Everything but the Kitchen Zinc

I wrote a note to poet Carolyn Martin, who had published in the May issue of Verse-Virtual, telling her how much I liked her poem “You Do Not Have to Be Good," and singling out some examples of language I’d particularly liked:

I love your attention to the sound of words in "You do not have to be good." The way the lyrical flow of lines 2-4 come up against "we've been duped." Internal rhyme in "indulgences that smudge." The consonant play with the d's in "don't add up to good."  The lines where every vowel sound is different sing too -- "of blooms disguised as weeds."

She wrote back, thanking me for the nice thoughts, and thanking me for noticing things she hadn’t even known were there.

Well, yes. Of course. That’s as it should be. It’s not our job as writers to know everything that’s in a poem we’ve written. We don’t exactly have to be like Robert Browning, who, when asked by a fan to explain the meaning of a line said, “Madam, when I wrote that line, only God and Robert Browning knew what it meant. Now only God knows.” But the truth is, if you know everything that’s in your poem, that means you haven’t put enough into it.

I once wrote a poem called “The Map of the Bear.” It had a line in it that read “Above, the route’s engraved on fire,” and people reading it have told me how much they liked my poem about the night sky and the constellation Ursa Major. And of course, they’re right. Ursa Major is the map of the bear, the route engraved on the night sky, the map that points to true north.

The only thing is, when I wrote the poem, it did not occur to me for one second that the map of the bear had anything to do with Ursa Major. And I probably only put in the line about the route being engraved on fire because I needed a half-rhyme for “bear.”

What had started me writing this poem was not a desire to find my true north, nor to probe the mysteries of the night sky. What started it was a mistake. I was reading something about a performance artist who explores places where the only map is the map of the bear.

Say what?

Say what, indeed. I read the sentence again. She explores places where the only map is the map of the heart. And that pretty much ended my reading for the day, as I realized that I didn’t care about places you could find with a map of the heart, but I really wanted to know about those places that one could  only  find with the map of the bear. And I was only going to find those places by starting to put words down on paper.

Donald Hall told me about a way that mistakes can make a poem. He wrote all his first drafts in longhand, but his handwriting was so bad he couldn’t always read what he wrote. In a poem about being in the kitchen on his first Christmas alone, after the death of Jane Kenyon, he wrote a line about pressing his penis “into zinc and butcherblock,” where before it had always been his wife’s buttocks. As he typed up his handwritten draft, he wondered why he had included zinc, when to the best of his knowledge there was no zinc in his kitchen. He finally realized that he must have meant the sink, but by then he had formed an attachment to zinc, and he left it in. The butcherblock stayed in the poem because it had actually been in the kitchen, and because it sounded good with zinc.

But when you think about it, zinc has powerful associations in the context of this image. Zinc is a metal—hard and lifeless, the opposite of warm, pliant flesh—but it’s most often used as an alloy, bonded with another metal to make a strong and unbreakable union.

And a friend remarked to Hall what a powerful symbol butcherblock was—a symbolic castration, a response to the loss of the object of his love and desire. Hall agreed: that was certainly true. And it had not crossed his mind as he wrote the poem.

And it didn’t have to. Things make their way into a poem by one means or another. And once they get there, if they’re right, they furnish the poem, and they furnish the imagination, and like all furnishings, they can be moved around by whatever reader moves in and inhabits the poem. If your reader wants to make love in the kitchen and slice up salami and cheese in the bedroom, as long as you’ve provided the condoms and the cold cuts, why not?

In the old game, Twenty Questions, you first had to guess if something was animal, vegetable or mineral. Butcherblock and zinc are vegetable and mineral…the wrong answers for a penis seeking the animal warmth of his wife’s buttocks.

Here’s one stanza of Hall’s long poem “Letter at Christmas,” from his collection Without, written after the death of his wife of 23 years:

I’d be interested in hearing about any other lucky mistakes that made into poems and given them a new focus or a new direction, or things that other people have seen in your poems that you didn’t know were there.