Over coffee this morning, I began thinking about mistakes, fortuitous ones in particular. We've discussed happy error before in our W@1 salons, how poems sometimes emerge from a misspelling, a typo, a mis-used part of speech, an unintentional locution or expression, a mixed metaphor. The list of errors can go on and on, at least in my own experience.
Once many years ago I mis-typed a subordinating "that," in a line of poetry, leaving the "t" off. Rereading the draft afterward, I saw something in the odd "hat" inserted at the beginning of what was intended as a subordinate clause. The error introduced new (if slightly nonsensical) meaning to an otherwise standard construction. Art invaded grammar. For more than five years after that serendipitous error, "hat" served as a kind of totem of the imagination, popping up in poem after poem until it became too programmatic itself, like standardized grammar, and I dropped it.
If you were to read these poems today, you likely wouldn't get the connection between "that" and "hat." The meaning is more or less hermetic, idiosyncratic, personal, which is to say, obscure. Maybe even a failure of imagination and feeling. That would be one way of looking at it. Another might be through the lens of Derrida (yes, I know how this sounds): a that/hat relational notion, a presence expressing an absence and vice versa, a "this/not this" binary code, a sliding signifier, a packed gesture. But I get the connection. I cannot deploy the word "hat" today in a poem without also deploying the relative pronoun (and the demonstrative!). There. That.
And because I get the connection, the connection bears big meaning. Which is? Well, the title of this post, for one thing. Poems proceed by accident sometimes. If we're lucky, by happy accident. For another, Hats-as-Thats exists in a Dr. Seussian world . . . which is where poetry thrives, right?
Not every error leads you to new ideas or fresh takes on the art you practice. Not every "experiment" delivers new insight or knowledge. Not every mistake is an experiment; it's often just a screw-up. And not every time do I recognize a meaning-making error. Happy accidents have a great capacity for going unnoticed, by their authors especially. By this author especially.
So the serendipity of error, fortuitous error, depends on my ability to see it. If I do, a door is opened to me in a poem to avenues of art I hadn't anticipated when setting out to write the poem. Then all I have to do is accept it for what it is, an open door, and step through. But that's another problem for another post.
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