For our sequence Making of a Poem, we’re asking some poets to dissect the poems they’ve printed in our pages. Michael Bazzett’s “Autobiography of a Poet” seems in our Spring challenge, no. 243.
How did this poem begin for you? Was it with a picture, an thought, a phrase, or one thing else?
It was a phrase. I used to be sitting in my yard, with a authorized pad and some books, together with Fady Joudah’s Footnotes within the Order of Disappearance and After Ikkyu by Jim Harrison, which comprises the road “I used to be born a child, / what are these hundred fits of garments I’m carrying?” I used to be excited about dislocation and baby-logic, and object permanence, and the thought of first encountering one thing via a way aside from sight. Listening to a hen earlier than you see it, for example. Or how a visible stimulus like a leaf-shadow fluttering within the wind strikes on the wall above a crib. In my baby-mind, I think about that light-flicker as one thing animate, shifting of its personal accord. When does a child cease partaking with stimuli as pure picture or pure sound and start to think about what brought on it? I’ve typically puzzled what it might be like to have the ability to reexperience the desires we dream in utero, or within the first months of life earlier than language, earlier than we consciously encounter phrases and narrative construction. How would they be ordered? The place would the pictures come from? Will we carry something with us from the opposite aspect? Are there issues already written into us?
For some purpose, I’d written down some notes on language on my authorized pad: “Language as vitality, as predating tradition, as one thing to find …” And “Language as vitality” leaped out at me, and I wrote, “I assumed birds have been pure sound / till I used to be 5 months outdated / and one fluttered to my sill / and into my sight.”
I say I used to be “excited about” the above issues, however actually they have been considering inside me. Or simmering. Or buzzing. I don’t know what the verb is, however it’s not considering.
How did writing the primary draft really feel to you? Did it come simply, or was it tough to put in writing?
I got here throughout the strains after I was typing up one other poem from the pad, and I typed it up and performed with the lineation and preferred “I assumed birds have been pure / sound” as an preliminary first two strains, with the slant rhyme of hen/pure, the little head-fake that “pure” modifies “hen” (as a result of enjambment) earlier than it settles on “sound.” I preferred the way in which it was shifting, and tried to observe its sound, which led to “flutter” turning into “flicker,” echoed by “fast,” and “mild” rhyming with “proper.” It sounded sort of jaunty, so I simply adopted the voice.
The cigarettes arrived as a joke, however a joke that one way or the other included the ultimate picture, which stunned me and in addition felt pleasing and symmetrical, with the half rhyme of “curled” and “hen” echoing the opening stanza.
The entire thing got here out fairly rapidly, which occurs generally. Not typically.
The following revisions have been principally simply little tweaks. The largest change was that “Having a smoke” turned “Smoking a dart.” I heard it and I assumed, Yeah! Get a couple of extra consonants in there. The unique title was “Ars Poetica,” however I modified it fairly rapidly, as a result of it didn’t appear the world wanted one other poem referred to as “Ars Poetica.”
Have been you considering of every other poems or artistic endeavors whilst you wrote it?
Moreover the Jim Harrison, I had additionally written down an thought from Paul Ricoeur earlier within the pocket book: “Info is the shadow of that means.” I feel that concept was lurking there, too. Poems have a tendency to come back in “households” for me, so it’s good to take a look at the entire authorized pad. I used to be additionally doodling a bit, which I do after I’m writing in longhand.
What have been you listening to or watching whilst you have been scripting this?
This may sound humorous, however I used to be rewatching the whole thing of The Sopranos throughout that entire interval. A six- or seven-month undertaking of rewatching. I feel that’s most likely the place the “Fuck yeah” got here from; it capabilities nearly as a type of punctuation to my ear, the profanity not landed on, however drawn in on the inhalation. It’s not a register I work in fairly often. I nearly hear it in Tony’s cadences, accompanied by that hopeful, puckish little-boy smile. James Gandolfini was so marvelous in that position. I’d pay a thousand {dollars} to listen to him learn this, as a bit of monologue: “… from my muddah’s purse!”
There’s additionally a bit of Mel Brooks in there, from Free to Be … You and Me, when he voices a child within the opening skit with Marlo Thomas. I all the time liked the gag of a child with a voice of a grown man, and now, in a method, that’s what I’ve grow to be.
Michael Bazzett is the creator of six books of poetry, most not too long ago The Echo Chamber.
