Subject can be the most burdensome aspect of any writer’s work. In college I worked a lot with reading and writing poetry. My professor brought in a guest lecturer the excellent Major Jackson. Major shared some of his poetry and lectured on what it is to write. He said a poet typically falls into the category of ’subject poet’ or ‘language poet’. A subject poet finds one topical centerpiece for their focus and plugs away at it, often for a lifetime. A language poet is more interested in attaining certain linguistic goals, grammatical permutations, structural experiments or investigations of what a set palette of vocabulary can achieve. These categories are not mutually exclusive but a way to understand a writer’s dominant interest.
Being a young and uncertain writer I was not sure which category I fell into, but I suspected that I aspired to be a subject poet. I was very interested when Major brought to our attention that most current and successful (meaning published, a poet never makes much money) subject poets focus on their ethnic experience. Major Jackson writes vivid poems considering his experience of being a black man from Philadelphia.
I felt a bit nonplussed, considering the ethnic experience I have to offer is suburban, caucasian, U.S. citizen. Not an impossible starting place but I certainly couldn’t motivate myself to deconstruct the suburbs, or the modern American family. There were many angles at which to attack a prevalent existential crisis amongst affluent agnostics, but I was already starting to exhaust the subject in my song-writing, and it would be even more difficult to construct a solid series of poems on the matter. Writing good song lyrics is far easier than a good poem.
At this point I felt quite stifled in what was available to me as an aspiring poet. I had limited interest in post-modern experimentation (more language poetry), and felt my own ethnic experience to be of little interest as a subject matter. This is when I joyfully discovered the work of Elizabeth Bishop .
Bishop’s poetry focuses heavily on place, geography and setting. She often picks a scene or place for contemplation, describes it visually until the details ultimately review something human. The poems turn usually arrives when visual aspects of the place reveal something about the people who live/work there, humanity in general, or the viewer’s own psychology. One short example in the second stanza in Bishop’s “The Map”:
The shadow of Newfoundland lies flat and still.
Labrador’s yellow, where the moony Eskimo has oiled it. We can stroke these lovely bays, under a glass as if they were expected to blossom, or as if to provide a clean cage for invisible fish. The names of seashore towns run out to sea,
the name of cities cross the neighboring mountains -the printer here experiencing the same excitement
as when emotion too far exceed its cause. These peninsulas take the water between thumb and finger like women feeling for the smoothness of yard-goods.
“The Map” is unusual because instead of looking at a real place, it considers a map of them. Effortlessly it weaves in details that take a potentially mundane map and inhabits it with characters, while exploring the emotion of its creator. Bishop’s ethnicity is completely irrelevant, yet the poem is well grounded in a sense of subject.
I found more threads for this technique in the prose of Virginia Woolf. In her novel To the Lighthouse an entire section of the book considers the Victorian house where it is set with no one in it. The absence of the characters and the appearance of their summerhouse says much of who they are, and what their effect on the place is atmospherically. While the section is difficult, it is also very effective.
Later I found variations on this technique of centering focus on place in some of Wallace Stevens’ poetry. He came up with a tricky way of showing multiple permutations on how to view one place or thing as a way to create epistemological uncertainty, like in “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird”. While the poem is definitely not centered on landscape, or subject alone, it still showed me how contemplation of a place, or thing can yield fascinating output.
Years later I have set my poet’s pen aside. While at best I may have written a few good poems, I never created anything great. I also did not show the motivations or work habits of what it takes to become a true poet. Something I now respect as an unusual and herculean task. I have continued to write songs and much of what studying poetry taught me fuels my lyrics.
After a dozen or so songs that have been centered on autobiographical anecdote, as well as biographical songs (characters borrowed from history and made up), I have arrived again at place. It is a helpful approach being an avid traveler and a kind of pseudo-Anthropologist making willy nilly observations about a region’s people based on the decorations on their walls, the size and color of their buildings, or the amount of sunlight or rain that graces their skin from day to day.
I am thankful that brilliant writers like Bishop and Woolf have nudged me towards a mental space where a moped ride can create a meditation on the concept of home, or the appearance of an institution’s waiting room begs questions about concepts of freedom and fulfillment. I could never pretend to harness these writers skills, but often times a good song requires only strong visual language and a catchy melody. Poetry is another case all together.
