NOT QUITE THERE YET
Randall Brown

"It's not fully realized yet," the mantra of poetry workshops.

"Why not give your poem another go? If not for you, then for me; I'd love to see it after you work on it." I like those who say "some more"—after you've worked on it some more.

I've studied poetry throughout two undergraduate and two graduate degrees, and participated in workshops with poets. I've taught poetry for eleven years, written it, published it, read Dr. Seuss at age three and to a three year old, but I've yet to realize a poem fully.

I started by writing poems for the dead or drunk; they don't ask for another shot. Well, drunks do. My first published poem was engraved on my grandfather's tombstone. A poem for Leisa Mohr my Chicago landlady buried in her pocket. A mother's day poem my mother can't find.

Pallas Athena, shaking her spear, sprung from Zeus's head. Owl-eyed, wholly formed, advocate of the arts, watcher of workers. It is she who oversaw the creation of the Trojan horse, only to see it used to raze every building in Troy. An ass-kickin' goddess, full of war and wisdom, that gray-eyed one.

She appears before me. I pretend I know what she wants. Construction and destruction. She asks for work, for design, for a construct at the same time she desires that the work destroy what once was. I probably misread her; do not fully realize her intentions.

The construction: sounds that resonate throughout, lines cracked unexpectedly yet necessarily, a purposeful movement. a cast-iron center, every word a compressed contributor to the whole of the work. You'd think someone who emerged into the world already built would have no interest in the work, but not Athena, the goddess of carpenters.

The destruction: the razing of the everyday, a cleansing of the household, what Charles Baxter refers to as the anarchy of the imagination: "It likes to find details that don't belong, that don't fit...to make the familiar strange and the strange familiar."

Each word held together, each word moving toward something new, destroying the world as we know it so that something else emerges, not quite wholly formed, unable to be fully realized, strange, familiar. The poetry of my misread goddess, a Trojan horse hiding beneath its wooden structure those who will take Hector's infant son and throw him from a Trojan tower before it's toppled.

Not one of my students has ever barely, let alone fully, realized "so much depends / upon / a red wheel / barrow / glazed with rain / water / beside the white / chickens." What it constructs and deconstructs eludes them. It makes no sense. Talk of imagists, of modernism, of one-word lines, of a dead world reborn. None of it helps, really. It remains, for them, fully unrealized. Goddesses appear in such a misty haze of water and whiteness. I imagine her laughing at our efforts to see the red wheelbarrow.

Every finished work destroys the others that might have been written, as this essay erased the three, four, five others that might have been. Students ask for my advice on creating their poems out of the poetic elements—and mostly they ask how to know when one is done. How they shake, awaiting the verdict, how much of their selves they've invested, as if in an art class rather than AP English. Sometimes their poems emerge quite well constructed. Safe. Sound. Fully realized.

Of these poets, I ask what their poem has destroyed. What warriors lie beneath, spears shaking, awaiting the world? Unrealize your poem, I might say. The student poet shakes her head. Unrealize your poem. Athena nods in assent. Wage war. Shake your spear. Raze the villages. Strike. Raise your fist. Unrealize the world. I wink.

And when they say, of my poem, that it isn't fully realized?

Fuck 'em.

© Randall Brown 2004

Randall Brown, our new poetry guide, is currently at work in Vermont College's Master of Fine Arts in Fiction Writing program and filling a slot as guest editor at flash journal, SmokeLong Quarterly. The rest of the time he finds ways to make poetry come alive for his high school students.

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