We at Wednesdays@One frequently invoke commonplaces in our poems, those "sayings" and turns of phrase that are "common" to us all and that we collect for ourselves throughout our lives. We use them to launch our writing, to underpin our poems, to add a flourish to some thought or feeling we're trying to convey through a poem. We sometimes "borrow" the thought they express without actually quoting the expression itself. A commonplace is just about what the portmanteau word says it is: a commonly expressed and/or understood passage or phrase, in other words, a "saying."
I started thinking about commonplaces and how we use them in poems just this week during our W@1 salon. One of our writers, in a poem whose title itself is a commonplace, wrote this:
She watches mutely
no judgment or tears
as we act without method
gamble without strategy
Nothing new under
yet endless
green incarnations
drop without
consent into dark limbo . . .
I'm referring specifically to the expression, "Nothing new under." It is, as others in our salon reminded us, a Biblical commonplace (from Ecclesiastes 1:9) referring to the sun and assuring us that "what has been will be again." In the poem above, the writer borrows the part of the commonplace we're most likely to connect with and applies it to the sun's "opposite," the moon. That's pretty clever!
Commonplaces are a way of organizing our experience or our memories, and of conferring upon them something more universal than our personal take. Besides that, commonplaces can help us lift our poems out of the mundane, investing them with insight or even wisdom--because the wisdom belongs to Humankind, not just to us alone. * They're like ready-made gravitas.
Commonplaces historically make up "commonplace books," basically journals of nuggets of wisdom or good writing that we pick up in our reading and copy down for ourselves to return to later. I have journals full of such phrases and passages. Even when they come from relatively obscure writers and texts, they "ring true" in a way that says to me this was written for the ages.
Look. I just used a commonplace: rings true. Or maybe that's just a cliché. Or maybe a cliché is a commonplace by another, less charitable name.
You can use commonplaces in a poem in a variety of ways and for a variety of effects and meanings. Sometimes our W@1 writers append an epigram to a poem that's meant to expand upon, comment on, reflect upon or illustrate the thought expressed by that commonplace. Sometimes we insert a commonplace for tonal effect (irony, for example) in the middle of an idea we explore in a poem, or as a prop for a persona (the wise owl, the imperious autocrat, the spurned lover, etc.).
Sometimes we take issue with the thought expressed through a commonplace. Imagine a feminist writing "a woman's place is in the home" in a poem.
My point is that commonplaces are, as the word suggests, loci of agreed-upon thought or wisdom or truth, places where we meet each other in understanding. They aren't facts, like, "the coronavirus is real," or "Joe Biden won the election." Facts are "truths," as we've seen over our adult lives, that can be manipulated by anybody for any reason. Even if they appear to be self-evident to us, others may see them as maneuvered and provisional. They can be argued with. No, a commonplace is an idea expressed in a way that most if not all people might say, "I can't argue with that." Like this:
A man sits as many risks as he runs.
Thoreau wrote that in Walden, along with many other ideas that have stayed with us as commonplaces of good thinking and good writing.
The world could use more commonplaces in its thinking right now, don't you agree? And maybe it's up to we poets to make that happen. So let's give it a try.
Below are commonplaces I culled more or less at random from my bookshelves. (I suppose it's a commonplace to suggest that I could pick anything "at random" from a library I've spent a lifetime building, carefully and consciously.) Choose one of them and use it in a poem, as an epigram appended to the beginning, as an opening line or passage, as a theme for an idea you develop in a poem (that is, as a rhetorical device), as a metaphorical device on which you build a series of images and associations, as a poetic device which you deploy rhythmically and figuratively.
THEN, think of somebody you know personally who doesn't seem to share your ideas about the world. Who might have a different politics, faith, understanding of knowledge and/or science, or who might subscribe to a different set of facts than you. Share your commonplace-derived poem with that person. Your goal is NOT to berate, educate, shame, convince or otherwise try to bring this person round to your way of thinking. Instead, it's to find common ground, to write a piece about which this person might say, "I don't need to argue with that." Another way of putting this is, opinions are tools for staking out personal ground. Commonplaces are tools for finding . . . ahem . . . common ground. Try to do this without platitudes (which admittedly may be another form of commonplaces, just commonplaces that no one trusts anymore).
Here are your options . . .
I would write on the lintels of the door-post, Whim. **
Every advantage has its tax. **
Another sort of false prayers are our regrets. **
It makes no difference whether the appeal is to numbers or to one. The faith that stands on authority is not faith. **
Avoiding self-delusion: here's a useful life lesson for all of us. +
Consider the 'unwanted sexual advance': what tangled tales of backfired desires, bristling umbrage, and mutual misunderstanding lurk behind this sterile little phrase. +
There are certain men who just like getting women mad at them, for reasons that are open to speculation. +
Nobody looks through a book of pictures of women without noticing whether the women are attractive or not. ~
It feels true only in a trivial sense to say I make my books. What I really feel is that they are made, through me, by literature; and I'm their (literature's) servant. ~
To describe oneself as young is to face that one is no longer young. ~
To seek God is to seek reality. And this must be something more than a flight from images to ideas. The interior life is not merely what is not exterior. #
There is something you cannot know about a wren by cutting it up in a laboratory . . . #
No comments:
Post a Comment