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From an essay by Louis Menand:
“Language is a profoundly mysterious technology, so constitutive of the human mind that we can only get glimpses, from inside the fishbowl of consciousness, of how it works.”
The Sea Inside. Charnine.com features information on surrealist artist Charnine and Surrealism – copyright © 1994 – 2011 Samy Charnine – All rights reserved
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How do we get from language to poetry? However we do that, consciously or not, it must be as fluid and natural as it is damned difficult! I sometimes wonder whether paradox may be the basis of art. At least, if there exists a “something” that inspires me to compose a poem, paradox–and the way it requires effort to explore contradictions and ambiguities–could stand in as my motivating flame.
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Paradox, randomness, juxtapositions and contradictions evoke imagery, dream, the realms beyond the rational consciousness we humans claim to possess. Poet and fellow poetry blogger Susan Rich recently posted about the surrealist painter Remedios Varo, an artist whose name and art I had never before encountered; and I felt an urgent pull to introduce her work to my friend David Dunn–he loved surrealism and appreciated it more than I ever have, and such paintings (particularly early de Chirico) exerted a large influence on his poems.
David, however, died in 1999. I share my memory of him here, by writing it on a blog, the same as I share the names of Varo and de Chirico and of the many poets and philosophers I have mentioned during my years of posting to this forum. It’s a form of immortality, if only a temporary immortality (another paradox…)
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Here is Menand again, who wrote poetry in his youth but moved into journalism and critical reviews in prose later on: “… I got the same painful pleasure out of writing prose that I did out of writing poetry—the pleasure of trying to put the right words in the right order.” Painful pleasure. That mysterious technology, language, rises to the occasion of inherent contradiction.
“And I took away from my experience with poetry something else. I understood that the reason people write poems is the reason people write. They have something to say.”
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Do you know what you have to say before you write a poem? Or does what you have to say appear in the process of writing? Or after the poem seems complete? Or once someone else has read it and decided what it is you had to say?
ann e michael 
Every poem is different for me. Sometimes I sit down knowing exactly what I need to say. Sometimes I only have an image and I’m not sure where it’s going. Sometimes I set out to say one thing and as I write it evolves so that I end up saying something different altogether. Sometimes the lines come to me almost perfectly with little editing. Sometimes I sit at a page desperately wishing I could open a small hole in my head and drip out the image into something remotely artistic because there don’t seem to be words for it.
It can be frustrating, never knowing how each poem will treat me until I tackle it, but at the same time that’s part of the adventure and I’m certainly never bored. =)
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Sounds about the way I work! Varied, inconsistent…adventurous. I almost never know what I want to say first, though. For me each poem is always a process of evolving into meaning.
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Can I answer, all three? Sometimes a poem is a process of discovery for me, sometimes its a deliberately built thing from beginning to end, and at other times it’s revealed to me by readers.
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