Art in Boxes: A Poem is a Container for Collisions

This past week I was at a large Continuing Medical Education (CME) conference held at a casino in Atlantic City. It’s been many years since I attended this conference, but the distance of time gave me a chance to appreciate how much I have evolved. Meals were served buffet style with seating at large round tables.

Some of the participants who were there alone, as I was, sat at a table and made it clear they didn’t want anyone to sit next to them. They kept their gaze down, avoided eye contact and kept their personal space small. I used to be that person.

This year, when I sat at a table, I would make eye contact, smile, and engage someone in conversation. If no one at the table wanted to be engaged, I would look around the room for someone I knew. I found that by appearing open, I attracted interesting people to sit next to me, and I wasn’t alone for very long.

This feeling of connection and relationship is a pleasant one. I don’t know why I was so anxious to avoid it. Anxiety is rarely rational, though.

Relating Unrelated Things

Creativity is a collision of unrelated things that are then brought into a relationship. A poem is a container that holds these types of collisions. Last year, I attended a writing conference that purposefully asked us to collide unrelated things.

The participants wrote ideas on scraps of paper at the direction of the instructor. Then we passed the scraps around the room randomly. Each person ended with five unrelated ideas in front of them. The task was to make one poem incorporating as many of the ideas as possible. I solved the problem by adding yet another concept to weave all my poem components together.

Sometimes, the combination of ideas seems rational. When I wrote “Window to the Bay,” I combined dead vegetable matter and a patient’s necrotic toe into the same poem. But often, the combination of ideas can be surprising or unexpected.

A poem I wrote for another class began as a semi-logical discussion of the side effects of chemotherapy. It ended up being about the general stress of being a physician, and it morphed into sonnet form. I struggled for a long time with this poem.

One morning, while I was still in that liminal time between sleeping and waking, the image of my childhood ballet class came up. It made no sense at all as an idea for this poem, but I tried it, and I got a poem I was happy with. You can read “Fertilizer: A Sonnet” here.

When I began writing a poem about flowering trees, I didn’t know that I would end up writing about my grandparents (“Smoke Trees and Mountain Ash”). Sometimes the surprises come up if I distract and overwhelm my logical brain with too many details.

For example, I can try to include the name of a retail store, a common proverb or saying, and a city in the Midwest in my poem. While one side of the brain is distracted, the other side is free to supply imagery. The distracting details can later be edited out, but they have done their job in helping construct the first draft.

In the case of “Smoke Trees,” I unearthed a memory of having my picture taken with a flowering tree when I visited my grandmother for Easter. So sometimes, my rational mind can figure out what the relationship is between the two seemingly unrelated things. Most times it can’t.

Creating a Feeling of Refuge and Safety

But that doesn’t stop me from experimenting with putting unlike or dissimilar things together, either in poetry or in life.  Some of the harmony achieved by combining dissimilar themes is shaped by having a safe space, a container.

By examining the self I used to be and observing the one I am now, I have some perspective on all the work I have done to decrease my level of anxiety, to create inside myself a feeling of refuge and safety. I credit my long-standing meditation practice for most of this change. I credit writing poetry for the rest.

Question: When have you had evidence that you’ve grown and matured? To what do you attribute this growth?