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Chapter 1

The Golden String

Long enough have you dreamed contemptible dreams,
Now I wash the gum from your eyes,
You must habit yourself to the dazzle of the light and of every moment of your life.
Long have you timidly waded, holding a plank by the shore,
Now I will you to be a bold swimmer,
To jump off in the midst of the sea, and rise again and nod to me and shout, and laughingly dash with your hair.

—Walt Whitman, “Song of Myself”

This much I know: things happen when you work sincerely at a poem.

What kinds of things?

Wonderful things.

Certainly you are not the same person after working at a poem that you were before you began. The circle of your awareness has grown, by a mite or a mile. When you work at a poem, new pleasures unfold; creative energies begin to flow. The brain, which in our culture works mostly out of discrete compartments, recomposes itself and becomes a tapestry of unleashed and united energies. Public thoughts get together with private thoughts; public feelings get together with private feelings; and these unite with our imaginations, with our sensual memories, with our symbolic thinking and our dreams.

Time lengthens and slows down. To work at a poem is to enter a sacred and timeless space, the field of infinite possibilities. It is a place of silences wherein the chief activities are watching and listening. When I was young, my father unknowingly prepared me to be a poet by teaching me to fish. All those attributes essential to the fisherman—conviction, patience, stillness, attentiveness, intuition, curiosity, experimentation, and acquired knowledge and skills—are exactly the attributes of the poet. In the silences, associations and connections are assembled. Nature itself, which nourishes your body and provides you with sensual experiences, may now present itself to you as symbol, and nourish your soul.

The one who you were as a child reappears, and the marriage of innocence and experience takes place. Invitations for a great reunion go out; writing a poem is like calling the scattered children of your heart, your mind, your emotions, your memories, your dreams, all to come in to supper at the same time, perhaps for the first time in years. In this moment, your life becomes an examined life (Socrates said, “The unexamined life is not worth living.”) and begins to offer up its meanings. With courage and honesty you initiate yourself as an artist-seeker, a lifelong learner, a worker in depth, in vertical perceptions, in discovered truths.

And, yes, angels appear at your side. Perhaps you remember the television advertisement in which a man remarks, “My broker is E. F. Hutton, and E. F. Hutton says, . . .” and all heads in the room turn and lend their ears. One day you will know this: when you work at a poem, all the heavens and their hosts bend close, rejoicing that another human being has found the workplace and pathway of the poem. The assistance offered, the anointing, can hardly be described. From time to time poems arrive on the page—little miracles of poetry—from where we know not. They seem to come through us but not from us. Poets everywhere know of this experience.

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