Poems Grow In Language

Whether spoken or written, poems are language, so to some extent it's absurd to claim that poems grow in language the way plants grow in soil.


The idea behind such a comparison can be useful to poets, however, because sometimes poets are so determined to say something--to send a message, make an argument, or get a point across--that they forget they are making something (a poem) not just saying something.


At one point in his famous book on creative writing and the teaching thereof, the late Richard Hugo, a Pacific Northwest poet who went to high school near Seattle and worked at Boeing for a while, advises, "If you want to communicate, buy a phone." With exaggeration and with tongue close if not in cheek, Hugo is trying to get young poets not to focus exclusively on getting a message across, on being profound. His book is The Triggering Town, and in it he develops a variety of strategies and techniques for learning how to dance between "saying" and "making." He often urges the reader to err on the side of letting language "tell" you what to write rather than on the side of insisting that the language say what you want it to say. He is not, I hasten to add, arguing on behalf of obscurity or obfuscation, or for laziness that leads to lack of clarity. He worked hard on his poems, and he insists that all poets should work hard. Nor is he pointing the way to what is now known as L-A-N-G-U-A-G-E poetry, in which poets seem, at least, to write words randomly, or at least to make leaps of thought and free-association that are hard to follow. I'm among those who simply don't "get" L-A-N-G-U-A-G-E poetry, but I confess that in this as in other matters, I may be revealing myself to be a curmudgeon, and I don't object to the fact that others do "get" such poetry.


Hugo writes, "Never want to say anything so strongly that you give up on the option of finding something better. If you have to say it, you will." That is, another part of his approach is to operate from the belief that our obsessions, the things we "have" to say, are going to emerge in our work no matter what, so it's best for us to concentrate on the making, not the saying, and often to let language and revision lead us and our poems-in-progress to surprising places and, one hopes, to surprisingly better poems.


Here is a poem that sprang from language itself; in fact, it started with a two-word phrase that had stuck in my head: "padre, noonday." I've always loved the word padre. It just sounds so great, and for a native Californian, it conjures images of Spanish priests wearing dark robes and getting missions built on El Camino Real. "Noonday" is a pleasing word, too, but it's also a bit confusing. What not just say "noon" or "mid-day"?


At any rate, I started playing with the phrase, and at some point, I came up with the first stanza:


Old padre, dry
as a cricket’s chirp,
as a lizard’s burp—
old padre, why



I associate crickets and grasshoppers not just with the sounds they make but with the dry summer grass of the Sierra Nevada in summer, and sometimes crickets do sound as if they need to wet their whistle--although I believe they make that sound by rubbing their legs together, so they don't literally chirp with their mouths. I followed that cricket-comparison witch "a lizard's burp," so I'd effectively committted myself to a certain rhyme-scheme--the In Memoriam rhyme-scheme, named after Tennyson's long poem of the same name, in which the stanzas rhyme a-b-b-a. I'd also commited myself to very short lines, and with the fourth line, I'd commited myself to asking the priest a question. Eventually, I managed to finish the poem, with the rhyme-scheme and short lines and also with the suggestion of a story concerning a priest in a village who, like mad dogs and Englishmen, goes out in the noonday sun:


Padre, Noonday



Old padre, dry
as a cricket’s chirp,
as a lizard’s burp—
old padre, why

do you go to the well
at blazing mid-day
when everyone’s away
in shade, in sleep? Tell

why even the town’s
lunatic has enough sense
to nap under an immense
oak, but not you. My own

notion is it’s not
for water that you
come, surely not to
set an example. What

then? Is it to show
yourself to God’s blaze
of scrutiny, God’s gaze,
before you go?


I seem to have invented the possibility that the padre is showing himself to God--confessing himself--by going out in the brutal heat. I think the poem does end up communicating something, saying something, but it got there by the circuitous route of my having concentrated first on playing with language, or working with language. The poem pleases me in part because it's a surprise, a nice little gift given to me by the process of writing. I like the combination of very short lines and the a-b-b-a scheme, and I like the half-rhyme of town's/own, although I would certainly understand if other readers wanted a full rhyme there. Richard Hugo may not have liked the poem at all. I just don't know. I don't think he liked poems this terse, this short. But he may have liked the play of language, and he may have liked the hint of an invented town, a "triggering town," in this case some imaginary village in arid or semi-arid territory. In any event, "Padre, Noonday" is, like all other poems, made of language, but figuratively, at least, it also grew from language-itself, as opposed to being driven by a message.