patrickkanouse.com Blog

Poetic Influences

The subject of poetic influences comes up a lot…at least for poets, scholars of poetry, etc. Influences are, of course, at work in every aspect of human life, whether in an artistic or commercial endeavor. Our experiences in youth influence our moral, ethical, religious, and so on interaction with the world.

My earliest poetic influence that I can remember was in high school. A teacher, I forget her name, put a recording of Edgar Alan Poe’s “The Raven” on a turntable and made us listen to it. The reading was intent on reinforcing the rhythm and thus was quite boring. I thought: “This is poetry? Yuck.” We were supposed to learn in that class the iamb, trochee, etc., and hearing such as recording was supposed to help. I am certain that it did, but it made poetic endeavors seem awfully boring. Not until years later did I read “The Raven” again in a way that was interesting to me.

I did not really investigate poetry again until my first year in college. The Romantics fired my imagination then, Percy Shelley in particular, though I later found John Keats more important to me. At the same time, an anthology introduced me to Wallace Stevens, T.S. Eliot, Vachel Lindsay, Hart Crane, and others too far into time or too obscure for us to ever get to in high school English courses. An anthology of British poetry led me to Gerard Manley Hopkins and Dylan Thomas. Wow, did they appeal to me. The utter fascination with language as sound as well as image I found overpowering, intoxicating, and wonderful.

I think my earliest writing influences were Crane, Hopkins, and Thomas tempered by W.H. Auden. Auden provided the antidote to the others. While none are imitatible, Auden at least provided a bit of background to the easily chaotic poems of Crane. In other words, imitating Crane necessarily resulted in an awful poem clearly derivative. Imitating Auden was also obvious but somehow less ridiculous.

Others come and go, but I think those were the first real poets I tried to imitate in searching for my particular voice or angle on my poetry.

An Experiment

In the next few weeks, I am going to do quite a bit of updating to my website. Replacing the standard “repertoire” of poems for the most part with a new set. I like the general current look and feel, so I do not plan on changing that too much. Perhaps the biggest change I will implement is a small ebook of my poems. This will be a PDF version with no security, but with active links and, I hope, embedded audio files of my reading the poems. I am planning on “charging” $2.00 for the ebook.

I am doing this mostly as an experiment. Will I sell any? I haven’t a clue (except to my good, dear, loyal friends and family). The fact is, publishing is moving to electronic formats. More and more so and I think poetry’s real future life will be on the web (or whatever its future incarnation will be). Poetry through the traditional book publishers is mostly a losing money venture. First-book contests are everywhere (and I do submit to both the Whitman and Yale Younger Poets competitions). Increasingly, however, ezines and ebooks will be the avenue that poetry will travel the world. There are hurdles to this, of course. How do poets get readers to their sites? Will people pay? Will they willy-nilly share the ebooks without thought of compensation to the author? etc.  Who knows?

I figure trying something is better than trying nothing.

Occasional Poem

Last year, shortly after my sister, Meg, announced that she was engaged, to a fine gentleman named Pete, she asked me to write a poem for the wedding ceremony. A few years earlier, my brother asked the same of me. Writing “occasional poems” is a tough task, one particularly so for me. If one thinks of the poems written by England’s Poet Laureates (including the current, Andrew Motion, and his predecessor, Ted Hughes) one may be forgiven for thinking that such poems necessarily are inferior. These are tough poems to write. Why? Perhaps because they tend to be so highly contextualized and of the moment that they lack proper forward impetus–by that I mean lack an ability to extend beyond the moment and the current audience–to, in essence, leave the occasion behind. Still, one can cite Edmund Spenser’s “Epithalamion” is a great occasional poem (written for his own wedding). Like all poetry, the bad far outnumber the great.

Anyway, my sister asked me to write a poem for her wedding. A difficult feat. Does one include elements of “them” in it. If so, how much? If not, well, is it appropriate?

About a year or so before, I had begun a poem that soon seemed to me appropriate for a wedding. One that I thought, “Hey, this could work.” When my sister asked me, though, I did try to frame something pertinent to her and her fiance’s context, their history. I tried for many weeks to frame something I thought excellent. Alas, all the drafts ended in the trash. During that time, I continued to work on the other, confident I could craft it to a quality I would be happy with. Now that I have read it at her wedding, I’ll share it now.

The Measure of Love

for Megan and Peter — May 12, 2007

In letters, across phone lines, by sly winks
Lovers have found what they could not measure,
What scientists could not reduce, alter,
Or at all explain — just conjecture.

Baffled, they designed experiments
To deduce the spectra, the atomic
Scaffolding, to find the protein or gene
That might lead somehow to the basic.

They wrote papers of theories and equations
Artfully thought out but unworkable.
They failed and remained baffled, said that Love
Was beyond science, its code unbreakable.

They could not say: “That’s it; let’s test it,”
Because the answer — to them the gem,
The whole object, the frame of their vision –
To the question, “What is it?” eluded them.

Of Love’s mysteries, of its gathering,
We are its fortunate witnesses.
Just see it. Praise it. Believe in it.
Gesture to it and say, “There. There it is.”

Moment of Inspiration

A few weeks ago, as my wife and I were driving down Meridian Street (a main road through Indianapolis on a north/south route) to attend Dance Kaleidescope’s peformance of “The Beatles,” one of those elusive “inspirations” happened.

Digression: First I need to comment on Dance Kaleidescope. This is a modern dance company in Indianapolis. That evening’s performance was to the music of the Beatles, and for the costumes of Act II, my wife crocheted several of the pieces. They were bright “hippie” colors and they looked fantastic on stage. She and several of her co-workers at Stitches and Scones (a yarn store in Westfield, Indiana) did many pieces (hats, vests, scarfs, etc.). Overall, they all looked great. Of course, I’m partial to my wife’s….

So driving down Meridian, there are several places of redbud trees that line the road. I always enjoy seeing them bloom early in the spring and swagger their purplish color long before most trees even show a leaf. I have had a poem sitting for probably two years now that features a line about redbuds: “Charge the treelines with purple.” But the poem has remained unsatisfactory, as if I had some good lines, a good thought, but just not cutting to the core of the feeling, etc. Thus, the poem seemed limp. As we’re driving I am hearing that line through my head, but a word changes: “Charge the treerows with purple” (and since, I have thought of dropping “with”). A tiny change. A subtle shift in cadence. That small change cascaded to a complete re-invention of the poem in my mind. I have been tackling it anew and hope to make some real progress on it.

I remember reading once that Hart Crane had a poem sitting around for a long time. One word he was missing. Then, one day, he stumbled upon it in the dictionary: Adagio. (At least, I’m pretty sure that was the word.) The point is, so often poems can wreck or rise based on a single word. So too, it seems reasonable, that the whole concept of a poem from the poet’s view can change with such a change, whether by accident, by inspiration, or by sweat.