A setting for small mysteries . . .

When we first took over this back yard some sixteen years ago, the grass was so high that for the first several months I cut it with a scythe, striding among the waist-high grasses and nettles like the figure of Death – no doubt startling the neighbors.  I didn’t own a gasoline mower or weed-eater (being unable either to afford or tolerate them), and my turn-of-the-century reel mower was powerless against such a tough & tangled chaos of weeds.

The back of the yard was a shantytown of weedy, proletarian trees: box-elder and trees-of-paradise.  It was in fact an abandoned alleyway and not, strictly speaking, our property at all, but it had become ours by default.  Any professional landscapist would have cleared the whole mess away and simply started over, and I can’t deny I would have preferred a backyard of dogwoods & flowering crabs, but such a sweeping renovation was far outside our budget.  Besides, I am loathe by nature to come into any place as an outsider and begin my occupation with a policy of systematic slaughter.  I prefer to enter, as it were, through a side door and take a seat at the back, and simply watch until my new furred & feathered neighbors begin to present themselves.

Once I know who they are — plants as well as birds & beasties — I begin my alterations gradually, in small ways at first, with as little disruption as possible — and only with hand tools: no motorized equipment ever.  Which is why the development of our garden has taken so many seasons, and why someone who had not seen our yard for twenty years would still recognize it as the same place.

My poems are composed along similar principles.  I begin with an experience and let it age slowly in the back of my head – and sometimes in nocturnal dreams — let it age many months or years, before beginning to write about it.  Only in this way will I have time to notice minor details and moods associated with it that I would miss or bypass if I wrote about it immediately.  “Emotion recollected in tranquility”, as Wordsworth said.  It is the subtle resonances of experience that interest me most, and they are never immediately apparent.

In the actual composition of a poem, I rarely begin with a particular form in mind, but concern myself only with as precise and sensitive a rendering of the experience as possible.  The form will suggest itself soon enough.  Form emerges from the experience, from the poem’s subject, rather than the reverse.  The subject is never forced into a predetermined form.

Similarly the paths and borders in my garden evolved gradually from the topography.  I cut down no trees and have mostly allowed new seedlings of trees to emerge and grow.  Much of the yard remains in its original ‘wild’ state, except that there are now paths and niches for statuary which have entered the wildness.  But these are not imposed artibrarily.  The paths and niches, in a sense, were already there.  Their creation involved very little clearing away of undergrowth.  I just took the half-formed accidental lanes and clearings as I found them, enhanced and enlarged them a little, lay down some gravel, and made what was slightly forbidding now quietly inviting. 

Similarly, in a poem, whatever formal devices I might employ are not imposed from without, but rather emerge from within.  In writing them, with my focus entirely on the subject, I discover formal devices embedded in what I have written.  I allow such naturally-occuring accidents to suggest the form of what will follow.

Many of the great gardeners have written of the wonder and charm of accidental appearances in their own gardens.  Unexplained effects, mysterious visitations by plants that were never planted, and so forth.  Both garden and poem become settings for small mysteries that may or may not occur — an empty place set at a table in the off-chance that Elijah might knock at the door.