This week during National Poetry Month, William Mawhinney offers us an account of the way sound is at the root of his poetry practice. His books, Songs in My Begging Bowl, which appeared in 2002, and Cairns Along the Road, which appeared in 2009, are both available through him for $10 each. To order, email mawhinneyw_w@msn.com]

Where do my poems come from? I admit that to get started with my own writing, I do a lot of reading. I need to be poked and jogged by resonant arrangements of words: phrases that give me a faint, preliminary shiver and lines that ring my bell. Whenever they come along, they grab me and refuse to let go; they give me something delicious to work with.

Sound has always been my way in the door. When I was small, Mom read to me in the evenings. Exposure to rhythmic word sounds lies as far back as I can remember. I was an only child, born in 1939, at the tail end of the Depression. Dad taught accounting to World War II vets at night school; he was gone in the evenings when I was little. Mom, a Latin and biology major in college, injected me with her enthusiasm for words. I remember one night how she explained “oviparous” and “viviparous,” mouthing the words with great animation. That may sound weird now, but that’s how we spent our evenings before we had TV. I thank her for my lifelong love of language, for my joy in hanging around words and my delight in rubbing them together.

 Books heard so long ago all tumble together in memory. My favorite going-to-bed story, The Little Engine That Could, drifted me into sleep many nights with “I think I can, I think I can….” I recall Mother Goose mixed with Eugene Field, Edward Lear and Stevenson’s A Child’s Garden of Verses.

Rhythm hardwired itself into my boy’s body; meter coupled with magic always hooked me:

All the king’s horses and all the king’s men
Couldn’t put Humpty together again.

and

They danced by the light of the moon,
The moon,
The moon,
They danced by the light of the moon.

I hope I never become too sophisticated to delight in the feel and taste of words in my mouth. Happy noises are fun on the tongue. Luscious pleasures of dance and song bubble up from my gut, not in through my eyes. I stay open to poems moving inside my body.

A poem by Lew Welch called “Ring of Bone” captures this resonating sensation:

I saw myself
a ring of bone
in the clear stream
of all of it

and vowed
always to be open to it
that all of it
might flow through

and then heard
“ring of bone” where
ring is what a
bell does.

Let me dip into my commonplace notebook and share some resonant snippets and lines that have rung my bell over the years. I’m a sucker for such paths of shimmering music as these:

“The day waves yellow with all its crops.”
— Virginia Woolf

“We sit together, the mountain and me / Until only the mountain remains.”
— Sam Hamill

“To follow the sea-bright salmon home.”
— inscription on a bell cast by Tom Jay

“Clouds dance / under the wind’s wing, and leaves / delight in transience.”
— Basil Bunting

“Time stops when the heart stops / as they walk off the earth into the night air.”
— Jim Harrison

“Down the rivers of the windfall light”
— Dylan Thomas

“After many a summer dies the swan”
— Alfred, Lord Tennyson

“Man is not a town / Where things live, / But a worry and a weeping / of unused wings.”
— Kenneth Patchen

“Down their carved names the rain-drop ploughs”
— Thomas Hardy

“I had the swirl and ache / From sprays of honeysuckle / That when they’re gathered shake / Dew on the knuckle.”
— Robert Frost

“Bare ruined choirs, where late the sweet birds sang.”
— William Shakespeare

“But something in the sad / End-of-season light remains unsaid.”
— James Merrill

“in the silent, startled, icy, black language / of blackberry eating in late September”
— Galway Kinnell

I don’t invite my left brain to take charge when I engage a poem. I cringe when I recall the poetry courses at Pitt in the 1960’s encouraging me to tear wings from these butterflies. When I flunked my master’s oral exam, I was told to “hold my nose and read more of the source material.” I fled grad school right after that. For me, art is a verb, not a noun for arms-length analysis. Today, as I read poetry, my right brain relishes the sounds of words, their physical and sensual presence — ”the original “mouth-fun” in baby talk, bedtime tales, and nursery rhymes.

If a poem — one of my own or someone else’s — gets up and starts to dance, I’ll speak it to myself, I’ll give it voice — ”the poet’s medium is breath, not black marks on the page. And, when it’s a real winner, I’ll offer it my entire body by walking along the nearby roads and reciting it out loud. My neighbors already know I’m weird!

Phrases like those above are a species of remembering. They activate me; they stick like Velcro to a tender place; they light up dark spots inside me, helping me to confront what Mark Doty calls “the unsayability of experience.”

I jot them down in my commonplace book; otherwise they’ll evaporate.

That’s my writing exercise: to scribble down bits and shards of language that come my way, never knowing how I’ll use them, if at all. A few may become the seed of a poem, but they all plunk my magic twanger. I hoard them like a magpie taking shiny objects back to its nest.

I never know, or plan, where all this scribbling will end up. For me, writing poetry is a guideless journey. To the best of my ability on any given day, I ignore that voice whispering from the shadows, “What a raging chunk of crap!” and follow whatever thread emerges as best I can, remembering the words of an old Zen cowboy: “Always ride the horse in the direction it’s going.”

****

And here is a poem from William Mahwinney’s new book Cairns Along the Road, available by emailing him at mawhinneyw_w@msn.com.

Don’t Laugh at My Library

When you sift through my office after I die
you’ll confront a wall of poetry books.

I hope you won’t snicker like I did
when I dismantled my boyhood home

and found forty pairs of black socks
in Dad’s dresser drawer. Why so many?

If you wonder that about my books,
just know I couldn’t part with steady companions,

summoned round my heart to hold at bay the howling roar
of the bullshit train that clanged past my door.

The wall studs buzzed with honeyed hives
of language stored on these shelves.

Before they go to Goodwill, riffle their pages,
glance at my underlines.

There’s where my soul snagged, where
shards of reflected majesty

sang their fierce clarity
through lines of inert ink.

These shelves bulge with poems
that gave me the gumption to pull up my socks

and stride through the turning world.
So, for pity’s sake, don’t scoff too harshly.

With each passing year and each passionate purchase
this library was the brightest utterance

I had at my disposal. When I read them,
I was their audience. When I didn’t

they became mine.