Poet Behind the Poetry, CKP’s special blog series in honor of National Poetry Month, looks behind the scenes of a writer’s creative life.
Still Inside Me or Gone?
Dawn Potter
I know a poem is finished when each of the words I have chosen is exactly right in the context of all the other words that surround it. I picture a wall in which each stone is essential to holding every other stone in place. Exactly right takes many, many elements into account: definition, connotation, sound, cadence, visual appearance, even the poet’s private associations with the word. For instance, if you were to note the words dawn or sunrise or rosy-fingered in my poems, you would not be wrong to suspect a personal resonance, any more than I am wrong to suspect a parallel resonance in Robert Frost’s many references to snow and ice. Our names, after all, are among the oldest echoes in our own minds. “Where was the child I was, / still inside me or gone?” asked Pablo Neruda. The words that call forth these deep reverberations are the conversation of poetry and of the poem itself.
[from The Conversation: Learning to Be a Poet (Autumn House Press, 2014).]
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