A couple of weeks ago the Science Vs podcast was about the scientific facts vs the popular fad surrounding the use of dietary fiber. 

Now that’s interesting, I thought, noting that there is a lot of support for fiber being especially beneficial for your gut microbiome. 

So, I started tracking my fiber intake.  

It was not good.

I was eating about ten to fifteen grams of fiber a day, nowhere close to the suggested thirty-two grams I needed to get the benefits purported in the studies.

So, I modified my diet, now eating two servings of bran cereal with almond milk everyday as well as extra fruit and vegetables. 

Since then, my subscriber base has jumped up over ten percent, from sixty to sixty-eight!

Total success.

As with so many things that are running through my head, fiber made it into a recent poem (which is still in the works).

Likewise, our water filter getting caked with stone dust spurred the poem, “filtrate”.

When we bought our house twenty-six years ago, our well failed in the first month. I’m not sure how our home inspector missed this potential problem, especially as he had noticed that the water pressure dropped after he let the water run in a sink for five minutes.

I too share this blame. I just didn’t know enough about that whole process.

So we had to bring a well drilling rig in and watch our yard get destroyed. It was a fascinating process, and expensive. 

I wrote and posted “filtrate” in twenty minutes, meaning I wrote it in about ten minutes, just trusting myself to let the poem tell me where it wanted to go. 

And where it wanted to go was to talk about my tendency to give inanimate things human characteristics. 

Which, ironically, I just did here, suggesting that the poem had a direction it wanted to go.

I have been reading Mary Oliver’s book “A Poetry Handbook” recently. She has wonderful and important insight on the process of writing poetry and especially on the need for revision.
Mary Oliver would not be happy with me posting this poem after twenty minutes.

She notes in her chapter on revision that she often writes forty to fifty drafts of a poem.

A line that comes out perfect the first time it hits the page is “luck” or “grace”. That’s nothing to say about the entire poem. Writing poetry is “hard work, hard work, hard work.”

You must, though, understand Mary Oliver’s standard for a poem includes the need for a poem to stand on its own, to not rely too heavily on imagery or cleverness, and to carefully control its own energy–”the sense of flow, movement, and integrity.” 

I would say that my posting a poem is not the same as my publishing a poem. 

Publishing has weight, especially if something is physically published. Then it literally has weight.

Online publishing is a slope and I would argue that a website is a version of publishing, but very very much at the bottom of the hill.

Mary Oliver also writes that even though a poem is born out of personal experience, that same experience can cause things in it to happen of which the poet is unaware and that cause the poem to not be as effective as it can become.

“filtrate” has a lot of this happening. One good example is where I comment on the phone line snapping when the well rig’s mast hits the cable to a huge temporal jump where the rig is drilling and stone dust is becoming a slurry on the lawn. 

I didn’t see this discrepancy when I posted the poem, and now that I see it I want to fix it. 

On the other hand, Mary Oliver is clear that the poem does not need to hold true for what actually happened. 

Which is good, because they definitely did not break our phone line. And I wasn’t on the phone with my mom when they arrived. And we didn’t have any dogs at that time. 

And I wasn’t even there. I was at school teaching.

I’m right there with Mary Oliver. I don’t write poetry to tell true stories or to relate real events in my life. 

My poems are born of my experience, but they are not in any way a memoir. 

Perhaps they are lies that help the reader understand truth, as Picasso said about art.

The best statement of this sentiment is from John Cocteau: “The poet is a liar who always speaks the truth.”  

So, then, is there truth in this twenty-minute poem? 

I think there is. I’m not sure how tight the language is in the construct of the personification of machines, but the end of the poem noting that if we could only understand the language in which machines spoke to us we might avoid things such as black lung disease, that is a worthy truth.

As for black lung disease, that came out of nowhere. I suppose it was the color of the filters, which is very dark gray, and thinking that this must be what black lung disease looks like, or that stone dust is what causes black lung disease, which it doesn’t. Breathing in stone dust causes silicosis. 

Which is much different as not nearly as deadly as black lung disease.

So here’s a case where there probably should be a connection with truth–except that I say that the color is the same, not the disease. The connection is that if we listened to the warnings around us, we could prevent a myriad of problems in our world.

Or, because we don’t have the imagination to consider the cognition of things, we miss a lot of important information that the world is telling us.

As for that poem about fiber, Mary Oliver has a suggestion as the final paragraph in the chapter on revision: “It is good also to remember that, now and again, it is simply best to throw a poem away. Some things are unfixable.”

Ouch. 

I’m not going to throw the fiber poem away though. I’ll post it tomorrow, giving it forty or fifty drafts and several tosses into the trash can for good measure. 

As for “filtrate” Mary Oliver would be happy to know that I removed the first four lines:

We have a well.
It’s a deep subject,
about three hundred feet
to be exact.

I know when I’m being too clever. At least sometimes. 

As for Mary Oliver’s hard work, hard work, hard work–I don’t disagree, but I also think this is overstated.

A poet is a craftsperson, as all artists are, as are all masons and carpenters and software engineers and librarians. They have a craft and over time they do that craft better, although it might be more precise to say more efficiently.

It is also more precise to say with fewer mistakes.

As we are putting a sunroom on our house right now, which will soon become the space in which I write each morning, and as there is a drywaller working in there as I write, I want to use the art of drywalling as an analogy for writing poetry.

We have done many additions to our house. If you count decks and dormers, this is the sixth major addition to our house. But since decks don’t add square feet to the house, I’ll say we’ve done four. That’s still a lot of additions.

I did the drywall for the dormer and for the remodeling of our kitchen, and for various other smaller projects.

This is to say that I understand the process. I know and own the traditional tools of drywalling. I know the different sizes of drywall and the different ways to join the seams, to finish the corners, to cut out outlets and ductwork. I know how to mix spackling and the need for different widths of knives. 

But it would and did take me as long to finish one seam as it will for our drywaller to do the entire room. Maybe longer.

And you’ll be able to tell where my seam was because I just can’t get the edges to taper off well. I sand and sand and sand, apply thinner and thinner compound, and still it’s not nearly as good as the professional.

The simple analogy here is that once you learn your craft and spend hours and hours doing it, you get better. 

Could I become as good as a professional drywaller? It’s hard to say for sure, but I think I could. Not as fast perhaps, but I could get there. 

The deeper analogy is that it isn’t just technique and skill that you develop as a craftsperson–it is the ability to recognize quality work. The ability to know when you yourself have reached a level of quality with the piece you are building. 

And a bit deeper still, the desire to want to reach even higher degrees of satisfaction with your work.

With this idea, Mary Oliver lost me in the first line of the introduction to her book, on page one. She writes, “Everyone knows that poets are born and not made in school.”

She doesn’t question that assumption. She doubles down on it. She accepts it the way that Euclid accepts certain postulates in geometry. 

Mary Oliver rightly questions the way that the craft of poetry is taught in schools. There is room to question the way that every subject is taught, though. And plenty of space for criticism on all fronts. 

Getting back to our drywall analogy, the professional drywaller can recognize a quality joint in a second, maybe less. I need to take bright lights and shine them from multiple angles for a complete inspection. 

Even then, I might say that two seams are identical in quality which to the experienced eye are clearly not. 

And so poetry is similar. There are good poems, very good poems, and poems that belong in anthologies. 

There is also informed opinion. A good drywaller and an amazing drywaller might agree in general on a good seam, but the amazing drywaller will detect differences in the style, the grit, the structure of the seam. 

They will both see the same seam, both agree the seam is good, but differ in their expectations for greatness.

So it is with poetry. 

Here’s a poem that I love that isn’t one you’ll have seen in school, most likely. The poem, “Surfaces”, is by Kay Ryan and is just beautiful. It was first published in The New Yorker magazine in 1996. I wish I could show an image of that printing of the poem. I love how The New Yorker looks, the font, the columns, the color of the paper. 

Alas, the Poetry Foundation’s version is also beautiful. 

And why should we care how a poem looks? 

Ask a similar question–does it matter how a poem is read? Of course it does.

All of my poems are posted as images–I cannot stand lines of poetry getting broken up differently than I intend, nor space added between each line, nor the use of a generic font. 

All this to say of hard work, hard work, hard work–only the poet knows what their hard work looks like.

And only the poet gets to decide when the poem is done.