The Forest for the Trees

I recently felt the need to explain myself. As the author of a piece, a poem, a profile of someone for a journalistic forum, an essay, even a journal entry, I have learned how to home in on particulars: the juice is in the details, we have often been instructed. Of course, this leaves so much out.

With poetry it is especially true. A poem is not the life that it may describe. As William Wordsworth defined poetry it is "emotion recollected in tranquility." There is a distillation in the art of creating a poem. For one single effort, much is cast to the side. A lot of young writers, and even those of us who write from the larger lot of words down to the finer choices (as compared to those who craft word by word, carefully over time, with full consciousness--whew, I don't know how they do it!), we have a lot of work to do to winnow and revise.

A poem is never the full story. The poem about the last moments in the hospital with my sister, as we sat with my mother as she was dying, does not describe the full arc of my relationship with my mother--hardly at all.

An acquaintance assumed that the relationship with my mother was beautiful and nurturing. At the moment of her death, there was beauty and even nurturing, in an odd spiritual way. But, my relationship with my mother was complicated, with me more often in the nurturing role.

Mary Webb, a wonderful writing teacher and novelist in Berkeley, California, taught students to discuss the work of others by focusing on the poem itself, or the story, and not the author. We were instucted to talk about how "the narrator seems to be motivated by . . . " or "the speaker in the poem is very . . ." rather than assume the narrator, speaker, voice behind the poem was the person sitting before us in the room.

A writer, even one so subjective and exposed as many poets can be, needs creative distance. The work has to be set aside from personality. In truth, long after the creator passes away, the work may still exist in tangible form, revealing its small truths or exposing the big lies. But it is never the life of the writer herself, never the forest, only a small, struggling and uniquely beautiful pine.