A Theory of Origins

People sometimes ask where an artist’s ideas come from. It’s a hard question to answer; “it depends” is probably the most accurate answer, though hardly illuminating to the questioner.

On a few blessed occasions, the answer is, “from everywhere.” I like this comment from a letter by Elizabeth Bishop to her friend, Robert Lowell:

Your poems “have that sure feeling, as if you’d been in a stretch … when everything and anything suddenly seemed material for poetry—or not material, seemed to be poetry, and all the past was illuminated in long shafts here and there, like a long-waited-for sunrise. If only one could see everything that way all the time! It seems to me it’s the whole purpose of art, to the artist (not to the audience)—that rare feeling of control, illumination—life is all right, for the time being.” (Elizabeth Spires, "One life, one art: Elizabeth Bishop in her letters,” https://newcriterion.com/issues/1994/5/one-life-one-art-elizabeth-bishop-in-her-letters)

An amusing side note comes from Cole Porter’s many stories explaining the origins of “Night and Day” (see William McBrien, Cole Porter, 1998). I’ve captured his various accounts, with poetic license, in my poem, “Theories of Origin,” recently published in Skating Rough Ground:

Theories of Origin

Zanzibar, ’35--
a little hotel, a patio,
ivory dealers in burnouses,
the barkeep simpatico,
a round on the house,
night and day the phonograph playing
Night & Day
while Porter’s in the corner saying
I wrote that in a taxi
in the roar of the traffic--
no, at lunch with the Astor’s
in Newport, when it was raining
drip drip drip—but no,
it wasn’t so prosaic--
I took the wife (no, lover)
to the starry mosaic
vault of a mausoleum--
no no no, it was the plaintive
cry of the muezzin
from a mosque in Morocco--
and no it doesn’t matter
darling where it was
on the Black Sea or a bus’s
backseat—doesn’t matter
if in a bar in Zanzibar
or on far out Antares
or in patent dancing shoes
under a nightclub moon.

That’s the best answer perhaps—it doesn’t matter. 
Elizabeth Bishop in Brazil in 1964. Public domain (source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elizabeth_Bishop#/media/File:Elizabeth_Bishop,_1964.jpg)

A Song
​A poem for the sycamore,
a sycamore for the snake
that swims in the shallows
sheltered by its roots, roots
for the land, to hold it in place,

land for the sycamore, on whose
long thick limb we’ve lain
cantilevered over the river
in shade, shade as blue as a jay’s
feathers and free to all comers.

* * *

A poem for board feet standing
in a mane of leaves fluttered by air
of their own making, air
for poet and spouse,
poet and spouse for each other

and land and snake
and river and sycamore,
sycamore for the leaves,
leaves for the air, air for the song
of marriage we are singing.

* * *

Those who venture off trail--
booted against snakes,
whistling Colonel Bogey’s March,
surveyor’s maps rolled underarm--
see dimity patterns

the roots make on ground
checkered with shadow and light,
and with every step are wary:
clutters of leaves may strike,
the stepped-on stick bite back.

* * *

Those tongues flicker
to find us out, warm-blooded
calculators who fell
and bark, slab and mill
through knot and burl

till the tree of knowledge
is pollarded and bare,
a lacquered coat rack
where perch the birds
of abstraction.

* * *

This sycamore rising dog-legged--
or is it a god’s leg, or that
of a god’s horse straining
the wooden musculature
to rear against the bit?--

is hard to fix in words
that do not hobble the power,
but when saw and dozer
cut their buck and wing,
easy to reckon the board feet.

* * *

By this border of blooming
surveyor’s flags in weeks
we’ll step arm in arm
then do-si-do over hardwood;
on a bed as wide as a pond

glimpse in our dreams
afternoons that stretched
a heron’s wing over the river
in woods whose high crowns
for us have been lopped and pulped

* * *

and made into this paper
on whose void the words
elusive as a swarm of gnats
reeling and spinning
bless our reading chair,

our table where a boy
not long from Africa
types the home row letters:
lads fall; all sad lads;
half sad half glad: all fall;

* * *

bless the safe place we have made,
the wooden bowl on the table,
the fruit that fills it, the gnats
eating the ripe fruit, the fruit
of prayer and meditation;

and bless the headboard in whose
shadow we dream the tree
whose fruit we are—logger,
surveyor, poet and spouse,
lads: same tree, same fruit.  
​
Published in Mouth Work (St. Andrews University Press, 2016)
Hope, by Cynthia Reeves (1979)

ANYCE SHEPHERD

The murder of her deputy sheriff husband in 1938 begins my grandmother's fifty-year widowhood. 

NIGHT WEATHER

The quietness of haiku in a book designed and profusely illustrated in color by Katie LaRosa. 

MOUTH WORK

Prize-winning poems on the power of language and love. 

MISSISSIPPI LAWYER

Love letters from a crafty lawyer, William Maybin.
Trying to Break Through, Cynthia Reeves, 1984. 

Trying to Break Through

Every writer dreams of breaking through - to a deeper, richer language; to a greater understanding of the world; to an appreciative, buying audience. This painting by Cynthia Reeves expresses that longing, as well as the commitment to continue even if the breakthrough remains elusive. 

Contact

jsabsherphd@gmail.com