What gets a poem started?

Sometimes, it is a prompt; I depend on those when I am feeling a bit “dry” creatively. Most of the time, though, the prompting comes from some unexpected quarter. The poem below was prompted by something a colleague said–that she’d consider belonging to any religion that permitted red wine and brie cheese. She was joking around, but the idea stayed in my mind. When I elaborated on it in a draft, the poem needed to be in first-person. And then it took off in an unexpected direction. Kind of a world-weary, sardonic direction, a commentary on our society perhaps. No: certainly. The poem changed tone from something rather amusing to something more reflective and serious. I had not seen that coming when I sat down to draft it!

I like that unexpected directions happen when reading, and writing, poems. One thing I have noticed when I see so-called poems “written” by an artificial intelligence program is that they deliver no such surprises. An algorithm’s surprise is called a bug; it occurs when something goes screwy in the code string. But AI isn’t human enough to understand surprise. Not yet, anyway.

~

Luxuries

A five-year-old chianti reserva, recompense enough
for a day of malingering and, yes, loneliness—
as though that were reason to drink, as though drinking
requires reason when, for most of the last few
centuries, wine’s been safer to drink than water,
and I’ve no right to complain.

Aphorisms tell us we choose our own ways
(paths, journeys, lives); anthropologists say we are 
society’s children, which limits our choices.
Religions narrow the decisions further, although I’d
choose one that permits wine, Camembert, and almonds—
I admit a taste for luxury.

In my milieu, chianti and Camembert are luxuries and
I haven’t had my house bombed, my family sundered, the water
turned to poison in the reservoir, not yet, though sixty years
may not be an entire lifetime. And no quantity of wine erases
the wrenching violence done in the name of my society,
of keeping me secure

and those like me. As though we deserve to be kept, and not 
others, so we can purchase a more than palatable wine
and French cheese and almonds, to ensure the economy’s
robust, and money—that expression of magical thinking—
can continue to pour itself into the stock market’s statistics,
somehow to save us all.


~~