poetry survival guide - #2

Stevie Smith

The Photograph

They photographed me young upon a tiger skin
And now I do not care at all for kith and kin,
For oh the tiger nature works within.

Parents of England, not in smug
Fashion fancy set on rug
Of animal fur the darling you would hug,

For lately born is not too young
To scent the savage he sits upon,
And tiger-possessed abandon all things human.


*


Gary Snyder

How Poetry Comes To Me

It comes blundering over the
Boulders at night, it stays
Frightened outside the
Range of my campfire
I go to meet it at the
Edge of the light

*

Smith, as a poet, is a unique force in British literature. The body of her work – its thematic explorations – puts me in mind of a twentieth century Emily Dickinson.

Snyder – a beat poet who has his own niche in that realm – is a writer who makes the process look so simple. His poems – with an Eastern twist, of course – have the ease of William Stafford or Robert Frost.

Both Smith and Snyder are at one with poetry’s wild nature. Poetry isn’t really a world of thought – instead, it’s a wild landscape, filled with untamed, sometimes unruly, but always revealing entities of existence. What we find in that wilderness is both universal and highly personal. Those deepest chords in Dickinson, Stafford, Smith also sing in me – if I listen. But I have to learn to be a good listener.

*

The wilderness of Smith, as represented in “The Photograph,” is the tiger-nature, the marvelous beast, that’s inside the poet – already inside the poet. Notice the different approach in Snyder’s poem. The wild nature – the poem, the blundering beast – comes to the poet. It’s not about thinking. It’s about listening. Paying attention to. Letting go.

*

And the alternative…? Dulled, senseless writing that isn’t my own. Superficial, plastic, hollow. Rilke’s “The Panther” is the perfect warning.