How a Poem Is Made Workshop

“Does it cohere? Is it credible?” The British poet, Michael Glover tells us to question the poem we are making in a workshop he gave on a humid Monday afternoon here in this small Canadian prison town, of Kingston, Ontario.a

With his wife, the artist, Ruth Dupre, Glover spoke about the “pure act of fabrication, made of bits of this and that.” His new book, from San Marco Press, a sixth collection of poems, ‘For The Sheer Hell of Living,‘ lay on the table, all 94 pages of it. But he quotes W.H. Auden’s:”Poetry exists in the valley of its making – it makes nothing happen.” He approves of love poetry; “Poetry depends on it for survival.”

“There is no such thing as poetic diction,” Glover pronounces. He is intimate with the language, seeming to know it, upside down, backward, forward, in and out. The clothes on his lanky frame seem coated with words, like the chemicals we spray on cars to keep the road salt off in winter. Glover seems literally made of tasty words, like one of those calligraphic exercises you are told to execute in man-shape. “I always feel slightly sorry for poems trapped in books,” he goes on.

“Iambic pentameter…the ten syllable line, is the absolute foundation of English poetry,” he says. “The poet’s voice falls into it all the time.” He explains the ten stress lines, divided into five bits, with each line containing two stresses, called a foot. An unstressed line followed by a stress. “There are lots of examples,” he says. Then he spouts a line as one: “I couldn’t sleep until I stole your voice.” He gives the six of us a few words and has us construct 4 lines in this verse form.

Around us, in a downtown cafe, employees are counting receipts, mopping the black and white tiled floor, covering the cases and getting ready to close down for the night. Backs to them, the eight of us sit at a long wooden table, heads together, listening and interjecting. Ruth breaks in to clarify, to ask for more illustration, now and then. The two work together as one, to describe something of the dark inside that now and then breaks into a thing of fizz and light.

“The fruits of our reading feed [continuously] into our poems” he assures us. When blocked, the poet does well to read himself whole again. For Glover, an atheist, his back reading is the King James Edition of the Bible and a certain Belgian Surrealist, whose name I did not catch. He reminds us that Wordsworth and Coleridge stirred everything up by using the actual language, as it was spoken in their day, street words rather than ‘literary language.’ Their resources were meter and discourse.

He speaks about how a poem gets made, how all the words we have ever read feed into us, a clash of reason and unreason, as our subconscious does its work. That we must watch free verse lest it become slack prose, crude outpourings of soul without craft. He says there is a re-emergent use of certain metrical openness. He recites a poem from Lewis Carroll about seasons, a serious writing, seldom if ever quoted from the creator of Alice In Wonderland.

“Poetry is an intuitive activity,” he says. “It comes from inside, never outside.” Which indicates the best thing a poet can do is to carry a notebook at all times since a poem is no respecter of time of day or circumstance. “A certain openness to experience always helps to bring on a poem,” he adds. “Cultivate a mood of eager expectancy,” he advises. “Also read other poets assiduously and continuously.” He means reading what we consider the old poets, whose words schmooze up to each other. He believes we should write every day and at about the same time.

We take a break by reading the 20 line pieces each of us was invited to bring. Topics range from sexual teapots, Al Purdy, mothers, bike thieves, memories and, from Jason Heroux, the violence of rain and flowers.

Glover props his bearded chin on one long hand and recommends that we revise continuously, reading our poems out loud once we have finished a draft, not examining just the words but also the sound of those words together. Body rhythms will be in there too. “We have all these words feeding into us while we attempt to cajol our words into the poem.” The afternoon light is waning. Through the window, civil servants are popping into Hondas, going home from work. A summer day sweeps the streets, heavy with exhaust.

The poet Tom Gunn let whatever book he had finished, sit for six months, till it was “cooled down,” he said. He spoke of John Ashbury’s routine in making a poem. He would have his writing on his computer screen in his study, and as was his habit, he would then get up and wander about his study, pouring a cup of tea, drinking some, then setting the cup down, walking further to fiddle with a bookshelf, twiddling his thumbs, examining something on a table, looking out his window at the trees and dogs walking by, then, as if by chance, passing by the computer screen and exclaiming, as though he’d never seen it before, “Hey! What IS this?”

One of Glover’s poems, to close:

The magistrates

The magistrates hold tightly in their arms

Worlds we had never known to sing about,

They rock them, highly, nimble on their feet

Pale flowers are strewn, which keeps the occasion sweet.

The magistrates, those old men, muscled taught,

Sing about worlds long vanished from this world,

Strange, heightened places with viridian streams

Which soodle, winking at the brightest suns

How can these men be magistrates? we ask

How can they uphold laws when all we see

Are goatlike creatures, beckoning with their thumbs

To dance with them and chatter mindlessly?

Michael Glover, (from, ‘For The Sheer Hell of Living’)