Inspired to Last

By Kwame Dawes

I think most poets will recognize this question: “What inspires you to write?” This sounds like a good question and it is almost always asked in good faith. There is, built into that question, the suggestion that the questioner thinks there is something inspired about one’s poetry. This question will often come from someone who is interested in writing or someone who has read your work, if you are lucky. If you are not, it is the question that the stranger asks you when you tell them, “I am a poet.” “Really? Wow. So what inspires you in your poetry?” I almost always dismiss this question because I don’t know how to answer it.

The problem with the word inspiration is that it has a long tradition of pseudo-spiritual implications. Plato, a man with a notable distrust of poets, understood inspiration to be the thing that happened to poets making them loose control of themselves so as to become completely submitted to the spirits of the gods. The inspired artist finds something outside of herself and functions as a vessel for some higher being. At some level, those who ask me that question are working with the vestiges of this idea in mind. They are assigning an external force to the task of giving me reason to write and in the process they are asking me what my obsessions are.
The problem is that I do not feel out of control when I am writing a poem. There is some risk, some uncertainty about where the poem is going, and I have developed a blind faith in the idea that if I keep tumbling along, putting one word after the next, eventually something interesting will happen. But I have never ascribed something external to me to be the force controlling what I am writing. While I have not given it full consideration, I suspect that much of what shapes what I do as a poet is not mystical, but deeply psychological, and, with some time and thought, it can be explained as a very rational human process.
This, though, is an act of self-delusion—an intentional and willful act of self-delusion as a way of preserving the mystery, as a way of not destroying the magic of the creative act by explaining it away. I don’t want to know what inspires me, and I don’t want to know what my poems are about except someone looking back at what I have done. To venture into knowing, I fear, will create a tyranny of expectation that I am certain will hamper my creative process.
For the past two weeks I have been thinking a lot about the why of making poems. These thoughts were prompted by encounters with two quite established poets who I listened to talking about their work, about what poetry is about for them. In this entry, I will focus on one of these poet’s ideas. I will handle the other in a later blog.
One of the poets, a senior woman poet, first talked about the compulsion to make art that lasts. Her thesis was that the poetry of the past that we still have with us remains with us because they were written to last—because the found that elusive quality of perfection making them able to survive floods, wars, insane tyrants, volcanoes and unspeakable human horrors to come to us. It is the greatness of these poems and these poets that allowed them to survive time, even if all we have of them are fragments. People thought the worth keeping somewhere, and so they remained with us. So, she said, she wanted to write poems that will last, that will engage the world in ways that would make people want to keep them. I wondered aloud why lasting is so important. For the theory of survival through perfection to work—for this Darwinian idea of art to work—one would have to value lasting—a kind of eternal life sustained through art. One would also have to believe that great things never disappear. That the truly great things in human life will somehow survive. It requires a profound act of faith to believe this idea and to live by it. The cynical realist, constantly aware of the way in which the march of repressive regimes and quite horrible political movements has literally expunged the art of less powerful civilizations from our collective memory, does not have the faith to believe this idea. This Darwinian view of lasting art would suggest that whatever those lost works might have been, they were not great, for if they were great, they would somehow survive. You see the problem? This is not an argument that can be won or lost.
I can’t say that I write poems with the hope that they last beyond me. I can say that I write to construct a sense of the world through language that parallels and celebrates that which is happening around me. I have thought of lasting a lot. I have thought about poets that I have known who are dead. Good poets, but “minor” poets with a few books to their credit. The books are out of print. A few people will teach a few of their poems, but in many ways, their passing has meant the end of their poetic presence. It is possible that someone, ten years from now, will discover their books in a library one day. The person will be startled by the brilliance of this work and will start to write articles and books about these works of genius. It is a fantasy, a sad fantasy born out of the cold truth that without a warm body, most poets will vanish, most books will disappear forever.
My friend would say that their work was not good enough. And she may be right. My ambitions for lasting are far more modest. My father was a writer. He published two novels and one small collection of verse. I still troll the books to find clues to him. I hope my children will do the same with his work. I wish he had written more. I really wish he had published more books because I suspect I would know him better. I have written a lot of books. I have left a trail behind that will keep my family occupied for a long time. I can’t say, though, that beyond them, my poems will last, and I can’t say that this is something I think a great deal about.
I do know, though, that if poetry is totally committed to its longevity, something will be lost in the energy and power of the moment. There is something powerful about speaking to the moment, about making poems that arrest us in the discourse and language of our present without concern for the future. This kind of verse must be valuable, must be important.
Still, there is a challenge in my poet friend’s charge about making poems that last. What will a poem be like for it to last? The longest lasting poems seem to be free, at least on the surface, of the ballast of cultural mores, time-specific allusions, fleeting idiomatic expressions, and a poetic style that is rigidly slavish to a specific discourse. The longevity of a poem has everything to do with the values and ideas of the people who are reading the poem centuries after it has been written. If they are fascinated by a society from the past and intent on discovering the humanity of the people who lived before them, they will seek out the human echoes in the poems. I have a feeling that it is this self-indulgence, this idea that the poem is valuable if I can somehow connect to it—find myself in it—that determines whether a poem will last or not–that and the promise of a world free of political repression, cataclysmic fires, clueless housekeepers, floods and insects and rodents that have a sophisticated sense of taste for good poetry.
If then, the hunger for eternal life is what inspires me to write poetry, then that instinct is deeply buried beneath my consciousness, and it may well that it is this spirit of longevity, this god of the eternal presence that possesses me as I write. The truth is probably less inspired. I write to remind myself that I am still in the world.
God only knows, God makes his plan
The information’s unavailable to the mortal man
We’re workin’ our jobs, collect our pay
Believe we’re gliding down the highway, when in fact we’re slip sliding away
Simon and Garfunkel, “Slip Sliding Away”

2007-03-07

Posted in Group Blog, Uncategorized on Wednesday, March 7th, 2007 by Kwame Dawes.