I have come to believe that there is nothing inherently poetic about a particular place. The commonplaces, or loci communes if you want to get fancy with it, that poets return to so often (having coffee, working in the garden, walking in the woods, funerals) seem to me to simply be times in which the poet has a guaranteed moment for quiet reflection.
I’ve written before of inhabiting a mindset that allows you to see (and to note down) these instances when you encounter poetic moments in your daily life. Here, I want to further dispel the illusion that you have to put yourself into nature or drama in order to find poetry from the world around you.
For me—and again the caveat: incoming personal opinion from a far-from-expert—the way in which we draw meaning from the day-to-day and siphon it through poetry into concrete form is via the throughline. So, what’s a throughline?
A practical definition might go as follows: throughlines are the narrative pathways that form the spine of a poem and onto which we attach our observations in order to give the poem form and meaning. Without a throughline, poems are either amalgams of disparate thoughts or amorphous blobs of abstraction. Neither pastiche nor blob is particularly aesthetically pleasing for me, and though you can certainly slap some random words on paper and call it poetry, you’ll find yourself in the same boat as a child with fingerpaints (i.e. you’ve got the tools, but you lack the awareness).
In order for a poem to have meaning for an audience beyond the poet, there needs to be some semblance of structure so that a reader can overlay their own perspectives, experiences, and histories onto the poet’s work. I like to think of it as a tent. The poet gets the whole mess out of the bag—which is always too small—and lays it all out on the ground, sets up the poles, hammers in the pegs, dusts off the hands and waits for the reader to bring their own canvas to drape over the thing. Will it be yellow or red or camouflage? Will it have fancy nets and zippers or be simple weathered tarpaulin? Well, that’s up to the reader.
The most successful poems provide a framework or throughline that allows for multiple interpretations. If you’ve ever taken a writing class, you may have heard this described as “show, don’t tell.” It’s the salient if overused point that you need to let the reader draw their own conclusions about the poem rather than beating them over the head with your intended interpretation. Strong poems use their throughlines to let the reader enter the poet’s world as seamlessly as possible, and then once they’re in there, to think whatever they want rather than be told what to think.
In my opinion, developing a strong throughline is the hardest part of writing poetry. It’s also usually the last thing that I discover in the process. If I’ve been active in transcription and noted the small moments, observations, thoughts, etc. which populate my notes, then I already have the poles for my tent. But unlike my concept of extrapolation, which I wrote about here, that asks you to take an item or items and stretch them out until you find the drama or novelty that turns an idea into a narrative, a throughline instead finds the common thread between poetic moments and weaves them together into recognizable shape.
The problem with finding the throughline, though, is that the common thread isn’t always obvious or even sensible. What ties together a bird striking a window, a phone call from your mother, and the just-browned skin of an apple left overlong in a bowl? No clue. And because I don’t know how these poetic moments are tied together, I can’t write this poem. Yet.
The hardest part of discovering a throughline is being patient. In order to see what the connections between isolated events might be, there is no better tactic than waiting. And that can be hard to do. We see a bird strike a window and we think, “Dang! I gotta sit down and write this poem right now.” And you should! I will never tell you not to follow the muse. What I would advise, though, is to remember that whatever you’ve just come up with is a draft. And a draft, by definition, is a work-in-progress.
With patience, throughlines suggest themselves as possible pathways through a poem that you can overlay onto your transcriptions (those small moments of poetry) to make meaning from mess.
An example? Sure thing.
I was working on a poem recently, but it was resisting my efforts to turn it into a draft that made sense to anyone but me. Essentially, I had a nice first image of watering someone else’s flowers, and a context to overlay onto it thanks to some extrapolation (What if the person was watering her lover’s flowers? What if the lover was away with his own family at the time?) and the line “still life” penciled onto the page. So, I made a note and then left it for a month. Last week, I was out running in the corn when I saw this piece of tire that I thought was a snake—full disclosure: I jumped and hooted like a scared child—and it pulled me back to the memory of the tenacious little snake in my old garden that was never afraid to have a go at my shoes.
Now I’m thinking, okay, we’ve got a controlling metaphor with the snake being an obvious parallel to the lover, and the weird feeling of fear/anticipation of being around something that might bite you, plus the nice image of thinking you find a corpse and being wrong. “Still Life” came in as the last line and doubled nicely for a title because the poem sort of paints a still life of a moment, but it gains additional meaning when you read the poem. It’s not published yet, but I’ll post a link here when it finds a home.
I guess all this is to say that patience bears fruit when you’re dealing with a poem. Don’t worry about being in “poetic physical spaces” because they probably don’t exist. Instead, try to keep the poem in your mind as you go through your day so that you can start generating connections between lived experience and the throughline of a poem. Usually, when you find it, the poem writing goes from arduous to smooth, and suddenly you’ve got a draft you’re proud of. What a neat thing.