The following blog is a wonderful guest post from poet and Professor Emeritus Tim Hunt.
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| Poet Tim Hunt |
Poetry readings often end with the host inviting questions, and after an awkward pause, someone asks the reader or readers about their writing process. Some of us, it turns out, revise diligently, others less so or not at all. And some of us write at a set time in a specific place like reciting morning prayers or punching a time clock, while others wait for the lightning strike of inspiration, then scribble the gift to paper as the thunder fades away. Well, as my uncles in the California hill country would advise when I was a boy: There’s more than one way to skin a cat, and it seems that poetry can, just like that figurative cat, be skinned more ways than one.
Looking back, I realize I should have thought to ask my uncles: Why skin a cat? And with poetry, too, there’s a prior question: Why write it? Maybe we skip this question because we believe we already know the answer. We write to express ourselves. Or because we have something to say. These responses share an assumption. In both, the writer has something prior to the poem and gives it to the poem—crafting, encoding, and decorating the gift—then offering it to the reader. The trick, it seems, is to have something worthwhile enough to justify shaping it into a poem. But maybe there’s another answer. Perhaps we write to discover through the writing of the poem. Perhaps we write for the gift the poem might give us through the writing of it. As a corollary, we also write for the gift the poem might give the reader through the reading of it.
In William Stafford’s often anthologized poem, “Traveling Through the Dark,” the poem’s speaker comes around a blind curve on a mountain road where he stops to roll a dead deer into a canyon because “that road is narrow: to swerve might make more dead.” He then discovers that the dead doe is carrying a still living, unborn fawn:
Beside that mountain road I hesitated.
The car aimed ahead its lowered parking lights;
under the hood purred the steady engine.
I stood in the glare of the warm exhaust turning red;
around our group I could hear the wilderness listen.
I thought hard for us all—my only swerving—
then pushed her over the edge into the river.
William Stafford, “Traveling through the Dark” from The Way It Is: New and Selected Poems. Copyright © 1998 by William Stafford.
I don’t think Stafford wrote this poem to express himself by revealing his conflicted state as he confronted the necessity of killing the fawn he couldn’t save. Nor do I think he wrote it to tell us that we should act and not hesitate when confronted with difficult choices. I do think, actually I believe, that Stafford wrote this poem to probe the situation and explore his responses to it. And through the writing of the poem as a mode of attention and process of engagement—through the process of writing it—Stafford not only reenters his experience but expands his awareness of it. One aspect of this is the way the poem leads him to hear the wilderness as a being, rather than simply as a setting. For Stafford, this in turns meant thinking “hard for all of us,” with the “us” implicitly including nature’s being, even as this moment of thinking, this hesitation to act, is a kind of “swerving.”
And it is precisely here that the poem offers its gift to Stafford in the writing of it—and to us, in the reading of it. Through writing the poem, Stafford both hears the wilderness and accepts that this requires thinking from within its being. Yet this moment of thinking, this hesitation, even the temptation to evade, is where his humane desire to preserve life threatens to overwrite his heightened awareness of—and acceptance of—necessity, and thus threatens to become a kind of sentimentality. In the poem, the opposite of “swerving” is acceptance. I’d suggest that acceptance is the gift the poem gave Stafford through the writing of it, and the gift it offers us through the engaged experience it enacts as we read it.
Just as there is more than one way to skin that figurative cat, there is more than one way to write a poem—and more than one reason for writing one. We may have a point to make and want to make it as forcefully as we can. Or we may need to work through an emotion. Or we may want to capture an intense moment of perception. Each of these involve taking something known and framing it into evocative language. But we can also write by taking something that has resonance for us—a moment we recall, or an image, or a phrase—and engage that through writing the poem, exploring as we go, and accepting whatever gifts of insight, discovery, or even just intensified awareness the poem might offer us. Writing to express a point or confess an emotion can lead us to treat the poem as a road we travel to reach a destination. Writing to engage through writing is to discover a destination—one that often takes us beyond the map.
Tim Hunt’s six poetry collections include Western Where and Voice to Voice in the Dark (both Broadstone Books) and Ticket Stubs & Liner Notes (winner of the 2018 Main Street Rag Poetry Book Award). Originally from the hill country of Northern California, he and his wife Susan live in Normal, Illinois.
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Zack’s new memoir, Hugging My Father’s Ghost
Other posts of interest:
Getting the Most from Your Writing Workshop
How Not to Become a Literary Dropout
Putting Together a Book Manuscript
Does the Muse Have a Cell Phone?
Poetic Forms: Introduction, the Sonnet, the Sestina, the Ghazal, the Tanka, the Villanelle
