9780415317856_the_routledge_creative_writing_coursebook

www.ATIBOOK.irPoetry 65moving from tree to tree,his blood (channeled nowthrough Dacron tubing)beating strong again in his chest,while overhead the blue northern skystares down, intentas a surgeon’s great solemnscrutinizing eye—under the hot floodlights of spring.(Wilkins, 1982:38)The cherries ripen under a hot blue sky, and healing seems a natural process, but the lastlines correct that impression. The process involves the heavy engineering of the operatingroom with its overhead power-lamps. The poem brings the mechanical and naturaltogether in one stunning metaphor: ‘the hot floodlights of spring’. Despite their gradualconvergence we experience this final conjunction as a shock. Just at the moment whenwe thought of spring as the healing force, we are reminded of the surgeon’s eye.However strong the recovery was, a sense of being assailed still continues. The poemcouldn’t produce this insight without details of setting or world, without image (the waycolours impinge with forceful clarity), and story—from illness to recovery. We hear ofrecovery, also of persistent exposure, a turning-point that doesn’t quite make the turn, ofgreen orchards, also Dacron tubing. A dramatic tension holds these impressions together.TransmittersBut something else is important here and that is the poem’s relationship with its world. Inthis poem the cherries aren’t there just to provide realistic touches and therefore credulity,not used just to brighten its colour spectrum. They are performing a central function inthis particular machine of words. More than objects, they appear as transmitters ofmeaning, become signals of colour, an awakened sensuous ness, sought for as anaffective supply of life. What sort of cherries, how many, how red, etc? Just to describethem statically in terms of size and shape, along with everything else, is not the point. Bytransmitter, what I mean is that a particular object doesn’t just receive special attention, itgalvanises the rest of the poem’s world, generates a force field, a polarisation of energy.If you describe it you will be doing more than just representing an object in words. Itssignals seem to steer the attention we give to the poem as a whole, and to a widermeaning as we read. A transmitter can be a person or an object, animate or inanimate, astreet sign, something in a landscape. If poems are dramatisations of experience, then oneway of enhancing that drama will be to think not of static scenes but of shaping energy.Examples of transmitter poems include ‘The Tyre’ by Simon Armitage, many ofSylvia Plath’s poems, particularly ‘Tulips’ from Ariel, ‘A Disused Shed in CountyWexford’ by Derek Mahon, is another. The following poem by Daniel Weissbort, a poet