My year of blogging is coming to an end. Last year, at the beginning of April, my poem "Openings" appeared in the Journal of Radical Wonder, and I resurrected this blog -- which had been dormant for years -- to write about it. Since then, I have published a new poem every Sunday and added a pair of extra ones around the new year, due to the serendipity of having written three poems that take place on consecutive dates. I cannot thank John Brantingham and the rest of the Radical Wonder staff enough for the opportunity to publish work in a consistent venue, which in turn allowed me to revisit old poems and reflect on the inspiration behind them (and, in some cases, the hindsight that sometimes caused me to read them differently). It has been a year of renewal and discovery, but the time has come to divert my creative energy elsewhere, and so the Sunday poetry blog will go on hiatus at the end of March.
A few of the poems from Radical Wonder have been new ones. I haven't written much about those on the blog; I get tight-lipped with new pieces, perhaps because I want to let them speak for themselves. With the older submissions, which are now old enough that they feel like the work of a slightly different person, I have had much more to say. As my fellow California poet Paul Kareem Tayyar once put it: When it ends the road slips back into what it always was, A mirror for the rider to find himself within. So perhaps this blog has been a mirror. What have I found in it? At the risk of making critical dissertations on myself, I would say that my overriding subject as a poet has been the lives of ordinary people doing the best that they can. The couple in "Last Date Before the Proposal" who carefully scrutinize each other over tea, the parents in "The Girl Concentrates" who buy their daughter a toy space shuttle after a real one explodes on television, the college RA in "Commencement Day" who plans a huge morning prayer and then accepts two people showing up -- they do not always achieve their goals, but they have admirable standards, and life will probably be kind to them eventually. Some of my poems may focus on cruel or indifferent people, but they are in the minority. Most of the protagonists are conscientious, industrious, hopeful, and sometimes a little fretful and hard to please. Of course, that is a perfect description of me. There's your mirror for you. But the mirror is only one factor here. All of these poems were written by me, but they are written for you. Who are you, exactly? I don't know. I can name a handful of friends and family members whom I can say with assurance will read each new poem, but Christopher Nolan's family and friends undoubtedly go to see his latest movie as well. If we create public art, then we ultimately create it for strangers. A five-star review on Amazon or a royalty check from our publisher alerts us that someone out there has consumed it. Beyond that, the impact of our work is a mystery. Every year, I begin my 6th-grade English class by sharing Stephen King's essay "What Writing Is," in which he compares the connection between a writer and reader to the mythical art of telepathy. If you think about it, his argument makes perfect sense: A writer jots down a set of words in one time and place, and a reader receives it in another. The writer and reader never meet, most likely, but they are on opposite ends of an interaction. In the essay, King gives an example: If he describes a rabbit munching a carrot inside a cage on a table with a red cloth, you will construct that image in your mind, simply because he and you both know what a rabbit, carrot, cage, table, and cloth look like. The writer's audience, ultimately, is any person who knows what the writer is talking about. Perhaps that audience will end up being ten people; perhaps it will be ten million. Perhaps the audience will like the story about the rabbit in the cage; perhaps not. In any case, the connection has been made. One person writes the poem, another reads it, and both look to their respective mirrors. So here is "Birth," this week's poem in Radical Wonder. (For some reason this morning, Weebly is not letting me embed the link under text, so here is the URL: https://medium.com/the-journal-of-radical-wonder/birth-3f39d9866bfd.) I wrote this poem in 2010, long before I became a parent, but as I look back on it 14 years later, nothing in it seems inaccurate. It is a one-sentence poem built from images that most of us, at least over a certain age, can recognize. The title, first, is straightforward: We all know about babies. Perhaps you have had a newborn yourself, or perhaps you remember your younger siblings or cousins first coming back from the hospital. Even if not, you probably know what a tea kettle is, plus a banister, a mobile, and a newspaper stained with coffee rings. You know the sensation of days that seem to forge their own sense of time, sound that seems soundless, a state of mind that seems both tremendously focused and insanely scattered. The poem begins with the words "This is" before a torrent of nouns. When you start a poem with "This is," you obviously assume that the reader knows what you're talking about. I must have felt that way in 2010. Writing is a remarkable invention. I remind my students of that. Thousands of years ago -- not a particularly long time in the scheme of history -- humans developed a system of making marks on a flat surface and having them mean something. We use those marks for all different purposes, but when it comes to poetry or fiction or philosophy, my own belief is that the ultimate benefit of writing is to remind us that we're not alone. We get plenty of empathy from those telepathic voices, and sometimes they just remind us not to give up. So, if you're reading this latest poem between shifts of caring for a newborn, take it from me that the house will tidy itself before long and you'll eventually get your sleep back. And congratulations on your growing family.
1 Comment
Michael Kramer
3/24/2024 04:24:25 pm
One of your best. I admire the way you show that the world does intrude but not to any point of effacing the wonder, really the hope, new life and all the thereabout commotion engendered.
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This is the blog of Michael Miller, a longtime journalist, poet, publisher and teacher. Check here for musings, observations, commentary and assorted bits of gratitude. Archives
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