The Poetic Field

springs from a larger perspective. It calls me to live in the gap

between seeking poetic expression and finding poetic expression.

When compelling ideas and words arise, as they always do,

I craft them into verse that pleases me. The exchange is a back-and-

forth, line-by-line thing built on curiosity, the willingness

to be lost without rushing to judgment, and receptivity to a

greater field as it coalesces around my intent to explore poetry.

      The poetic field is not some magical thing, but simply one

of the countless fields about us. In truth, we are field creatures.

We create fields and use them to order the stuff of reality at

every scale. In a room, we could map the field of people, furniture,

air currents and hundreds of other things. Such local fields

overlap, interrelate and combine to form more inclusive fields

as systems or environments or taxonomies. We write books on

them, like dictionaries for the field of words or biology texts for

the field of life.

      I find relating to the poetic field much like sight, with its

interplay of focused and peripheral vision. Just as the point of

focus floats in the broad field of perception, like the moon in

the night sky, so the poetic field extends far beyond my normal

way of writing.

      Try a sight experiment. Look at an object about 10-feet

away and soften your eyes so you are aware of both the object

and the peripheral field. The peripheral world, rather than

sharp and clear, is one of movement, sensed shapes, patterns

and blocks of color. In holding both focus and periphery (this

can take some practice), you enter the full visual field. Similarly,

in poetry, I hold my focus as the shape and patterns of lines

stream in from the periphery.

      Because I want to write new and novel lines, I select from

the peripheral poetic field words wrapped in surprise and

delight. This is especially true of first lines, many of which

come at me like fire crackers on a dark night. Their light and

sound catch me off guard and I lean toward them, cupping my

inner ear to hear what comes next. Here are some first lines

that started me down the road to poems:

      “Don’t you know the world holds its breath until your lungs

give it air.”

      “Even sheep in wolves’ clothing eat grass on the way to muttonhood.”

      “We will become our own horizons then.”

      “When there’s no place to go, the going gets good.”

      “I break like a stone turned on the wind through endless

turns of heat and cold.”

      “Who made grass king of suburbia?”

      “If I hand you a cup empty of tea, would you grow full in the

drinking?”

      Perhaps one in 20 or 30 such lines end up as a poem. Many

lines intrigue me, but have yet to go beyond themselves, for

instance:

      “Circles in emptiness scribe centers without circumference,

everywhere and nowhere at once.”

      “The silence stretched between us like gentleness on soft

ground.”

      “Grow original things in an easy gradient back toward yourself.”

      “Our eyes met. For the briefest of moments I laid my antiquities

at your feet and you laid yours at mine.”

      “It’s absolutely crazy to let go the handlebars, but how else

to free your hands to shape air.”

      “Carpals and tarsals and their meta brethren worship different

faces of God.”

      “Behold black and the excess potential of its days.”

      Since the poetic field is everywhere in the greater field of

language, lines also come from the outer world. My job is to

grab them as they go past and make them my own. Here are

some:*

      “The lawn was full of south.” I’ve spent some early-morning

hours trying to put flesh on this Emily Dickinson line. It

nags at me still.

      I keep this line adapted from a William Stafford poem by

my desk and go back to it time and again: “They want a wilderness

with a map. But how about…the many places a road can’t

find.”

      My friend Terry said that when his cat Cinnamon passed on

“her eyes stopped reflecting the moon…and the moment

cracked in two.”

      “The inches we need are everywhere about us.”

      From a radio interview with a musician just before he played

live on the air: “I have suffered for my music, and it’s time you

did too.”

      Here’s a statement attributed to John Phillips Souza when

asked about jazz: “It makes me want to bite my grandmother.”

      And another by a major league pitcher about the slugger

Hank Aaron: “Trying to sneak a fastball by him is like trying to

sneak sunrise past a rooster.”

      In talking about the differences between his world and the

Western world, an Afghani tribal leader told the US ambassador:

“You have all the watches. We have all the time.”

      I’ve gone on at some length with these lines to give you a

sense of the richness that streams toward me simply because I

look. The endless flow of striking lines says poetry is always

within reach.

      When I am in harmony with the poetic field, the lines that

visit are simultaneously inclusive and wide and narrow. If my

focus is too limited, I fixate, become overly literal and tend to

confirm what I already know. If I am too loose, I can’t hold the

tension between focus and field. I lose the field’s shape and my

resonance to it. I know I’ve lost my balance when what I write

bores me.

      My ability to land on enticing lines depends on a soft stance,

much like juxtaposing focused and peripheral vision. Doing so

leads beyond the ground I know to a place where I give the

emerging voice its voice and the wisdom below my wisdom a

podium.

      Poetry moves in my field because I welcome it. My predisposition

to novel wording brings novel wording. My presence

affects the poetic field, so I walk in a self-created Michael subfield

that surfaces familiar ideas in strange garb. Here I seek at

the edge of the known driven by the spirit of inquiry and the

spaciousness of not knowing. I simply need to embrace as much

of the field as I can and welcome what comes “moment to

moment in bridging conversation”.**