Against Craft: A Craft Essay by Poet E. M. Oliver
Craft is just about the worst thing you can do to a poem.
To all poets: AVOID CRAFT! It is the death of expression.
The only thing worse than crafting a poem is writing an essay about the crafting of a poem. But here we are.
I will not pretend to know the first thing about crafting a poem though surely I am guilty of “using craft”, and thus am a liar and hypocrite. But how else was I going to get it published?!
Before the poem was put to craft, it was alive, hot, bleeding. An uneven overflow of real emotion. Messy and lurching. It was what I needed it to be, but would another human find it so useful?
Do you prefer hot soup or gazpacho?
A poem should be the result of a personal surplus. A thought or emotion that overflows onto a page. It should come unbidden. It should be vital. There are just too many poems and poets, past and present, published in books or posting into the online void for us to concern ourselves with anything less.
This particular poem came from a surplus of crickets. The narrative is thus: A lover’s quarrel –> a walk outside –> an encounter with nature –> the search for meaning and resolution from the universe –> a moment of fleeting enlightenment.
It is autobiographical. The lover was my wife and the quarrel was our own. The walk outside was with my feet. The crickets were heard by me. Their noise and sudden silence affected my being. The night sky became a cosmic fount of wisdom. I entered a non-dual paradigm of enlightened understanding which laid bare the truth about our attitudes and behaviors and how we could overcome the differences that were causing strife in our relationship. This fantasy lasted about a minute until the return of the crickets brought me back to the reality of human drama.
The writing of the poem started that night, due to the resulting surplus. What overflowed onto the page was this: “crickets bicker in the thickets”. This became a mantra. It peppered the page repeatedly, insistently. Soon the moon was a bowl beckoned by Venus and the silence of the crickets was the secret to happiness. This was five years ago.
The poem slept. About two years ago, when I decided to get a divorce, it woke up. It became a song. It was chorus-heavy and backed by synthesizers. Entomologists and astrologists added it to their playlists. It speculated on the nature of breath, the quickness of lust, the origin of red blood cells, the will of Caesar. The moon was the buddha’s bowl floating upstream and the silence of the crickets was only the inhalations of the universe between lines of verse.
A year later I moved out. A new poem took hold and throttled the song, engorging itself on my surpluses. I returned to it again and again to alleviate my excess. It morphed and changed. It became unwieldy. Plot-heavy. Long and meandering. Ominous and inevitable. The moon became a sickle and harvested Venus. The silence of the crickets summoned the slithering of a giant cosmic snake to engulf my minute of enlightenment whole and whisper about the gift of bitter loss.
The nights brought on spontaneous retrospectives. My soul, a roll of celluloid, slowly sloughing sixteen cinematic years, frame by frame. The poem had me coiled, squeezed, swallowed. I wrote and rewrote, moaning and laocooning, digested by the reptile.
And suddenly I stopped. I was done. Seeing as I had become a fleshless, skeletal, herpetological regurgitation, I said: “You know? I think this could be a poem.” That’s when the crafting began. Craft is simply a deceit perpetuated in order to make a poem sharable.
As a reader, a poem is a box you are opening. Secretly you are hoping to find your very self in there, but really instead, it will either be empty, or there will be a snake. And if that snake bites you, you have been given medicine.
Did I craft this poem into an empty box? Or is there a snake still in there? Is it asleep? Will it strike out?
Of course, I am not the one to answer these questions.
