by Brian Tich

Today I came across these lines by the poet Dorothea Lasky:

I say I want to save the world but really
I want to write poems all day
I want to rise, write poems, go to sleep,
Write poems in my sleep
Make my dreams poems
Make my body a poem with beautiful clothes

They come from her poem, “Ars Poetica,” which you can read in full here. These lines are not the most elegant, nor are they the most complex, but they are certainly compelling. Why? Because they offer the reader a beautiful vision of how a poet’s life could be. Within these lines, Lasky imagines her everyday existence as a particular subset of her poetic craft. Not content to be merely a writer of poems, she decides her life ought to be poetry.

Other than the heedless romance of this notion, what attracts me to Lasky’s poem has to do with a piece of advice I once received from a writer. It goes like this (and please indulge me on this one, because it is more profound than it sounds): “If you are going to be a poet, you need to write poems.” That may not seem revolutionary, but anyone with writerly aspirations will tell you that although you may prefer to believe it is enough for now to have the mind of a writer, and to think literary things, you do actually have to write sometimes. And, for the most part, what you write will not be good. The words you come up with will rarely seem to do justice to their brilliant nonlingual prefigurations, which may lead you to wonder why indeed you are doing this instead of trying to save the world.

And then there is the old adage, “write what you know.” Not difficult, right? But there is many a grumpy old writer who will tell you that, at your age, “what you know” isn’t all that much. Maybe you are one of those overachievers whose stuffs her life to twice the density of the average person’s—but even then, you aren’t totally original all the time. Your life, like mine, is filled with a great deal of banality. And is that something you really want to write about?

But my point is this: for the true poet, the person who understands her life as poetry, the person whose greatest desire is actually to make her life into a poem, the problem dissolves just as easily as it appeared. For if you really are going to attempt to understand everything through poetry and as poetry, there is no chore. I can think of no better response than this to the words, “If you are going to be a poet, you need to write poems.” If you are going to be a poet, of course you are going to write poems—so why not live them, too?

And even if Dorothea Lasky doesn’t always leap earnestly out of bed each day, yearning to do nothing but write until she collapses from exhaustion and then has multi-layered dreams about writing more poems—even if she is not this constant, pure, perfect poet-of-poets, she may nevertheless tell herself that she is. This is how she comprehends her condition. It is a grand and tidy little fiction. It lifts the pressure off the words, off the page. It demystifies the pen. The paraphernalia are incidental: it’s all about the life.

At this point, I would like elaborate a little on Lasky’s intentions by giving you another few lines, this time from Pablo Neruda:

Between the lips and the voice something goes dying.
Something with the wings of a bird, something of anguish and oblivion.
The way nets cannot hold water.
My toy doll, only a few drops are left trembling.
Even so, something sings in these fugitive words.
Something sings, something climbs to my ravenous mouth.
Oh to be able to celebrate you with all the words of joy.

Here, in essence, is Neruda’s sophisticated elaboration of Lasky. What better way to describe the poet’s own purpose, his own struggle, his own particular victorious and defeated joy? How little his nets can catch! How much evaporates, prematurely and breathlessly lost! But even so…

No matter how many words you attach to a thing, they will not be the thing. We all know that. But they will be something.

If you want to save the world, then maybe you’re not meant for poetry. But if your dreams are poems are dreams, then what else is there to do?