In Praise of Un-knowing

Ana Maria Spagna

I have always read poetry. I’d read it in the mornings as a kind of spiritual practice, the heart of which was always a kind of unknowable-ness. I often did not understand what the poems meant, but I felt them. The best poems shifted something in me, almost like a chiropractic move, an adjustment of the spirit.  After reading them, I’d step into the day right.

So, I read poetry, yes, but I did not write it. I wrote nonfiction and occasionally fiction, never poetry. I feared that once I starting making poems, I would understand how they worked, and the act of knowing how or why poems worked seemed not just wrong but dangerous. I was afraid of undoing the magic. 

The fact that I stumbled into Carol Ann Davis’s Fairfield MFA workshop “Poetry for Prose Writers” was less a stroke of luck than a revelation. The experience moved me—changed me—the same way reading a good poem could, and the way she shifted my perspective came as a surprise. I thought my problem would be too much thinking. I like thinking, on the page and off,  and I assumed thinking would get in the way of making poems. Carol Ann disabused me of that notion straight off the bat.

Yes, think, her approach suggested. Just not about meaning. Think about the parts. Think about sound, image, music, rhythm, syntax … and see what comes. Make a nest of language, she’d say, and see what hatches.

The truth is I’d been doing something similar with creative nonfiction for a long time. I abhor an outline. I’ve seen how having a theme—or, god forbid, a thesis—in mind ahead of time can tank a decent essay. If there is a central idea or concept or plotline, the best thing you can do is swerve from it, take a leap. I thought of such moves as “bridges” like in music, a shift in key mid-song, or like on hiking trails, a way across a chasm.  I learned poets call such moves “turns,” and I worked to build nests for them.

When the class ended and the pandemic hit, Carol Ann generously offered to continue a correspondence. She’d send a poem when she had one, and I’d send one when I had one. Like all good mentorships, this relationship had the semblance of camaraderie, of friends, or equals, when in fact I was following her gentle lead. What I learned was that for Carol Ann a snip of unusual syntax provided an opening. When I read her poems using opening lines, I’d imitate them. The anaphora of “Insofar as I know…”, for example, freed me from my prosaic tendencies, but also invited unexpected imagery. The geese, the everyday geese, let me dive into space. Imitation gave me license and encouragement and stripped me of what I might’ve thought I knew. I was grateful, and the gratitude, too, seeped into the poems. 

Later in the summer, I dropped pure imitation and took to bravely following the language where it took me. In the fraught week before I left my wife of 30 years for a (temporary) job across the continent, mid-pandemic, I began to write about cutting green firewood, and all the forces on uncertainty, of unknowing, I didn’t want to confront from teaching remotely to the impending election sneaked their way onto the page. Not one bridge, not one swerve, but several, woven together within language-nest, held by a singular sensibility. 

I realize these lessons aren’t terribly original or earth-shattering, but what’s exciting is that they are so simple to follow. Listen to the words. Imitate those you admire. Lean into gratitude. And don’t leave the thinking out. Just the knowing.