Reflection on “Radius” and Writing a Poem About a Thing: A Craft Essay by Conor Gearin
Recently, a coworker asked me what my poems are generally about—what was my theme. Embarrassed by this reasonable question, I said that I write short little poems about nothing in particular, getting dangerously close to the joke about Seinfeld. (“It’s a collection about nothing!”) But the real answer is that I want to write poems that are like a thing of their own: they follow an internal logic; they are sharply-defined; they give a sense of weight and heft. I like reading poems that feel complete in themselves, within their boundaries, and I’m trying to write poems like that, too. I want any theme that appears to be drilled and anchored to the studs of the thing at hand. Whether or not I succeed, that’s my goal, developed from reading poems such as Seamus Heaney’s “The Rainstick”:
Upend the rainstick and what happens next
Is a music that you never would have known
To listen for.
or Mary Ruefle’s “Spikenard,” about an aromatic plant:
After I had my crying,
I had to indent again.
The scent of spikenard
is nice. It smells of
weird responsibility.
Like many poems, “Radius” becomes a backdoor ars poetica, a statement on what a poem is and how they work. I want my poems to end where they began, fixed on the character of their subject rather than trying to tell a story (“anti-narrative, observing only.”) Maybe I’m chasing Archibald MacLeish’s dictum that “a poem should not mean / but be.” Maybe I’d twist that dictum a little and say that a poem can mean something, but if it doesn’t have an encounter with the material world outside the mind, it won’t mean much. Through absorption in a thing and its thisness, the poet writes their way out of solipsism toward another self-consistent reality, rediscovering our “weird responsibility” to the things and beings outside ourselves, to use Ruefle’s phrase. It is perhaps better meditative practice to do so with a plant or a stone than with a warm-blooded creature. It demands more critical imagination from the writer and relies less on reflexive empathy.
So, spinning the rolodex of things I’ve retained from science and math classes, I thought of the radius, and the many other things it’s linked to: bomb blasts, pollution from a point-source emitter, turning radii for vehicles, orbits, NASA flight plans. Rather than an abstract geometry concept, I think of the radius as a tangible object: a line drawn in graphite, a clock-hand, a sweeping ray of light on a radar screen. I borrowed a structure from “The Rainstick” of beginning with a series of commands: “Start…Sweep…Take out a longer line and draw…” With an organizing concept and a structure chosen, in writing “Radius” I felt free to pursue whatever images felt connected.
And that’s where the trick of writing about a thing comes into play. Masquerading as a poem about a specific item, it instead begins to sweep towards everything else nearby. The black hole starts to gobble up a galaxy into a single point. In a poem ostensibly about math and physics, I found myself straying near to my familiar stomping-grounds of ecology and naming the infamous invasive plants “loosestrife and phragmites” (Lythrum salicaria and Phragmites australis, for those keeping score at home; a dear friend reminds me that “friends don’t let friends use common names for plants.”) In the poem, the plants are obstacles in an overgrown wetland that must be circled and “perambulated” around, so technically the radius/circle throughline continues. But in rereading the piece, it strikes me that this is the apogee of the poem’s orbit, the furthest point from where it began, the place where the reader (and indeed the writer) asks, remind me how I got here from there?
Having expanded like a blast cloud, the poem begins to collapse in on itself. It winds its way from the moon missions, to riding a bike in circles as a kid, and finally back to
the point of origin. Again I
throw all my weight against it.
There, the poem completes its orbit. It was a nice way of knowing where I had to end (even if what came in between needed plenty of revising after the first draft.) Looking at the last lines, I noticed a visual rhyme in the line endings “Again I / against it”—it’s the same letters, with “t” added to the end of each word, as if the phrase has cycled through a machine and had something new tacked onto it. The ultimate subject “I” becomes the ultimate object “it.” From the self to the world of things, over and over, amen. But to be clear: I didn’t plan that. It just happened.
I’m interested in the idea that poetry is better at imitating music than prose, and not just in the form of pleasant sounds when read aloud. Pop songs have a cyclical form: verse, chorsus, verse, chorus, ultimately ending on the tonic chord. A pop song in the key of G probably ends on a G chord. Yet this isn’t seen as unimaginative. It’s just basic, respectable songwriting mechanics—the twelve-bar-blues, the three-chord rock song. Despite having a predictable structure, it might lead you somewhere surprising in the middle. Unlike fiction, which generally avoids retreading the same spot, perhaps music and poetry can build meaning through accretion and recursion. Perhaps music and poetry can first of all offer passive entertainment, then maybe sneak in something unexpected on closer listen, rather than chase after a single prosaic conclusion and thereby justify their existence. As Heaney writes in “The Rainstick”:
What happens next
Is undiminished for having happened once.
Twice, ten, a thousand times before.
If a poem sets the humble goal of beginning and ending with the same idea, the same chord, maybe we can end up somewhere interesting in between. A song or a poem doesn’t need a reason for being apart from playing one note after the next, but in so doing, we might be surprised what gets strung together. I’d like to write poems that, like songs, are nice to revisit and replay even if you can sense where they’ll end. In taking another orbit, you might glimpse something you’ve missed the first hundred times around.
