Always on the Train

I ran across a poem recently that seemed to me to be remarkable both as a message to the world and as a kind of master class in the practice of poetry. I suggest that you read it a few times yourself and collect your own preliminary thoughts before reading what follows:

Always on the Train

Writing poems about writing poems
is like rolling bales of hay in Texas.
Nothing but the horizon to stop you.

But consider the railroad’s edge of metal trash;
bird perches, miles of telephone wires.
What is so innocent as grazing cattle?
If you think about it, it turns into words.

Trash is so cheerful; flying up
like grasshoppers in front of the reaper.
The dust devil whirls it aloft; bronze candy wrappers,
squares of clear plastic—windows on a house of air.

Below the weedy edge in last year’s mat,
red and silver beer cans.
In bits blown equally everywhere,
the gaiety of flying paper
and the black high flung patterns of flocking birds.

                - Ruth Stone

The poem opens with radical simplicity. The first sentence is a simple, declarative statement about a poetic move that all writers, from grade school on up, have likely made at one time or another. In the course of fifty years of teaching, I've read countless poems that began something along the lines of

I am writing this poem this way
because I do not know what else to say
The teacher says I have to write a poem
so, I guess I'll just let my mind roam...

I don't have anything against this method of proceeding. If the goal is to get oriented, to get started, to get a line of thought going, writing a poem about how you feel about writing a poem is probably as good a place to begin as any. It's a move I've suggested to students who don't know where to begin. I've written more than a few poems that began that way myself.

Ideally what will happen is that, having gotten the poem moving, the poet will fall into something that opens the poem up in surprising ways. That's exactly what happens with Ruth Stone's poem, and it starts to happen right there in line two, with the simile that ends the first sentence:

Writing poems about writing poems
is like rolling bales of hay in Texas.

Really? How so? In what way is writing poems about writing poems like rolling bails of hay? And why Texas? The next line starts to develop this apparently random idea:

Nothing but the horizon to stop you.

So that's the Texas connection. Texas is big. Texas is flat. Once you get rolling, there's a lot of space to move in, all the way to the horizon. Which, of course, will recede as you move, so you've got even more room than you can see.

That first three-line stanza serves as a kind of frame for what follows. Presumably, having written the first three lines, Ruth Stone could have stopped there, leaving the poem as a kind of process-reflection haiku. But.

But. There it is, that powerful little word.

[Digression: On many occasions I have had reason to discuss with my students the power of the word "but." Notice, for example, the difference in impact between these two sentences:

   
    You didn't do your homework, but you passed the quiz.
    You passed the quiz, but you didn't do your homework.

Same content in each sentence. The exact same words, in fact. But the tonality of the sentences is completely different. The first sentence comes across as a kind of compliment. It appears to let the person spoken to off the hook. The second sentence comes across as a criticism, as a setup for further bad news. ("That's why you got a C rather than a B on the report card.") The power of the word "but" is that it tends to deemphasize—and sometimes make disappear entirely—whatever comes before it. And to focus attention on what comes after it. That's why people in the design-thinking community and other venues that hope to support creative thinking often preface their brainstorming sessions by stipulating that the phrase "Yes, but..." will not be allowed, and that group members should make a point of prefacing their remarks with "Yes, and...". EOD]

So Stone's second stanza begins with "But":

But consider the railroad’s edge of metal trash;
bird perches, miles of telephone wires.
What is so innocent as grazing cattle?
If you think about it, it turns into words.

Here the author is second-guessing herself, re-thinking, with that introductory "but," her original assertion that there is nothing in your way when you begin to write a poem about writing a poem. Even within the particular framework she has hypothesized with her Texas/horizon simile, there are things "in the way," or perhaps more significantly, "along" the way: Railroads. Trash. Bird perches. Cattle.

Now of course, all of these elements are in fact hypothetical. They're imagined. They're made up, as was the original simile, of words. But that's the point. Having set up the landscape comparison, it's natural enough to start imagining your way into that landscape, and as soon as you do, the energy level in the writing starts to jump. As Stone points out, "If you think about it, it turns into words." And suddenly our poem, which started out as a somewhat generalized reflection on writing poems about poems, has itself become more poem-like. The author is still holding the metacognitive thread in her mind; she's still thinking out loud about the relationship between thought and verbalization and poetry. But, as it turns out, not for long.

Stanza two began the transition from landscape-as-simile to landscape-as-imagined-space. The second half of the poem is in essence a falling through: the writer is no longer thinking about poetry, she's writing poetry, and a startling, dynamic, soaring poetry it turns out to be:

Trash is so cheerful; flying up
like grasshoppers in front of the reaper.
The dust devil whirls it aloft; bronze candy wrappers,
squares of clear plastic—windows on a house of air.

Below the weedy edge in last year’s mat,
red and silver beer cans.
In bits blown equally everywhere,
the gaiety of flying paper
and the black high flung patterns of flocking birds.

Now we're out on that Texas flatland, watching the reaper blow up candy wrappers and, behind them, the birds soaring in the sky overhead. The language here is compressed, imagistic, metaphorical ("windows on a house of air"!), musical (grasshopper, reaper, wrapper, paper; squares, air, everywhere; beer, bits, blown, black, birds). What began as a contemplation of poetry has metamorphosed, before our eyes, into a poem. Magical.




I love the way the poem opens up in the last two lines, how it takes us through the imaginative process, after we have been looking out, of looking up. And the closing image of "the black high flung patterns of flocking birds" gratifies both my sense of sight and my sense of hearing, the richness and symmetry of those b's and f's.

What I find most inspiring about this poem is the way that it demonstrates, the way it enacts, the poetic process itself. How do you write a poem? You begin somewhere. You begin where you begin, even if it's just to ask "Where do I begin?" Once you've done that, it's like you've boarded a train. You're on the way. You're moving. So you stay on that train and, as it begins to move across the landscape, write down what you see. Piece of cake.