There's a diner that figures prominently in my poem "Surviving the Flood". I tell a little about meeting a man there and engaging him in a debate about the "meaning" of the flood. Whenever chance takes me past it, I recall immediately and powerfully the moment the poem came into existence and the story of my conversation with the opinionated old man. Only problem is, it never happened.
The diner's not even a diner, actually, it's a small deli on a suburban street, and I've never so much as used its parking lot to make a U-turn, let alone stepped inside it for a braunschweiger on rye. Yet every time I pass the place, I remember the days when northern New Jersey was a maze of cone-lined work-arounds and so many people were suffering with the effects of our swollen rivers, and I remember vividly the first lines of "Surviving" taking shape in the silence of my idling car.
Is it a bad thing that I fabricated a diner and its small population of characters from a neighborhood delicatessen? The deli very much was part of the inspiration for the story of the poem; there's a truth in there, but I took quite a poetic liberty with the narrative. I think Stevens ("Poetry is the supreme fiction, Madame") and Picasso ("Art is a lie that makes us realize truth") are on my side in this debate, and who are any of us to argue?
A more interesting question for me is the power of the connection of place. It is absolutely true that I can't pass this little deli without experiencing again the moment of the poem's birth. And that's not the only potherem of mine that has such an impact on me. For that matter, I have that relationship with other people's poems, too. When I'm visiting Massachusetts, there's corner on a road I frequent that is like a tap from which "Stopping By Woods on a Snowy Evening" pours. There's one supermarket (an Acme, ironically) that always launches me into BJ Ward's "Mythology at the Shop-Rite". Hopefully I needn't articulate where the Great Falls of Paterson take me.
This has become very interesting to me. In To The Ones Who Must Be Loved, many of the poems have very specific places of origin, and since I still live in the midst of those places, I still live in the midst of the poems, some of which I wrote a dozen years ago. And when I visit my college campus, which I do several times a year, I recall vividly even the poems I've long-since buried for being sentimental nonsense (or reminders of people no longer in my life) - and not just my own poems, and not just famous poems or poems I know well. I walk past a particular dorm and remember a poem by one of my coeditors of our incarnation of the college litmag. And I bet he could tell me about the night it was born as vividly as I remember it. I rarely think of that poem any other time, but when I'm there, its title is as clear to my mind's eye as as the first time I read it. In 1985.
Is it that way with many poets and poems? Your own or other works that have been important to you in your writing travels? I've heard it said that among the senses, smell is the most powerful trigger of memory. That may be so, but I'm leaning toward believing that sight has its own particular power, and that place is a more powerful promoter of poems.
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