Still Life, with Wine and Occasional Fires
By Mischa Willett
Every once in awhile, a poem will arrive a gift entire: Aphrodite full-grown, sprung from the mind of Jove. This happened once while I was walking around the Spanish Steps in Rome. I was tooling over some lines, a little riff that had been nagging me; saying it over to myself, I saw the whole plan: word by word and sound by sound tumbling out like the sparkling water of the nearby fountain. I didn’t have a pen to hand, so I ducked quickly into the closest open shop, the Cafe Greco, a fancy coffee place where Byron and Tennyson used to write. Scusi, I began, ma sono un poeta… but I could already feel the architecture falling apart in my head. I tried saying the first words aloud to myself while trying to communicate my need for a pen from the barista, who kept telling me the equivalent of “but this is a coffee shop; we have no pens.” I was shaking by this point trying to remember too many things at once and afraid it would disappear. I saw one by the register and grabbed it, scratching lines on a receipt. In my hurry, I knocked over a crystal keepsake glass they had for sale by the register, which shattered instantly into the tub of coffee grounds someone had just cranked. I felt bad, naturally, but I also felt elated. I was getting it! The man tried to explain that I needed to pay for the glass and I tried to feel sorry, but, leaving a bill on the counter, I backed out smiling like a man who had just seen a sea-borne goddess bubbling up from the beyond.
But that doesn’t usually happen.
Normally, though still a frenzy, my writing has built-in speed bumps, to keep the crystal from jittering around. At any given moment, with my Blackwing pencil on the backs of drafts of scholarly essays, I am working on between 80 and 100 poems. No one suggested this practice to me, but it is how, through blunder and error, my writing has evolved. Here’s how it works.
Every day that I go to work on poems, which is, since having children, not every day, alas, I remove a paper hanging file from the drawer in my desk, and before I open it, I pull a book of poetry from a nearby shelf. It could be anyone’s: usually it is something contemporary, but if nothing comes quickly to hand, I turn often to Eugenio Montale, or C. Cavafy, who can usually be trusted. I read them until I find something thrilling, something I wish I had made, or wish I could make. Usually it’s three or four poems, but sometimes I find it on the first foray into the field.
I need that spark, I think, to remind myself why I’m doing this in the first place; why I am carving this time out from the many pressings on my attention and day to build something out of that most pedestrian of mediums: words. All it takes is for me to see a cathedral-face that someone else has erected, even a foundation, to believe again. This is something I was getting at, the fleeting nature of the charm, its inevitable fade, in a poem from my first book called “Ode to Inspiration,” which ends with the line, “Spark, who so recently/ had us rubbing sticks together.” It’s something like transitioning out of the normal space of exchange, where words are operative and utilitarian. I see them gleaming and stacked, resplendent, and recall my vocation as a setter of stones.
Opening the folder then, I start with the poem on top, looking detestable and half-drunk, which I might have begun composing anywhere from last week to eight years ago. I stay to see if I can still see what was once lovely in it, to remember what sparked its creation in that first spinning place. I want it to justify its existence to me. If it happens, I concede to form it further, pressing the language harder, polishing the remnant, giving air to the too-tightly packed image, striking the overly affective, the gaudy baroque.
If I can’t see how to take it further—where does the poem go from here? Is it over?—I slide it to the bottom of the pile, to be considered again when next it rises to the surface. Maybe I will understand what to do with the poem in a month, or after I’ve read more, or in winter.
Sometimes I add only a line or two to the poem and move quickly to the next in the stack; sometimes I add a page, or I think, you know, this really seems like it’s two poems, one that mainly says this, and another built around this sound system. Hold on, let me just get another piece of paper… and that new seed of an idea goes into the hopper for later elaboration as well.
Once I really get a live one, one which I can think of no way to improve, I type it up, destroy the original (which I sometimes regret but nevertheless keep doing) and place that printed copy into another folder I call “the cask” for aging. Ezra Pound said that “poetry is news that stays news.” I know enough about myself as an artist to realize I can be myopic about my babies. I love these little things I’ve made, probably out of all proportion with their actual value. So as a check against my instant shouts of Hosanna, sending a poem out into the world before it has reached maturity, I sit on them for a while. Each month or so, I’ll check in on the cask to see if anything looks ready. Often, I'll change a word here or there; often, I’ll forget having written it and read one of them in genuine admiration. Man! I'll think (and often say aloud), listen to this!
At that point, I’ll begin searching for a home in some journal for it to make its introduction to the world. That submissions process, and the other one whereby these grapes are crushed and bottled and we make a book are discussions best left to another day, but this is the ground out of which the vine fruits—for better or for worse, my practice.
Mischa Willett is the author of The Elegy Beta (Mockingbird, 2020) and Phases ( Cascade, 2017) and of poems, essays, translations, and academic articles which appear widely. He teaches English at Seattle Pacific University.
