Disturbed . . . and writing poems (10.30.20)

This is not a blog for Halloween, despite the blue moon we're expecting tomorrow evening!

I was reading here a review of a new retrospective collection (Vol. 1) of the music of Joni Mitchell.  Recalling her earliest life as a song writer, she says, 

“I think I started writing to develop my own private world . . . and also because I was disturbed.”

I want to say, "Well, heck yeah!"  Especially of that latter statement, because I was disturbed.  But what a curious way to describe the creative urge.

Now, Mitchell was speaking at least partly of being abandoned by the father of her first child, which she gave away at adoption when starting out in cold, cold Canada.  (He packed off to California, where "everything is warmer.")  But it got me thinking about how much writing gets done out of some form of disturbance or other.

I'm not going into any essay about poetry and madness.  That's for somebody else to ponder.  What I have in mind is a much less debilitating kind of "disturbed-ness," albeit a kind that certainly interrupts your day without warning. For me, and I think for my friends at Wednesdays@One, and for just about every writer of poetry I've ever encountered, something happens to get me to take a note, write out a line, begin a poem, stay engaged through a first draft.  It might be a memory.  It might be a recognition or an epiphany.  It might be an overheard remark or a rhythm in someone's speech.  

Once, I discovered a black, black house fly on a windowsill.  It was winter and a foot of snow had fallen overnight.  The sill had recently been painted a brilliant white so the fly stood out from this background of whiteness in three glorious dimensions.  It had died there in all that whiteness, just inside a single pane of glass that didn't do much at all to keep out the cold, perfectly balanced and triangular.  It cast a voluptuously small shadow in the sunlight.  It so disturbed my morning's routine that the image imprinted itself, apparently permanently so, if this blog note is any indicator.  And it demanded a poem, which I wrote some weeks later, made of wide, prosy lines and fashioned into three slab-like stanzas of equal length.

Someday I'll explore how that poem's blocky but regular shape reflects the encounter with death it describes, or rather, tries to counterweigh it.  But for here, let it suffice to say I wrote because I was disturbed by that image of black on white and the thought of a mighty event--a creature's death--happening there on the windowsill.  Out of which, a poem must be made.

It's the business of an artist, poets included, to be continually open to disturbance.  I think the rest of the world depends on artists being so.  And there lies one of the commitments we make to art: to be disturbed, and then to make art.