THE WRITER’S EYE with Susan Beckham Zurenda & guest author Peter Schmitt

THE WRITER’S EYE with Susan Beckham Zurenda & guest author Peter Schmitt

Welcome back to our new column that examines unexpected ways authors find inspiration for their writing. This month we hear from poet Peter Schmitt, a literature and writing professor and at the University of Miami.  I hope you enjoy some of his discoveries turned into delightful poems, as much as this writer did: 

For years I have compiled a list of classic typos, malaprops, bloopers, and spoonerisms committed by my college students in their essays, short stories, and poems: A long, buffet style table full of finger foods and pasties lined the right wall… Throughout the mass the whole congregation would sin, in Arabic… 12 years old and about to enter adolescents…  Such gaffes relieve the tedium of grading, and every instructor, whether they’ve saved these goofs or not, has enjoyed them.  Many stories from the bible mention the use of water by Christ; for example, one famous story about Christ turning wine into water… I like to walk the beach in the morning with my fishing rod in the hope of catching a snook to have my Grandfather grilled for lunch…

Although I’ve sent my assemblage of bungles to colleagues and friends over the years, only recently did I realize that a poem might be waiting amid this material—something brief, ideally, that would try to capture the earnest spirit of these blunders.  Here, from my collection, Goodbye, Apostrophe, is that poem:

Typos

I urge my students to watch for typos:

how do I know that you mean tap dancer

when I’m staring hard at a lap dancer?

And your performing unasked-for lipo

on the great and ancient Chinese poet

is unintentional, I’m sure, but lacks

respect, all the same.  Pubic goes public

too often these days—to what do we owe it?—

(no stanza break)

loins are lions when the mood’s conducive,

and immoral, yes, has proved immortal

since probably time immemorial,

but your paper’s not the place to prove it.

Did old poets write with rhyme and meaner?

Or with a more cheerful misdemeanor?

The point is that inspiration for poems—or for stories, plays, novels, you name it—can come from virtually anywhere, even the unintentionally amusing things students say when they don’t bother to proofread.  Personal experience, and memory, have always proved my most reliable sources for generating poems, but in Goodbye, Apostrophe alone, a newspaper article, a bird’s egg wedged into a window crank, a life-size model skeleton, a postcard, a stash of weapons my father secreted around the house, a 19th C. photo from Tombstone, Arizona, a gas station encounter, a mattress, a condom, an old man falling, Scrabble, a set of old golf clubs—all these launching points, and more, have found their way into my work.

Of course, it takes more than mere inspiration to create a poem—or a successful poem anyway (at least for me).  Metaphor, language, and some kind of insight—some call it “perception,” or “epiphany,” or “message”—all have to come together to begin the process that culminates in the experience of a fully realized poem.  It doesn’t happen often, this alchemy of elements—again, at least for me it doesn’t—and one needs to be alert when the signs are there.  But it does start with that spark, that hunch, that here might be something worth writing about, that would fulfill what my college writing instructor Barry Goldensohn had in mind when he asked, and answered, the question, Why do we write poems?  To express something urgent, and to say it as beautifully as we can.

Here is one more, prompted by a painful brush with the natural world:

Instinct

The wasp that stung

your pretty lip

that time you strayed

too near its nest,

merely obeyed

its instinct—

much the way

I find my mouth

moving toward yours 

whenever you allow

yourself to slip

within my vicinity.