452 - Writing Poetry

Writing Poetry

By Harold McCurdy

The first question raised by my intimidating topic is whether I am qualified to discuss it. I have indeed written verse, lots of it, from an early age; and a fraction of it has been printed in magazines and a few slim books. I am sure I am a verse-writer. But poet? No one has ever observed my eye in a fine frenzy rolling, nor have I often given to airy nothing a local habitation and a name. In the only extensive review accorded to any of my books of verse, the critic, after complaining about my traditional meter and rhyme ("Why these boxes?") and comparing one of my efforts unfavorably with Gerard Manley Hopkins's "Inversnaid," summed up his judgment in the crushing statement that I lacked "the madness of art."

Is there any method in my lack of madness? Yes, I aim to communicate with others as best I can about matters that seem important to me, such matters as love and grief and the state of the world in those respects open to my examination. I find that the slight intoxication of speaking in verse, and thus allying myself with those who have spoken in verse before (their name is legion), enables me to cope with experiences and lines of thought that would fit awkwardly into ordinary everyday discourse. The risk I run in resorting to iambic or other meters, and to formal stanzas (those "boxes"), and to sonnets, etc., is that the minds I want to communicate with may be put off by the very music that allows me to speak. I recall a man, a musician himself on flute and harpsichord, who gave up on a book of mine because he discovered that he could not get anywhere with it unless he read it aloud. That is to say, he was unwilling to treat my musical score as he did the scores of those baroque composers he was fond of rendering into sound through his instruments. Did he not know that the voice, too, is an instrument?

A young poet, Gibbons Ruark, whose verse I have long admired, has cheered me recently by an interview he did for a special issue of Yarrow, a semi-annual publication of the English department at Kutztown University. Along with other agreeable remarks, there was this, in reference to "intensifying the voltage" of an experience: "In my own work it has a great deal to do with trying somehow to discover and make whatever music is in the particular occasion because I'm more interested in the sound of the poem than I am in anything else in it."

Harold McCurdy is Professor of Psychology, Emeritus, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. Poetry is his retirement avocation, and he has published six volumes of poems, some of which have appeared in THEOLOGY TODAY.

453 - Writing Poetry

He then backs off a little from the emphatic last part of that statement to admit that, well, of course, there are other things besides the sound that have to be attended to.

Writing poetry is a complex business. Let us be as practical as we can be about the musical side of it. What, in a practical way of talking, are we talking about? It's about adjusting the words to each other in a pattern of stresses congenial to the speaking or singing voice and the listening ear. That involves us also in a concern for the interaction of the consonants and vowels in the sequence of words, harmonies or disharmonies into which rhyme, if it is used, ought to blend as a vital component, not as something stuck on. Then there is the matter of texture. Do we want the sounds to be thick or thin, rough or smooth, clotted or clear? The decisions, conscious or not, reflect the writer's temperament and issue in a more or less recognizable style. The style of a Swinburne or a Verlaine may tend to become too obvious, inviting parody, even self-parody; and the driving mechanical music may swamp the sense. How different is Shakespeare! His nimbleness defies parody.

By gift and practice the various sound-adjustments may occur without much laborious thinking, but rare is the poem that comes in a single unedited rush. Reworking is ordinarily required, word by word, line by line, stanza by stanza, if everything is to fit together properly, letting whatever is at the heart of the intended poem get free of irrelevancies. Anyone who wants to see how picking away at an original draft can improve it can find plenty of instruction in the working papers of many poets: Coleridge, T. S. Eliot, Dylan Thomas, or whomever.

Let me not seem to be saying that managing the sounds is all there is to doing poems. Far from it! Besides, the music of verse can never, in my opinion, be quite pure; it has to carry a burden of references to non-musical things.

In an especially lyrical moment I once started off a little something I called "Sinfonietta" as follows:

The music flows
one limpid stream
rippling between
daisy and dogrose
sweet in the sun,
etc.

Here we have a string of dimeters trying to flow limpidly on and on to whatever conclusion they were tending toward. I introduce this example for the purpose of stressing that even here, where music was uppermost in my mind, there were objects being visited or pointed to-daisy, dogrose, sun, etc. Verse is a fluid sound structure bearing

454 - Writing Poetry

along some minimum of sense in the form of visual, tactile, auditory, gustatory, and olfactory objects, and, beyond that, the less objective but no less real ideas and feelings by which the scattered and ravelled things of the world are knitted together.

In religious poetry, as I understand it from the point of view of a mere uninspired verse-writer, the urge to knit together the diversities of a ravelled world is notably strong. Let me illustrate again with some recent verses of mine, written in that terza rima of Dante's which seems so useful when one is struggling to say difficult things with maximum objectivity. As I have mentioned, it is rarely the case that I deal with airy nothing, and this is not such a case. The situation was this: at 10:30 on Christmas Eve, I stepped out into a cold and starry night, mainly to check on the weather, leaving behind me a house emptied of all my dearest treasures. What happened then was unexpected. It was also, both subjectively and objectively, of such a nature that I hesitated to speak of it to anyone, and in fact have spoken of it to just two persons, one a close friend, the other a virtual stranger. To the friend, I gave a crude and garbled account; to the stranger, I described the meteor falling without going into the subjective aspect. In verse muttered to myself, I dared to try to give voice to the whole experience, thus:

When softly and slowly fell the other night
That meteor flaring through my screen of trees,
Maybe I only was privy to the sight.

Eastward it fell of great Orion's knees
And his dog Sirius; southward of Jupiter;
And it was very bright, brighter than these.

If others glimpsed it (as, say, Lucifer,
Or some dull chunk of matter being consumed),
Let their view of it be as they prefer.

To me it was a miracle, subsumed
Within the ancient Mystery and profound
From which the whole starred universe once bloomed.

For look! I was alone on private ground
Awed by the starry heavens of Christmas Eve,
Yet sorrowful, and in self-pity drowned,

Pleading, as one who clamors to believe,
"O God, whom none can see and live, do you
Care in the least for us? Did you conceive

Us and this world and come incarnate too
To lodge here? Me, Lord, have you loved? Me, heard?"
-And then, abruptly, silently, fell and grew

That flare of light, that bright, that lordly word.

455 - Writing Poetry

Is that poetry? Is it religious poetry? Does it reach beyond myself to anyone else in the world? Have I achieved the madness of art and crossed over into the psalmist's territory? In a secular and scientific age, one scarcely knows how to frame the questions, much less answer them. My one certainty is that it was the slight intoxication brought on by muttering verse which permitted me to speak openly about a very private event.