Closing out July with a post on something that I've been asked many times by non-writers: Where'd you come up with that? or something like this question. I sometimes answer maybe a little too glibly, Life, of course! or I say vaguely, I dunno, it just comes to me.
Our heads are jammed with images, visual, aural, tactile, and so on. We add images continuously to our mental libraries, and while we may forget some of them consciously, I'm convinced that no image ever gets deleted. The older I get, the more images are stored in my memory bank, my personal image library, for use in a poem at some point. That's why I have more material to draw from today than I did when I was 25, much much more, and why there'll be more tomorrow.
I don't have to go to Timbuktu to find more images for my library. I barely even have to get out of bed. As long as I'm awake, I'm gathering them and storing them away and, somewhere, somehow, preparing them for use in a poem or some other writing. I do believe that I have to be awake to take images on board. I once tried learning Portuguese by playing a language CD for a week each night while I slept . . . I got nothin'.
So when someone asks me where I get my material for a poem, that's where. Usually.
Sometimes I help the image-storage-and-retrieval process along. I overhear a conversation on a commuter train; somebody uses a phrase that sounds like the first line of a poem which I try to make a draft of later that evening. The person in the apartment above my London flat paces back and forth, from window to kitchen (hardwood floors, no rugs, heavy shoes), and I get a sense of a rhythm that serves a measure of poetry that weeks later produces the thud/scuff/tap of a poem about fretfulness. The man at the next table is reading The New York Times with his coffee; I spy a headline on the page he's not reading that suggests a theme and a title for a poem that I write months, even years later.
Some of the images that I grab from my personal library are recent additions, as in, just saw that or heard that or smelled that, etc. Some were logged there last week, months ago, when I was a boy.
My brain (yours too, o poet!) is a sponge that's never full. I can't entirely control what it sponges up from the world I walk around in. Yes, I can try to focus my attention on this, that and the other. I can try to look out for, and sometimes do find, "poetry" in that world. But that's usually the suspect material, the beautiful prospect, the lovely face, the spectacular event, that I trust the least for poetry. Most often, my poems draw on those mundane images that my brain has been sponging up continuously since I woke up, that have been filed away without much notice on my part, but that are there for me to use when I get down to the business of making a poem.
For it's in the making of the poem that this library of images unlocks, throws its doors wide, admits me to the stacks for browsing. The older I get, the more I count on that library for material.
Here's what I love most about "materializing" a poem in this way: the act is highly associative. Even when I try wracking my brain for that thought or fact or image of an image that would go nicely, thank you, in this or that passage, that might introduce a turn or bring this poem to closure, my creative mind drags or dredges other images back into consciousness, back into the world, as it were. Often, what comes off the library shelf is loaded with ancillary images that have little or nothing to do with the poem I thought I was trying to write. Sometimes I'll reject these tag-alongs and keep looking. Sometimes I'll let them take over the poem and drive it somewhere unexpected. Sometimes I'll try them out in different phases, passages, lines, organizations, keeping only a piece of an image. And sometimes they'll lead me on, again by pure association, to "just what I've been looking for." Even if I didn't fully understand that I was looking for it.
Of course, if and when this pandemic subsides enough that I can get out of the house and go somewhere like Timbuktu, I'll go. I'll take my sponge and my library with me, too.
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