who has taught us and what they might be reading.
As I put a blank paper on the table, I heard, in my head, the first line of a poem by Gerard Manley Hopkins. "The Windhover" begins "I caught this morning morning's minion king-dom of daylight's dauphin ..." He goes on to describe the flight of a kestrel and the way something we see can open our heart. I stopped with the first words of the poem: "I caught this morning."
The question held me. What had captured my attention? What morning moments mattered to me?
The words that spilled onto the paper were a bit too hypothetical, exploring not a particular moment I remembered but what a dewy morning in spring might offer the senses. I put aside the first paper and explored the moment when a bright warbler hovered at my window.
Even as that poet's words echoed in my brain, a question bothered me. In a letter, Hopkins wrote that women cannot write important things. He was a proponent and defender of a patriarchal system that made it hard for some of my favorite authors, women like Charlotte Bronte and Jane Austin. Did I really want to spend a lot of time with words from someone whose social attitudes trouble me?
But I can't shake the question that he put to me through the questions a modern woman writer asked. Still echoing in my thought is that half-line. "I caught this morning..." What did I catch? And what slipped past unnoticed?
Whether the resulting poems are shared or not, I will be sitting with this question, staying in the moment, giving as much attention to these moments as Hopkins gave the kestrel.
Cathy Hird lives with ducks and jays, chickadees and juncos on the shore of Georgian Bay.
