A hazy sunrise, but stifling.
And very still.
Not because it's the best time for poetry,
But because I'm here,
So this is how it rests.
Later, says the novel
Etched on the Market floor,
There'll be smells, colours, almost-rotting fruits
And perhaps the damp of 'noon rain
Playing of trees.
Now there is just the possibility of it all,
And a blind busker
Settling an aging dog
For another day's harmonica.
Another day's sympathy.
by Liam Gilbert
Knoxville, Tennessee - May 2010
I recently visited Knoxville and really enjoyed the market square. It was one of those places that made me want to write. Sean O'Brien has spoken of trying to write "poems which are places", and it's in the sense that I wanted to capture this lively square - in essence the hub of the city - for posterity.
Beyond writing to draw the place into the poem, I wanted to articulate the idea shared by so many that the whole world is material enough for poetry; something akin to the imagist philosophy of "no ideas but in things" that is summed up in Carlos-Williams' 'The Red Wheelbarrow'
so much depends
upon
a red wheel
barrow
glazed with rain
water
beside the white
chickens
I love the way that the simplicity of this text is encapsulated by the single-word lines that sit at the end of each couplet, and it seems to me to capture O'Brien's idea that sometimes a thing is just "sufficient" to be a poem and so, in my own words, "this is how it rests".
How do we reconcile this view with Sylvia Plath's idea that she has "never put a toothbrush in the poem"? In other words, the sense that this kind of focus on anything trivial cannot be the job of the poet, but (for her) is the job of the novelist who includes it to "mix [language] perhaps, like paint, with a little water, thinning it, spreading it out".
Maybe we cannot. Maybe it is wrong to compare sunrise in a still market square to a toothbrush. Maybe Plath's dislike of the trivial needn't concern us. Afterall, it is nothing but another's way of doing something, and "a tradition becomes inept when it blocks the necessary conclusion; it says we have felt nothing, it implies others have felt more."
This is where the blind busker matters in the poem. After setting the sibilant and empty stillness of the sunrise that can exist in a poem against the bustle of the novel which is (truly) engraved on the floor of the Market, the blind busker with his harmonica and old dog comes to represent some kind of artistic ideal; Billy Joel's streetlife serenader as it were, creating purely for the love of creating. Maybe then the blindness becomes metaphorical, an image of the the difficulty of art that does not fit a mould, that receives sympathy or misunderstanding from its audience.
I too have never put a toothbrush in a poem, but I'd like to think that one day I could, and that this could still be material enough, could still be sufficient.
