What's good is good, what's bad is good.
Had an earlier post entitled "Ruth Stone's Second Hand Coat" not become so very popular on this blog, I would never have sat down tonight to trace backwards how I came to the poetry of Ruth Stone and come upon the following quoted passage from Wikipedia:
Writer Elizabeth Gilbert tells a story about Stone's writing style and inspiration, which she had shared with Gilbert:
As [Stone] was growing up in rural Virginia, she would be out, working in the fields and she would feel and hear a poem coming at her from over the landscape. It was like a thunderous train of air and it would come barrelling down at her over the landscape. And when she felt it coming...cause it would shake the earth under her feet, she knew she had only one thing to do at that point. That was to, in her words, "run like hell" to the house as she would be chased by this poem.
The whole deal was that she had to get to a piece of paper fast enough so that when it thundered through her, she could collect it and grab it on the page. Other times she wouldn't be fast enough, so she would be running and running, and she wouldn't get to the house, and the poem would barrel through her and she would miss it, and it would "continue on across the landscape looking for another poet".
And then there were these times, there were moments where she would almost miss it. She is running to the house and is looking for the paper and the poem passes through her. She grabs a pencil just as it's going through her and she would reach out with her other hand and she would catch it. She would catch the poem by its tail and she would pull it backwards into her body as she was transcribing on the page. In those instances, the poem would come up on the page perfect and intact, but backwards, from the last word to the first.[5]
This passage, I was meant to find. This is how I come to 80% of my best poems. Many times, I fail to honor the muse as she rushes through my body. I say to myself let me just finish this sleep, this drive, this walk in the woods, there will be time enough to write it down then. But, I rarely remember the exact phrasing, the essence of the idea escapes as if I had Alzheimer's disease, and all I can remember are wisps of feeling of what was so clear to me before. I take the muse for granted, I am ashamed to say, more often than I can afford to. I am better about it now that I am older. Respecting flashes of poetry when they come comes either when one is very young and able to drop everything to write, or when one is very old and must drop everything to write.
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