by C K Williams
Inspiration is essential to the production of significant art, but considered practically, as a method, a procedure, it’s all but impossible to characterize. Inspiration in practice is something either that’s happened at some time in the past, even the past of a few moments ago, or that hasn’t yet happened. While it is happening, it’s not there, or you can’t be aware of it being there, because the whole consciousness is taken by its activity—in a certain way you aren’t there yourself: there’s just the poem being enacted by you and, even more mysteriously, seemingly for you. The hardest thing is that inspiration is neither something that can be willed nor something you can wait around for. If on the one hand you try too hard to bring it about, to force it, but don’t succeed—which is what usually happens—the outcome can be impatience and frustration, states of mind not conducive to creation. If on the other hand you sit back and wait too long, it may well never come to pass at all. This is what’s troubling, really painful, about the whole business: you need inspiration, it’s absolutely essential, but you can’t schedule it or count on it or be sure that it’s ever going to happen again or that it will happen at all. In the end, we can only prepare a space, a field, for inspiration to occur. This, of course, is contrary to the way we’re taught to believe we should accomplish anything: by deciding to do it, then figuring out how, then making it happen. Implied in this view is the notion that learning happens systematically, in increments; that we grope towards something, find it untenable, try something else that works and, along the way, draw conclusions, so that the next time we can skip the inessential rest. We learn, in other words, that the proper way to accomplish anything, especially art, is by developing principles of procedure, which we call “craft,” and working from them rather than from trial and error.
In my experience, though, this isn’t an accurate description of the whole unlikely process. Anything like a principle I might learn about composition immediately becomes something I no longer have to think about, so I always feel as though I’m working from trial and error, always doing what I don’t know how to do, with a sense of blundering towards where I’m trying to go, and I’m always a little surprised if or when I do get there. For a long time I suffered, and still can occasionally, from the feeling that I must be doing this all wrong because if I have to explain, even to myself, what I’ve done when I’ve written something I find satisfactory, I often can’t.
Lately I’ve realized that one of the rewards of the labor of poetry is reading something I’ve written that pleases me and thinking, “How did that happen?” Young poets, or the young poet I was, tend not to know this and can become discouraged waiting for it to happen again. Older poets, by whom again I mean me, can tend, when facing the page, to forget it, too, though if we’re lucky we learn that however inspiration happens, all prosaic signs of the self to the contrary, it may indeed take us once more, so we slog on. That “may” is the necessary faith of art, and our most essential right.
The next right I’ll consider might not be among the most crucial, but is one that occurs to me now, perhaps because it’s connected to my first experience with mind, poet’s or anyone’s, being discussed as something in itself, to be thought about at all. When I was growing up, my father was much influenced by some inspirational book, the central message of which was that in order to do anything well, one had to concentrate, a bit of wisdom he repeated often, very forcefully when my schoolwork didn’t meet his expectations. Now, so far as I can tell, I never, through my childhood and youth and possibly until now, have managed to effect what seems to be indicated by the word “concentration.” So, I’ll propose here the right to not concentrate, by which I mean the right to allow one’s mind to skip and skid away from any prescribed subject without worrying that some aesthetic or moral commandment is being violated. Going along with this are several correlative rights. The first would be the right to understand that the mind, no matter how far and for how long it strays from the theme or idea to which one wishes it would apply itself, will sooner or later return when it is ready and able to do so and may well be the richer, or wiser, for the diversion and delay. (Bertrand Russell says somewhere that, early in his career as a mathematician and philosopher, he realized that if a problem he was interested in was going to take six months or a year to be solved, it would be solved in that length of time, whether he thought about it or not. This allowed him, he reports, to occupy himself with other questions that interested him. Though Russell’s insight isn’t quite what I’m talking about here, and I don’t think I’ve ever been able to enact anything like it myself, I like the idea, so thought I’d pass it on.)
Along with the right not to concentrate goes a corollary: the right to vacillate, to wobble, to shilly-shally, to be indecisive in one’s labors, and still not suffer from qualms about being irresponsible, indolent, weak. Poems can take a long time to arrive, and to find their final form, so surely patience is the word here, but it’s worth emphasizing that what actually happens doesn’t seem to have the maturity and dignity the term “patience” implies. There’s much more flailing about, and hesitating, and clearing the throat, and taking out the trash—and we need the right to all of it. At the same time, though, there’s an obligation that comes with this circling towards patience, which is to know that at some point you have to make your move, even if you don’t feel completely ready, and you have to make it with energy and tenacity and—this might be hardest—spontaneity. It might be asked how spontaneity can be willed? But isn’t that one of the very basic issues of art, of being an artist? Isn’t it really what revision is all about? Trying a thing again and again until the solution finally arrives that surprises and embodies that quality of surprise in itself?
Another, related, right: to be wrong, about anything and everything, and to know that even when your line of reflection or imagining might be viewed as absurdly illogical, you should be able to go on to its however provisional conclusion. This obviously has to do with revision, too: knowing that no matter how wrong, or how awful, a first, or second, or fiftieth draft can be, or an idea can be, or a groping towards metaphor or image, there will always be another chance, another hour for another attempt, and nothing in the meantime is lost except a little time, of which we sometimes have more than we know what to do with anyway. The corollary to this would be to realize that the judgment that something is wrong, or imperfect, or unrealized has a dialectic concealed in it of which one might be unaware and that working through this dialectic in itself can be fruitful. We should be able to regard our inner existence, the part anyway that’s raw material for poetry, as a laboratory, in which mental and emotional phenomena are valued according to their potential usefulness for poems and considered harmless unless they demand to be concretized in malignant actions. (It should probably be kept in mind that the ultimate purpose of this sort of reflection isn’t action but self-knowledge. Action—creation—comes later.)
From this follows the right of the mind to be able to remark in itself and not repress, or at least not too quickly, anything that comes to it, even such ostensibly inadmissible emotions as, to mention just a few, lust, greed, envy, anger—even rancor, even genres of otherwise unutterable prejudice. We should be able to entertain anything the mind casts up as potentially useful for a poem, while at the same time forgiving ourselves for such, after all, private matters, and this should be a forgiveness that arrives in a short enough time so that any shame or guilt arising from such scary glimpses within will be productive rather than debilitating for the germination of poems. We have to have, for poetry, as accurate an awareness as we can of the quality of our ethical consciousness, but we also need a firm sense of the difference between sins of the heart and sins of the hand: the mind has a life of its own that cares little for the parameters culture and society propose for it, and it is often this inner awareness that is most potentially interesting as an aspect of a poem. At the same time, though, we should probably refuse ourselves, in our poems, too ready an access to a transfor
mative vision of such matters: evil must be perceived as evil even in one’s self, and emotions that might threaten to be acted on—such as arrogance, cruelty, contempt, and ungrounded anger—should leave one nauseous, revolted, aghast. We have the obligation to discipline ourselves and our poems morally, to the point of apparent cruelty, but this should be done only for very convincing reasons. We have to recognize that all these rigors are finally for the purpose of making headway against ignorance and inexperience and never as punishment for imaginary offenses, to others or the self. Neither, though, should we privilege the marketability of the moral, in which abides the illusion that someday we’ll be judged and rewarded for our ethical efforts, in our poems or out.
More gently: the right to find manifestations in oneself of love (and so of poetry, which is love) in what are apparently evidences of its opposite: coolness, neglect, indifference, stubbornness, even (well-examined) rage (though never violence). Perhaps I’m trying to say something here about the basic trust in the efficacy of poetry, of being a poet or artist, that our efforts have to be grounded even if in the most tenuous way in the conviction that at the core of human existence is, after all else, love, or something enough like it to give us the confidence to send our language packets out to the world.
More practically: the right to move in our work into the realm of abstraction, with neither too much credence in seductive promises of philosophical purity and certainty nor too limiting a skepticism about abstraction’s capacity to enlarge on the ordinary and incidental. Abstractions are a useful implement for clarifying the usually muddled impressions that inform our vision of experience, and they’re just as useful in poems. In other words, sometimes the old workshop maxim has to be revised from “Don’t tell, show” to “Tell: everything you can.”
Close to here is the right to recognize and entertain and put to use, at least temporarily, those concrete, platitudinous symbols and implicit metaphors in which many complex considerations are embedded, even those such as “soul,” or “spirit,” which appear absurdly schematic and timeworn. There seem to be certain configurations of our inner world that can’t be fully considered without the use of these ancient constructs, and we have the right to resort to them in poetry, to put them to use if nothing else as starting points, or propulsive stimuli, even though our cultural moment might reject all such terms as merely sentimental.
The right to remember: there’s much to be reflected upon about the use or misuse of memory in poetry. One thing seems clear, however: we have the right to cultivate memory. But we shouldn’t be too good at it, or reflexive about it, because remembrance can then become an end in itself, which is nostalgia. A corollary to this might be the obligation not to release ourselves too readily from past to present necessities because we can end up then with too compelling a commitment to the present, and the present’s future, without adequately taking into account the causes from the past that determined it. We also have to be aware of memory’s inherent ambiguities, but we still have the right to inhabit those ambiguities without too daunting a compulsion to strive for accuracy. Remembering is necessarily inventing, and inventing is often remembering, but this doesn’t mean there are no standards for judging how things are remembered in poems; on the contrary, the poetic memory is art under oath, but real accuracy has more to do with the aesthetic efficacy of the poem than its fealty to any “real” past.
If the right to remember is taken further, there comes the right to believe with conviction that one is participating in the common history of humanity, to feel, even if only glancingly, even if only for moments at a time, the concrete connection we have to what went on thousands of years ago to certain exceptional, actual or mythical, personages in Greece, or Canaan, or Iceland, or even further back in caves in France or China, and to be able to embody this awareness in our poems. One’s own thoughts and acts, however humdrum and banal they may seem, should be able to be regarded as a portion of that same history, or destiny, or tragedy, if tragedy is what one comes to believe it is. (I suppose comedy is another possibility, though sadly these days there don’t seem many felicitous or humorous endings gleaming out ahead of us.)
From this comes the right, then the need, to meditate if not directly in our poems then in our reflections on the questions that come before poems, on the nature of our own specific historical identity and to move without qualm from this to general human experience. This has to be done rigorously enough, though, to prevent rash deductions that might jeopardize a scrupulous attention to the single self in terms of the general and vice versa. There should also be the recognition that the ultimate purpose of these reflections may be, in our poems, a kind of forgiveness—of ourselves but also of the groups of which we are, or have been, voluntarily or involuntarily, members. (Sometimes it seems our species itself requires forgiveness.) But in our poems or out of them, we shouldn’t be too quick to resort to this sort of absolution: pardoning oneself or one’s group should always be difficult; if self-forgiveness becomes programmatic, it degrades the potential seriousness of the debates such issues entail.
History, of course, implies death, so, next, death: to be able to imagine and reexperience the deaths of other people, and one’s own future death, as an essential part of general and personal history and of our poetic toolkit—others’ deaths perhaps as much as one is capable, less often one’s own. We should be able to believe in our own death only in ways that will allow the self to better prepare for an apprehension of the mystery of nonexistence, without inciting a despair that might render meaningless anything but the raw terror of that mystery.
On beauty now, some more general reflections. It seems essential for any artist to realize, and to keep in mind, the ultimate subjectivity of any criteria of beauty, without denying the legitimacy of these criteria. We have to be able to have confidence in our commitment to those elements of our aesthetic that can be categorized, and perhaps denigrated, as “taste.” At the same time it seems essential to recognize that taste can only be accurate within the terms of the system it is a part of and that such systems should continually be evolving, as we’re exposed to new poets and new poems. We also have to have the right (and again, perhaps the obligation) to liberate ourselves from the strictures of the system of beauty we develop for ourselves and to question how that system and our taste have evolved, because otherwise we can tend to become conservative and hidebound. At the same time, we have to be careful not to undermine our faith in our own taste to the degree that the assurance necessary for creating poems might be imperiled.
Corollary: to be able to keep confidence in one’s work flexible enough so that useful criticism of it won’t be rejected out of hand. Criticism is always grounded in taste, but it still should occasionally be considered seriously enough to determine whether it might contain helpful suggestions for our own aesthetic processes. It’s crucial, though, to recognize when criticism is merely an enactment of its perpetrator’s obliviousness to or disregard of the subjectivity of his or her own taste-system.
Corollary to a corollary about criticism: to know with some degree of accuracy the shape of your notions of honor, so as not to believe your honor has been offended when it hasn’t, even if something in you wishes to act as though it had.
Corollary to all of that: the right to acknowledge your efforts to yourself and to appreciate them according to criteria of judgment in which you really believe; to reward yourself within a range that neither inflates your feeling of self-worth, thereby reducing your objectivity, nor skimps it so much that the essential and probably inevitable discrepancy between effort and reward becomes disheartening. There should always be an inherent unwillingness to believe that anything in existence really has need of the limited and conditional gestures of which one is capable. But we still should be able to believe in and enjoy now and then our own and other people’s appreciation and acknowledgment of what we do.
This implies a certain level of success, so the next step to this would be to not let the
seductiveness of possible success contaminate our sense of purpose. The illusion of success is stability, dependability, durability; that illusion is always in negative relation to the uncertainties of artistic labor, and to existence itself. Too great an attachment to success makes one vulnerable to its other properties: capriciousness, flux, and maddening unpredictability. What we call ambition is too much credulity in the illusion of success and an inadequate appreciation of its other properties, of the fact that in ongoing artistic striving, rewards must always be considered fleeting and, finally, symbolic.
I’ll end with what is in some ways the primary obligation in writing or trying to write poetry, and that’s the reading of poems. It wouldn’t seem there’d be a great deal to remark about reading for poets, it’s so obvious, but sometimes things can get complicated. I always tell my beginning students that the writing and the reading of poetry aren’t really separate acts. The devising of a mind capable of writing poems depends absolutely on knowing how other poets have done it, and, moreover, it’s essential that the poems of other poets, their great poems, be a part of one’s working consciousness. This is probably all self-evident; there’s always something to be learned from reading poems, poems you don’t know and poems you already know and love. I find, though, that often young poets somehow situate themselves when they’re trying to compose at too great a distance from what might be called the poetic cosmos: in their quest to “express themselves” and, a little later, to be “original” in their work, they end up all by themselves in a kind of poetic vacuum, with only their own language rhythms and their own imaginative powers to inform what they’re doing. At the same time, I believe paradoxically that we also should have the right not to read poems, or even more to the point, sometimes the obligation not to read poems, at least some poems, particularly poems by one’s contemporaries. Younger poets tend to pore too much over the work of their peers; this is probably an unavoidable component of ambition, and it wouldn’t be feasible to specify exactly how much of a poet’s reading should be of poems by one’s contemporaries and how much from the enormous resource of the many centuries of poetry in English and translation. But it might be worth remarking that too much reading of those whose language and history and vision is by definition close to one’s own can seem to overload the world with poems, dilute it, pollute it with poems: poems, poems, poems. It’s happened to us all. Sometimes we just have to get up, go out, take a walk.
