poetry

Poetry Experiments

The Book of the Body
The Book of Prayers
The Book of Stories and other experiments

I have given up writing poems one at a time and now write poems in groups. Each group is the exploration of a voice, some aspect of the language, a certain topic. I find this more satisfying than writing poems which end up being single moments with haphazard connections.

Poems in groups often build one upon the other. An image here becomes an echo from something previous. Themes, emotions, feelings previously submerged come to the surface, and I end up exploring a territory I didn't know existed.

Two of these explorations are in the lab right now. They probably have few thematic connections -- except both come from me and are, therefore, representative of my own obsessions. But in my mind a connection exists. For this reason, I have given them similar titles and plan to someday publish them together with a third exploration which is now under way, and which to date hasn't appeared in the lab.

Self-publishing in this way is an important aspect of my writing process. The task of putting poems out there for others to see forces me to re-evaluate what I have been doing in private, to decide for myself if the poems are strong enough to stand up to reality, or if I have been deceiving myself.

The Book of the Body

These poems are about passionate friendships between men and women. In some cases the relationship is consummated, in others it is not.

They are the first poems I consciously decided to write as a group. I had just gone through a divorce, and I was totally shut down emotionally. I wrote a letter to a friend and felt as if something burst from me. And I thought, "Wow, I've got do to more of these."

I usually started these poems thinking of friends, former acquaintances, people I was dating, people I never dated but wished I had. As I wrote, however, the person addressed in the poem changed, became someone I created to get the poem completed. So in the end, these are not addressed to any person at all. They are a way of thinking about two people together, a way of relating to someone.

The tone of these poems had two touchstones, if you will -- points of beginning. One of the touchstones from Rainer Marie Rilke's Letters to a Young Poet:

"And perhaps the sexes are more
related than we think, and the
great renewal of the world will
perhaps consist of this, that
man and maid, freed of all false
feelings and reluctances, will
seek each other not as opposites,
but as neighbors, and will come
as human beings, in order
simply, seriously and patiently
to bear in common the difficult
sex that has been laid upon them."
-- Rainer Marie Rilke

The other came from "The Song of Solomon" as translated in the King James Bible:

"Thou has ravished my heart
my sister, my spouse; thou has
ravished my heart with one
look of thine eye ..."
--The Song of Solomon

Except for the final poem, I wrote all of these before I met my current wife.

The Book of Prayers

I started these the first day I moved into our house in Glendive, Montana, in 1995. One feature of the house was an office of my own, something I had been without for a long time.

For years I scribbled in notebooks, which usually lay haphazard around my apartment. When I had an opportunity, I jumped on a computer somewhere and typed out a draft. My library had languished in boxes. Occasionally, I dug through and found a book I wanted.

In our new house, however, my books were on shelves where I could see them. This was a gift from my wife, who had insisted I have an office of my own -- something I would not have thought to ask for myself.

As I walked through the office for the first time, I pulled a King James Bible off the shelf. How luxurious it was, to see a book, to pull it off the shelf and read it, rather than digging for it first. I sat down and read the Psalms, starting from the beginning, moving from chapter to chapter as one would any other book.

I had never read the Psalms in this way, like something to be enjoyed rather than mined for bits of wisdom. I was impressed how each psalm was a unit, with a beginning and end. I enjoyed the voice. How passionate the psalmist was. Perhaps I could write something like this, I told myself. Not a psalm exactly, but something of my own that resembled a psalm.

These poems grew from that moment of discovery. Other discoveries occurred along the way. I discovered, for example, the psalms were not the best model for what I had in mind. I could not take the passion of the psalmist's voice and use it as if it was my own. The energy was foreign, from a different time. But there were other models I turned to. Often I found myself going to Rainer Marie Rilke, or to Theodore Roethke.

Other experiments

I have a group of poems, related to the two above, which is in its early stages and has yet to be fully formed. I call it "The Book of Stories." I'm learning that each story I choose to tell is different, and from each story a new voice emerges.

And there are other poems which have yet to appear in the lab.

mrvmeck@yahoo.com