Triumph of the Trivial: Creating Poems from the Smaller Details of Life

by Jeffrey Hillard

The most frequently asked question (poetry FAQ) I receive from poets in the early stages of learning their craft is, "How do you really get a poem going, or where do you find material?" Any poet knows one mainstream answer, such as,"Search you emotions. Meditate on and explore your most immediate inner feelings."

While this answer can easily serve as inspiration for beginning a poem, no one answer truly defines the search for material. Poetry operates on such a nebulous, mysterious level for each poet that one’s method of beginning a poem may seem impossible to another.

Still, ways "into" a poem must be discussed and shared by poets, especially to keep afire the pure desire to write and to begin lines of even the choppiest draft. Any words and any lines will do at the beginning. The process of discovering the poem awaits you. The lines that come next should be vague to you. There will be every opportunity to refine the poem later.

If you’re stuck beginning a poem, often this is a subject problem. What to write about? What will appeal to readers or to me? How will the poem unfold? This is the left (editorial) side of your brain talking, a natural if frustrating inclination. We need to strive to overcome, as much as possible, that editorial side so early in the creative process.

Why not start "small?" Why worry about solving a laborious life question in a poem? Small, nearly mundane objects or moments can trigger lucid descriptions or word combinations. The idea of capturing a small or trivial object may lead the poet into a fascinating sequence of words, lines, or stanzas. The idea is to pay attention to the small, focus on the apparently mundane object, and let this object or moment speak to you.

The great poets have resorted to utilizing trivial objects for ways into poems. William Stafford has written about a railroad tie and a kitchen window. Maxine Kumin explored a rocking chair and apple tree. Pablo Neruda depended upon living room objects for numerous poems, and some of his most intriguing. Neruda engaged these objects, eventually, in a musical lyricism.

Let’s see how a few poets resort to the trivial and allow an object or "small" moment to work for the poem. The poet Tony Hoagland, in his award-winning book Donkey Gospel, uses two mundane acts in one poem to allow his imagination entrance into the difficult notions of human distance, human longing, and disquietude of thoughts. In Hoagland’s poem, "Honda Pavarotti," the narrator is simply driving; he is also listening to the opera singer singing an aria on the radio, in which the singer "opens his great mouth/and the whole car plunges down the canyon of this throat."

The beginning of "Honda Pavarotti" reveal the mundane: driving and listening to the radio, a voice. Very simple. The first line is, "I’m driving on the dark highway…." The second line: "…when the opera singer on the radio…." There is something definite and clear about the two lines. They are declarative in terms of sentence structure. But, an experienced poet like Hoagland is going to make more use out of the mundane. He is going to allow his imagination to wander, and poetic language is going to move into the forefront.

We know the narrator will not just simply "drive and listen." His imagination will reach down to a deeper level; Pavarotti’s song will take him there. Yet, in much of this poem, the action continues to reinforce the simple – the driver is on a road, and he continues to listen to this aria. There is no change in the central action of the poem.

What happens in the poem is interior and subliminal. The narrator tries to distinguish between whether Pavarotti is truly experiencing a "joy and suffering made one at last," or if Pavarotti is so brilliant at simply masking the joy and suffering in order to "manage" the complex emotions

within the aria. The narrator faces a dilemma. What is real and what is not real? But the poem uses a simple act, a simple trivial moment (listening to the radio) to enact these larger thoughts.

The poet Linda Allardt reveals how a lyric poem – a meditative or reflective poem – can resort to one small object to heighten the appeal of a poem. Her poem "Husk" in her book of poems, River Effect, fixates on – you guessed it – that one typically overlooked object: a husk. We know what a husk looks like; a shell, a shedding of skin. Here, the husk signifies a death of some inanimate or animate being. Of course. But in this 22-line poem, Allardt is interested in depicting the "dead" husk as beautiful because "Other things that shed their husks/unfold and fly…/or sprout and grow like oats, crop-heavy…." The poem speculates that the husk seems to be alive while "flying" in the air:

"Do they feel the falling,
unable to clutch in time
a branch against gravity
or get the strange contraption open in wind?
Free-fall terrifying, nothing to row with?"

The reader can easily get pleasantly lost in the poem’s beautiful rhythm, its juxtaposition of short and long lines, which represent a kind of flying, moving motion. But the poem, again, is focused on the mundane, the small, the trivial.

As these poets demonstrate, it is encouraged and right to allow yourself any entry possible into your poem. Do not feel obligated to take on the huge themes or the classical issues or abstract thinking we all encounter. If these huge themes enter into a poem, fine. But often a poet sees into and through the most remarkably small detail to express the larger concerns of humanity.

-- JH
©2000 Jeffrey Hillard

Writer Online Associate Editor Jeffrey Hillard is the author of three books of poetry, most recently Pieces of Fernald: Poems and Images of a Place. He teaches at the College of Mount St. Joseph in Cincinnati, Ohio.