The Triggering Town: Lectures and Essays on Poetry and Writing Read Free

we get two three-syllable words and a long two-syllable word, “yawning.” You might note that the poet is receptive to physical similarities of snakes and domestic cats—they look much alike when yawning—just as later he sees and hears the similarity of rattlesnakes to wheat (grain), the way the tail looks like the tassle, the way the rattle sounds like wind in the grain.
    In the final five lines the poet kills the snake, faces himself and the moral implications of his act without a flinch or excuse, and we get no multisyllabic words in the entire passage. All single-syllable words, and the gaze is level, the whole being of the speaker honestly laid out, vulnerable on his private moral block. If one acts on the rigid prejudicial attitudes expressed in lines five and six (which the speaker did), and not on the fluid, tender, humane attitudes expressed in the first four lines and lines seven and eight, then in return one is faced with the fully developed, uncompromising picture of what one has done. Forever.
    In this poem the triggering subject remains fully in view until late in the poem, whereas the generated object, what the poem is saying, just begins to show at the end but is nonetheless evident. The snake as such is being left behind, and attitudes about life are starting to form. The single-syllable words in the last five lines relentlessly drive home the conviction that all life is related, and that even if life isn’t sacred, we might be better off if we acted as if it were. In this case the poet got off the initiating subject late.
    I mentioned that one way of getting off the subject, of freeing yourself from memory if you will, is to use words for the sake of sound. Now I must use four lines from an early poem of mine, simply because I can’t verify any other poet’s process. I know what mine was at the time. These are the first four lines of the fourth stanza of an early poem called “At the Stilli’s Mouth.”
    With the Stilli this defeated and the sea
turned slough by close Camano, how can water die
with drama, in a final rich cascade,
a suicide, a victim of terrain, a martyr?
     
    When I was a young poet I set an arbitrary rule that when I made a sound I felt was strong, a sound I liked specially, I’d make a similar sound three to eight syllables later. Of course it would often be a slant rhyme. Why three to eight? Don’t ask. You have to be silly to write poems at all.
    In this case the word “cascade” fell lovingly on my ear and so, soon after, “suicide.” I wasn’t smart enough to know that I was saying that my need to see things dramatically was both childish and authentic. But “suicide” was right and led to “victim of terrain” and “martyr,” associative notions at least, but also words that sound like other words in the passage, “martyr” like “drama” and “water,” “victim” like “final” and “Stilli” (Northwest colloquial for Stilliguamish, the river). Instead of “suicide” I might have hit on “masquerade,” but that would have been wrong and I hope I would have known it. I might have simply because “masquerade” sounds too much like “cascade,” calls attention to itself, and to my ear is less interesting. What I’m trying to tell you is that by doing things like this I was able to get off the subject and write the poem. The fact that “suicide” sounds like “cascade” is infinitely more important than what is being said.
    It isn’t of course, but if you think about it that way for the next twenty-five years you could be in pretty good shape.

The Triggering Town
     
    YOU HEAR me make extreme statements like “don’t communicate” and “there is no reader.” While these statements are meant as said, I presume when I make them that you can communicate and can write clear English sentences. I caution against communication because once language exists only to convey information, it is dying.
    Let’s take language that exists to