Blacksnake Poetics

Several years ago, I wrote this statement for a "prairie poets" issue of Midwest Quarterly, published at Pittsburgh State University in PIttsburgh, Kansas. Perhaps it is of interest here.

Blacksnake Poetics

Gathering eggs in the hen house, I reach into a nest without looking. Instead of eggs, my fingers brush a blacksnake. Smooth cool skin sends a chill from fingertips to scrotum. Startled also, the snake writhes once and is gone.

Reaching into the nest of this moment, I gather surprise rather than the expected. I touch a startling skin that teaches me how to move and vanish. The shock encompasses me. In its passing, words begin to assemble.

My father did not allow us to kill blacksnakes, which eat rats, mice, and other pests. A few eggs were little enough reward for them. The shock of surprise and the moment of graceful vanishing are necessary to the enlivening of our words.

Streams arise in innocuous ditches in a pasture, can soon sustain a few fish and crawdads, and before long are deep enough to drown in. Rivulets become creeks become rivers in a network of flow.

A poem starts in a moment’s imbalance, a discontinuity of ordinary, dull awareness. In that imbalance, words writhe and shocks flow. What flows passes across the topography of my experience. It takes both resistance and yielding for the flow to deepen, but if experience both resists and yields, the flow of words soon becomes deep enough to drown in.

The horizon in Wabaunsee County, Kansas, where I grew up, is long and distant. I could see far from the hilltop where we lived. I saw subtly varied emptiness, constantly flowing and changing as storms and seasons came and passed away. Flint Hills like ocean swells, as James Fenimore Cooper described them. Echo, analogy, metaphor, rhyme: The likeness-in-difference, the patterned variation, that makes the words summoned by a moment’s shock into something else, a poem, an exclamation, a fragment of praise or despair.

Haiku, when understood, excel as a pattern to catch that moment’s shock. Ghazals, with their shifts, leaps, and repetitions, can register larger, more complex, more abstract shocks. The Korean sijo permits a three-fold dance of image, counter-image, and resolution.

Form in poetry should be an occasion for discovery rather than confinement. Limits can free but only if they allow the blacksnake to vanish after registering its presence, only if they permit the rivulet to merge finally with the swelling depths of the mind.