Commentary:

The most frequent adjective editors and friends have used for my poetry is wry, so I had to look the word up in my trusty OED (albeit the wimpy two volume set, because my wife still won't let me buy the complete 20 volume edition I have been salivating over for years, and which all poets should own). Anyway, wry literally has to do with a twisting and contorting of the neck and/or face to express dislike, disgust, disappointment, or (in the case of my poetry, I hope) quiet, sardonic amusement. I like that. I want my poetry to be funny, but also to have a wrenching sort of effect, to amuse and lovingly disabuse at the same time.

The preceding poem started, as they often do for me, with the sound of a word. I usually try to get the sound of a poem right first and then worry about the meaning. I suppose poets can write good poems working the other way around, but I have rarely been able to start with a prosaic idea and turn it into poetry by making it more musical. Rather, I catch a snippet of poetic sound (in a conversation, in a dictionary, on the side of a bus) and other words gather around it in my mind and start growing organically like a crystal (or a fractal, as the case may be). Only after I have completed this process of sound association do I start thinking about meaning.

I try to get one poem into a semi-finished state every weekday. I have been doing this for the past two years and am now up to #320. The above poem is #150, so I think I have improved some in that time. I began it on 4/29/98 and revised it for the 10th time on 6/20/99. As I stated above, it began with a sound: "amour." I stumbled across this word somewhere in my reading and started associating it with other words in my head. One of the most obvious words that came to mind was "more." And this reminded me of how my 1 1/2 year old son constantly said "More, more" about everything. What struck me most was how he wanted more of things that were not quantifiable or divisible. He didn't want more buses, he wanted more of the one bus. He also realized that even when he already had something, something was missing. Even when I was already with him, he sensed that I was not completely with him, that I was not one with him. Such profound metaphysical ideas sprung out of his naive misunderstanding of the word more and its "proper" syntactic and semantic usage.

In a sense, poets work hard to use language in such "naive" ways, but it comes naturally to kids. I have also noticed this with a Korean lady I know who is an incredibly intelligent engineer but who still struggles with the English language. I see poetry in almost every sentence she writes - it is so unusual and original because she doesn't know any better. As far as the brass tacks of the poem, I was in a syllabic phase at the time, so the above stanzas roughly follow a 9/7/7/5 syllable pattern. In general, I don't think readers can hear syllabic poems in English the way they can in French and Japanese, but it does provide a structure for poets to work within, and any structure can be helpful in forcing new and unusual word choices and ideas.

Yours and His,