Email exchange
between Klyd Watkins and Edward Smith about Edward’s poem “Welcome, Darling”
I like the way the second part of WELCOME puts literary visibility
into perspective. I laugh at the dream in the first part--good reading. I must
say I don't yet see how the two parts of the poem work together. Maybe it will
come to me. Klyd
When I was writing it, I felt the inner wrenching
of giving up where I planned for the poem to go, and went instead with the
part about Whalen & O'Hara, with Berkson in
between. I think, looking at it with the eye of "reason later", that the common thread is the utter passivity I feel
to the gift God called me back to. After so many years, I feel like
what Arthur Rimbaud might have felt had he lived long enough to have lunch
with TS Eliot on a Paris boulevard pre WW One. Not that I've been to
The boundary blurs then between me and the
poem. That's where Berkson comes in. And others. .
. . So...that's a number of
worries, and a fair amount of "here it comes & what can I do about
it?" Sometimes I think of Lincoln, the frontier lawyer and failed
candidate, who had the whole schmeer of the
Civil War just thrust on him, dumped into his lap. He saw himself as
passive, according to all the best historians. So you see.
An interesting postscript to this poem was that
I Googled Berkson, found his
e-mail, and sent him the poem. He shot back a reply in eight
minutes! Thanked me for the poem, and asked me to look him up when in
That was something
of what I was already feeling the unity of the poem was—it was one negotiation
with the muse.
The feeling of
being copiously passive before the muse is one of the greatest rewards of being
a poet. Don’t argue with the muse. Don’t even say “yes dear,” as she has an ear
for sarcasm. Has quite an ear period—hell, she’s the muse. During the writing
of Ghost
Trees, a chapbook of mine which is on its way to you by snail mail, I
became very conscious that my role was passive. I would eventually have to put
the segments in order but other than that I was to go out in the woods and sit
down and take what I was given. The poem got its start in fact when I
surrendered to the prompting to write down my inner most intuitive responses to
the forms of trees, despite the fact that it was clear that a 15 page long poem
about trees sounds dull as can be, and I surrendered to the command that I was
to have no concern about making the poem easy to read and to let my syntax
become quite complex is search of a diction that was very plain. Joyful, that writing. It was my idea to make the muse a
character in the poem, and I could tell she liked it. Looking back later I
realized that I had left myself one very active role. I tried to control the
pace of the poem—the speed at which the reader would hear the poem in his
head—by the line breaks, and thus give clues to which way the syntax was going.
As I was finishing Ghost Trees an even longer poem was coming to me, a poem
about Jack—of Jack and the Beanstalk and of the Appalachian Jack tales. This
writing was great fun too, but I know now that I became too passive. Getting
the line to work in this poem, which has reached a hundred pages already, is an
on-going struggle because I took so much of the material with no active
involvement.
You speak of “the
gift God called me back to.” I think you are right that when we write in our
lives and when we don’t write in our lives is related to spiritual growth.
Klyd