There is a monastery in Arkansas. I was there for some years. My mother sent me there to school after my father died. There, I learned I was an orphan.

One summer I returned to the abbey with my wife. The monks asked us to come help with a summer camp for orphans. Every night the Brothers, the hundred boys, and I would swim in the Arkansas River. My wife would sit on the dock and drink wine Brother Tobias made. She would sketch until the mosquitoes came.

On these long swims to the island there was no telling what we might speak of. At the time I was envisioning a film which still isn't finished, Deathward. It was nearly my birthday; I would be a quarter of a century old.

I decided to begin shooting. The scenario was finished. This is the scene: I am in the water filming a monk in a boat. He is rowing from far-away toward me. In the bow there is a draped casket. For the sake of rhythm I have the selection of Bach I will be using on the soundtrack. I hear this with the earphone. With the bare ear I hear commercial fishermen beyond the point, cussing the moon, listening to country music.

While we are filming, my wife is putting the one hundred boys to sleep. Suddenly, a monk runs to the edge of the water. He has brought bad news. One of the students, the son of a local wine maker, has drowned.

We are up river about half a mile. It happened near buoy 25. We go down there. Some of the monks and fishermen are wading the sand bar. It is too dark to look for a body. But the boy is found.

Death is an old dog trader -and like one, that night I make a title for a poem I will write a year later on the eve of my twenty-sixth year.

We traveled back in the fog. It had been a while since I'd been in the main channel. I looked up and saw a huge sphere of concrete. I found out it was a nuclear reactor. Near the water level hung the remains of a large flathead catfish. Arkansas Nuclear One said the sign. A fisherman had written: The Devil's Machine.

I had a year with this poem; everyday in the woods at work I would say it. I never wrote a word down until I had it right in my mind. It became what they call a floater. That's a work song, a chant. Once I thought it sounded right, and undramatic, I wrote it down without changing a word.

Men sing when they work, or at least they used to. I'm liable to talk to myself. I try to get at the taproot of poetry, of that force drawing things upward. A paradox always- even on Saturday mornings when I might be a little low-down and hung-over, but clear as a bell. I talk to myself. There is a poem that goes:

Each dawn love is a captain
Without a ship.
The only instrumentation
The sad and imaginary
Sound of his voice, love with its own
Words for music, the low light
of a fairly good star.

At the risk of sounding parabolic, I will let this go as technique.

Mean and sing.

Really, I visualize the dead as well as the living. I visualize you who I will never know. We are constant strangers. I imagine you, I stare at you when I write. And to think, you will never know, will never hear of those people I can no longer call anonymous. People close to me have said: I don't understand what you are talking about, but I know what you mean.

I have found out that women seem to be able to get to the heart of my poems, while men are often lost in them. In the beginning I didn't like this, I tried to leave path stones along the way so the masculine psyche could follow. Men know what the sounds are, but they don't know how things sound. I no longer leave a trace on purpose.

Poetry sometimes is like going along in a big rig with no one else on the roads, no smoke, no stops by the wayside, going on with no cargo, the radio quiet, only the sound of your own voice trying to get in touch.

I really don't know if poetry can be paraphrased, set to music, or what have you. Maybe so. Many times the poem ends up down on the ground, surrounded by strangers. I believe that the metaphorical imagination can be authenticated by the cinema. I know that my wife, an artist, has "irrigated" some of her canvases with my poems.

Every two folks have their own way of loving. The poet and the poem know what they like. When a particular kind of loving is adapted, you are getting into a different and strange country.

Now when I was younger, I wrote all the time. I had time to kill. A man has to earn a living; writing has become more special to me. When the poet is young he tries to satisfy himself with many poems in one night. Later, the poet spends many a night trying to satisfy the one poem. My poetry is no longer on a journey, it has arrived at its place.

Then the poet realizes it is midnight, he is alone, and his love is with someone else. What he wanted to sing, what he wanted to mean -someone else has done it. While the poet worried what kind of nails to use, how to fasten down his love, another has hit them on the head and driven them deep.

I give as an example part of a poem from C. D. Wright's new book, Alla Breve Loving. Listen to what Ms. Wright has to say:

I fear another lover
I am afraid a hurricane might blow tonight,
Some crazy sister to Camille and Celia
May come of age tonight, and dash a shelter beam
Across my skull, and give my heart to a barracuda.
Or a scorpion may come and whip its jointed tail
Through my dress. Or four drunken sailors in uniforms
As tightly fitted as divers' suits, will come with bottles
Of pulque on their thumbs. They'll screw me standing
In their boots, one by one. And I fear Jacinto is in cahoots
With them. Although he gave me a scarf for my salty hair
And sketched a map so I could walk to the reef today.
He crushed a centipede with his heel bared. And showed off
For me with his kungfu moves, kicking sand into the eyes
Of enemies.

Ten years and ten books and I still haven't said that. I read it in Alla Breve Loving, and I still want to say it. Poets friends the enemy.

You know there is no other poet on earth like me. I know there is no other poet on earth like you. We need to be read. This is the theme of poetry, now.

In my early days I was a student of all forms. I learned everything and nothing. I practiced the Katas of poetry. I listened to the blues. Having the equilibrium of a poet, I kept falling in love. Now, I believe content and form are not so much in opposition -as many would have us believe. They are one reality, in appearance as well as essence. If you do not know this, no progressive study of the art will provide you any insights. The poem eats when it is hungry, sleeps when it is tired.

In getting to the reasons for writing a poem, I suppose the poet can call the reader into the woods and lose him, or he can let him find his own way. I would say, though, in describing the poem we return to the place of poetry, the poet, and to the poetry itself. The following paraphrase from pages 46 and 47 of Daisetz Teitaro Suzuki's Zen Buddhism and its Influence on Japanese Culture is a good way of sending the poet on a wild goose chase -which he may need from time to time.

There was a great poet and teacher of the art. One day another
poet came to the city to see him. He came to learn. The master
said, "As I observe, you seem to be a master of poetry yourself;
pray tell me what school you belong to, before we enter into the
relationship of pupil and teacher."

The unknown said, "I am ashamed to confess that I have
never learned the art."
"Are you trying to fool me? I am a great teacher, and I
know my judging eyes and ears never fail."
"I am sorry to defy your honor, but I really know nothing."
This resolute denial on the part of the visitor made the
great poet think for a while, and he finally said, If you say so,
it must be so; but still I am sure you are a master of something,
though I do not know of what."
"If you insist, I will tell you. There is one thing of
which I can say I am complete master. When I was still a boy and
writing my poems, the thought came upon me that as a poet I ought
to in no circumstances be afraid of death, and I have grappled
with the problem of death now for some years, and finally the
problem of death ceased to worry me. How does that sound?"
"Exactly! I am glad I made no mistake in my judgement. For
the ultimate secrets of poetry also lie in being released from the
thought of death. I have trained ever so many hundreds of my
pupils along this line, but so far none of them really deserve the
final certificate for poetry. You need no technical training, you
are already a master."

I don't think it matters how a poet plants his garden; it is the quality of the yield which matters. Just like the stars, there are so many things to be said about poems and their poets. I can say I don't want my work to be obscure or vague -I also must say that sometimes I don't mind this trait in the work of others. I am not content in just suggesting things by the use of words, I want to show the origins, the metaphors of reality, the free movement of the spirit. Poetry is a body, all right, but in spirit it is the function which oftentimes creates the organ.

Jean Cocteau said mystery exists only in precise things -people in their situations, situations in people. Because I believe the visionary life has nothing to do with a necessarily transcendant existence, I like most of the poetry I read. I believe most poets know this is the world; and when you try to lead a special life or write a special poetry, you are dancing with an imaginary partner at a meaningless dance to which you have invited yourself and no one else.

So I think the visionary life is commonplace for the poet, the hair on his head, the pain in his rotting teeth. And I think there is a fear of all this good poetry. The spokesmen and spokeswomen of various constituencies of poetry are on their bulldozers, clearing away perimeters around a vast forest of poetry. This is a way of laying claim. You know what happens. They all meet in the center; everyone else is gone.

I don't believe in a tame poetry. When poetry hears its own name, it runs, flies, swims off for fear of its own life. You can bet your boots on that. Jean Cocteau said a poet rarely bothers about poetry. Does a gardener perfume his roses?

Truthfully, it is the lure of other fields, of other forces which draw me into a poem, not the techniques of a self-conscious poetics. A book like The Secret Life of Plants would have more influence on my poetry, add more in explaining and understanding the other systems of poetry, than would certain texts.

Every poet has a field of force not presently understood. Someone with no experience with poetry over the last thirty years says he is confused by Death and the Arkansas River. If I had the time, I would take him with me somewhere. I would give him another poem to read from one of the ten books. The truly confused are good and fair to deal with. Twisted minds are another species of folks.

A carpenter can tell you how a table is made, but can a medium joining hands with us over this table tell us what it is? Hug a tree.

We go back to the poetry, the poet I see a figure in the field. There is genuine moonlight shining on his crowbar. He is prying stumps out of his ground. Poetry busts guts.

Ginny Stanford

first published in 50 Contemporary Poets
ed: Alberta Turner, Longman, Inc., NY 1977