FINDING THE NOTE

by Robert Thomas

If you want to be an artist, is it condemning yourself to mediocrity even to think about craft? That’s the question that came to mind when I was asked to write something about craft. Craft is what those academic MFA types worry about, not real artists, isn’t it? As Allen Ginsberg famously said, “First thought, best thought.” But we can see this romantic thought embraced long before the Beats. One of the most damning remarks ever made about craft was in a letter by Keats: “If Poetry comes not as naturally as the leaves to a tree, it had better not come at all.”

Nevertheless, we may be grateful that Keats revised “The Eve of St. Agnes” so that instead of the embarrassment of watching Madeline “unclasp her bosom jewels” and “loosen her bursting bodice” (yes, that was Keats’ first draft!), she “unclasps her warmèd jewels” and “loosens her fragrant bodice”—changes that enhance not only the sensuality but the precision of the images, even if the bursting bodice came as naturally to Keats as leaves to a tree.

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In 1997 Dustin Hoffman received the Golden Globe lifetime achievement award, and in his acceptance speech he talked about an artist’s craft:

I remember being in a hotel room in 1967 in San Francisco one night and I’m flipping the TV dials after doing all this promoting all day long, and there is this little old Jewish guy with a bald head sitting at a piano in his living room and he’s being interviewed. And I suddenly realize I’m looking at Igor Stravinsky, the great Russian-American composer.

The interviewer is saying to him, “So Mr. Stravinsky, what is the greatest moment for you? Is it when you finally write your symphony?” And Stravinsky says, “No, No, No.” He sounds like a New York cab driver. “Is it when you’ve heard it played the first time by a symphony?” And he says, “No, no, no.” “What about opening night when they premier it and herald it as being one of the great works of the 20th century?” And he says, “No, no, no.” “So what is the greatest moment for you?”

He’s there sitting at the piano with some music on the thing there and he says, “I’m sitting here at the piano all day long, and for three, four hours I’m trying to find a note. I can’t find the note, and I’m going bum bum … bum Bum … bum BUM for three hours. Finally after three hours I find that note. Bum bum! That’s the moment. There is nothing like it. That’s everything.” So I started crying ….

That’s a perfect description of craft in the service of art. The art, after all, is in knowing which note is the note. But it must be done without becoming too obsessive. I once had a fantasy that if only my brain was a computer that could scan the entire Oxford English Dictionary in a fraction of a second, then writing would simply be a matter of picking out the perfect word to follow the last word, then picking out the perfect word to follow that one (perhaps Keats’ warmèd jewels).

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Pop quiz: What great poem initially ended with these lines?

Tension is but the vigour of the mind
Cannon the God and father of mankind.

Who would guess Yeats’ “The Circus Animals’ Desertion,” which unforgettably closes like this?

I must lie down where all the ladders start
In the foul rag and bone shop of the heart.

Yeats’ poem is perfect for looking at craft because it’s about the writing process from the very first line: “I sought a theme and sought for it in vain.” I’m embarrassed to admit how often when I write I find Yeats’ lines going through my mind: “Players and painted stage took all my love / And not those things that they were emblems of.” 

It is with very mixed feelings that I recognize this phenomenon in my own writing process, the way, for example, a love poem to my wife may metamorphose into a poem about the blue in Van Gogh’s painting of almond trees, with almost nothing visibly left of the original impulse. Artists are guilty of many sins, and the original sin may be when the almond trees “took all my love” from what originally prompted it. In some sense a revision is always a betrayal of the original poem, a sort of second marriage in which we betray the first one in our attempt to avoid all the terrible or not-so-terrible mistakes we made in it.

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Dickinson is one poet we can observe repeatedly finding the note, as she often revises just one word or phrase in a poem. Her original description of a helpless artist as “Powerless to unfold” was electrified by her revised description of the artist as “Paralyzed, with Gold.” Consider her simple revision of “The Thunder hurried slow” to “The Thunders gossiped low.” Gossiped! 

Despite Dickinson’s justified reputation as a poet who wrote in extreme solitude, she exchanged some almost workshop-like letters with her beloved sister-in-law Susan Dickinson, who wrote some remarkably poetic critiques of Emily’s poems:

I am not suited dear Emily with the second verse—It is remarkable as the chain lightning that blinds us hot nights in the Southern sky but it does not go with the ghostly shimmer of the first verse as well as the other one—It just occurs to me that the first verse is complete in itself it needs no other, and can’t be coupled—Strange things always go alone—as there is only one Gabriel and one Sun—You never made a peer for that verse, and I guess your kingdom doesn’t hold one—I always go to the fire and get warm after thinking of it, but I never can again— . . . . . Sue

Those were Susan’s comments on Dickinson’s great poem “Safe in their Alabaster Chambers.” Like countless MFA students in the future, Dickinson revised the poem and sent back a new version. It’s impossible to know whether the note she included (“Perhaps this verse would please you better”) had, also like countless MFA students, a sarcastic tone, but one may suspect. In any case, the final poem was exponentially better than the first draft, which had ended like this:

Light laughs the breeze
In her Castle above them—
Babbles the Bee in a stolid Ear,
Pipe the Sweet Birds in ignorant cadence—
Ah, what sagacity perished here!

The “final” version ends indelibly like this:

Grand go the Years—in the Crescent—above them—
Worlds scoop their Arcs—
And Firmaments—row—
Diadems—drop—and Doges—surrender—
Soundless as dots—on a Disc of Snow—

I put “final” in quotes because (surprise!) Susan’s criticism above was actually in response to the later version, which Emily had written in response to an earlier critique by Susan, and Emily wrote two more versions after Susan’s later critique, one of which she sent Sue with a possibly even more sarcastic note, “Is this frostier?” Thankfully, we still have the great second (“Disc of Snow”) version. Dickinson notably ignored Susan’s advice to simply delete the second stanza but instead wrote four versions of it, each taking the poem in a strikingly different direction.

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Many years ago I had the poet Stan Rice as a teacher, and he said that whenever he’d drafted a poem he’d think of the ending of Yeats’ poem “Byzantium”: “That dolphin-torn, that gong-tormented sea.” He’d think of how great that line was and how his work wasn’t done if his own poem didn’t measure up. It was a great lesson, and it reminds me of Rice’s own craft as a teacher: both to come up with the perfect line to illustrate the value of craft, and also to convey the lesson so compassionately, not telling me I’m no Yeats, but telling me that we’re comrades in this poetry thing, and this is what we do: we aim not for the stars but for the dolphin-torn sea.

Another teacher once told me that what I needed to work on in my poems was structure. I believe his exact words were “Structure. Structure. Structure.” At first I resisted, thinking he wanted me to write more like John Donne and less like Allen Ginsberg. Then I understood he meant structure in a larger sense, the sense in which a Jackson Pollock painting has as much structure as the Sistine Chapel. All that “structure” means is we need to make the classic painter’s gesture and step back from the canvas occasionally to look at our work in perspective. We get so obsessed, rewriting the last line of a poem a hundred times trying to find the right note. Sometimes I’ve found that the most helpful strategy in that situation is to take a step back and take my time rereading the poem from start to finish. Maybe the last line doesn’t work because the first line is wrong. Maybe what this poem about baseball needs is precisely a section in the middle about a medieval tapestry, or a meditation on anarcho-capitalism.

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Perhaps it does not go without saying that different writers find inspiration in different places, some in memories, some in images, some in texts, some in dreams, some in emotions, some in observations. The point is that some of these inspirations are closer to language than others: some arrive close to “ready-made” in words, and some don’t. Visual inspirations may require more work to be translated into language, and complex emotions the most work of all.

If a god is singing through you, it would be blasphemous to edit or craft their language. In that case, first thought, best thought! But if inspiration comes in the form of a vision or a “feeling,” not a voice, you would want to craft your words as perfectly as possible to capture that feeling.

Craft may be most crucial when the issue is being true to an insight or an emotion. In Stephen Dunn’s poem “Legacy” about his father, the father tells the son a story about his past. The poet could have said the story made him angry (and we can be forgiven for imagining him saying that in an early draft), but how much more powerful and precise it is when he describes the experience as “making anger the emotion I still have to think about.” 

Dunn’s long poem is full of such precise insights. When the poet’s grandfather’s mistress “began to die / and wouldn’t die fast, / when money became love’s test, / grandfather had no one ….” Think of how much craft went into the phrase “when money became love’s test”: what a profound and complex insight is condensed into five words. The poet’s father gives money to the grandfather for his mistress, but never tells his wife, who blames him all his life for losing their money “at the track,” and the father never betrays the grandfather’s secret. Was his mother’s anger at his father justified? Is his own anger at his father (and his grandfather) justified? Those are just a couple of the reasons that anger is the emotion the poet still has to think about. Again, how much emotion and thought have been condensed into a few words!

Another example of a poem perfectly crafted to capture a complex emotion and also a complex political dynamic is William Matthews’ “President Reagan’s Visit to New York, October 1984.” The poet is driving through New York City and, stopped for a minute at a stop light, a black man squeegees his windshield and he gives the man a dollar, “the going rate.” The poem ends:

The light turned green. Under a soot-slurred sky
we gave each other a parting glance.
What nation you can build on that, was ours.

I don’t know if there was an earlier draft of the poem, but I would bet that Matthews worked long and hard to capture the fragile but real bond between two men dealing in very different ways with Reagan’s visit and all it meant when “Pomp churned through midtown like a combine.” Matthews could have phrased the final line in many ways (or omitted it entirely), but even down to the placement of the comma, he has crafted it perfectly to be hopeful, honest, and heartbreaking.

To return once more to Dickinson, think of the emotional knot of hope and despair that she captures in her poem (640) that begins, “I cannot live with You—” and ends:

So We must meet apart—
You there—I—here—
With just the Door ajar
That Oceans are—and Prayer—
And that White Sustenance—
Despair—

When I call it “hope and despair,” that is my failure of craft to capture the feeling that Dickinson so devastatingly does, for whatever the poem may express, it is not hope. Dickinson originally wrote “pale exercise” where the final poem says “White Sustenance.” You can imagine Dickinson, like Stravinsky, struggling for hours to find the right note—“pale exercise,” no, “pale privilege,” no—and finally, bum bum: “White Sustenance.” That’s the note. That’s everything.

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Robert Thomas’s lyrical novella Bridge (BOA Editions) received a PEN Center USA Literary Award. His first book, Door to Door (Fordham), was selected by Yusef Komunyakaa for the Poets Out Loud Prize, and his second collection, Dragging the Lake, was published by Carnegie Mellon. He has received an NEA fellowship and a Pushcart Prize.