Decidedly uncertain

By RANDY KOCH

I’ve known for a long time that I prefer clarity, order, certainty, and the predictability of established schedules. I function best in the midst of recognizable patterns, find efficiency most feasible if the unexpected is either anticipated or evaded. However, these are precisely the habits, the preferences that, while they give me the illusion of being in control, make change and growth difficult. This is true both in my daily life and more particularly when I try to write different, better poems. And so it came to this:
I vowed to violate my own aesthetic principles. To eschew the techniques of craft I’ve long held as gospel truth. To convert my on-paper voice -- the one dense with concrete detail, ordered chronologically or linearly, dependent primarily on metaphor and simile for figures of speech, heavily reliant on action verbs, rife with dependably parallel lists and series, and stripped down to the tightest way of saying something. And eventually I realized that these are the things that poet Jane Hirshfield avoids and that this is why her poems feel strangely, even enticingly uncertain, quiet, contemplative, and mysterious in a way that mine do not. Of course, I didn’t realize all of this right away but read her poems simply for the sheer pleasure of listening to a voice that was not mine and thinking that she might help me -- for good or bad, I didn’t know -- discover a way to change.
And so for two hours every afternoon from Wednesday through Sunday during the past couple of weeks, I stood at the chest-high bookshelf in the living room, leaned over the off-white pages of Hirshfield’s Given Sugar, Given Salt, read her poems aloud, and waited. Like William Stafford, I hoped for a nibble, for an association, something, anything that would pull my mind off her page and prod me to write something unexpected on the laptop open on the kitchen table. Sometimes I read only a line or two, at others an entire poem before I typed a phrase or line of my own. Then, before I went back to Hirshfield, I sometimes leaned against the clothes dryer in the kitchen with my eyes closed or paced past the bookshelf, across the living room to the front door where I looked out at the cottonwoods and traffic on Harney. I let my mind wander, gave it a chance to find the next thing, waited for the surprising image or language, refused any line that seemed to logically follow whatever I’d just written, and let the poem find its own subconscious associations. Then, before any inkling of stuckness approached, I went back to Hirshfield and read another line or two, maybe a whole poem, whatever it took until the restlessness of an idea sent me back to the laptop to type the next thing. On Friday this process resulted in a 15-line poem called “The Woman at the Door,” on Saturday a 12-line poem called “How Slowly Might You Travel,” and on Sunday 22 lines titled “Closure.” All three are early drafts and still need work but felt different from almost anything I’d written during the past five months.
Later, in subsequent days I tried to quantify and classify what Hirshfield does in her poems that makes her voice so different from mine. What I discovered is that she accepts many things I reject, nearly all of which contribute to that meditative stillness, that openness inviting the reader and the world in but denying the certainty, the clarity towards which I often gravitate.
She frequently hedges, qualifies statements with words like “perhaps,” “it seems,” “almost,” and “I don’t know.” She relies on vague indefinite pronouns, particularly “something,” “nothing,” and “everything,” as she does near the end of “Patched Carpet” -- “But something in me has diminished” -- or at the end of “For Horses, Horseflies” -- “Under the surface, something whispers, / ‘Anything can be done.’” She starts lines with the wordy, passive, existential “there.” In “Leather” she writes, “There are times I feel myself cow stripped of her leather,” in “The Gallop,” “There are days the whole house moves at a gallop,” and in “Always She Reads the Same Translation,” “There are those who think the poem says something simple. / There are those who do not see themselves in its ink.” The “there” form is not only wordy -- she could easily conflate “There are times” to “Sometimes,” “There are those who think” to “Some think” -- but often suggests, of course, that something doesn’t act but mostly is. However, in Given Sugar, Given Salt, Hirshfield frequently contradicts the existential and through the use of negatives emphasizes what is not, particularly by using “nothing,” “not,” “neither,” “no,” and “nor.” Similarly, explicit contradictions also work against certainty in her poems: “I lied, or did not lie” (5), “The world changes or does not change by these labors” (52), “Nothing needs to be added. Yet we do” (44), and “to make the unwanted wanted” (32). Last, in 25 of the 69 poems in this collection she asks questions and almost always follows Richard Hugo’s advice from The Triggering Town: “don’t answer it, or answer a question not asked, or defer” (40), any one of which results in a pleasant, enticing indeterminacy.
There are few things about which I’m certain (or not), some principles of writing that seem perhaps neither firm nor flexible, applicable not only to prose but poems, that leave me wondering, has my writing changed me or have I changed my writing? Or is it all the result of someone, something outside either? Happily, surprisingly, I’m decidedly uncertain.