On Writing Poetry By Hand   <back to Poetry & Essays main page

I wander down the road,
the sky my roof, the heart my home,
the clothing on my back
wearing thin

around the bend, just one more bend,
an encampment of laughter, bright eyes,
joyplay bubbling from a stream.

I'll drink from that.

Poetry is the most spiritual and organic form of writing; it is the closest we can come verbally to the divine, its reflection upon our souls, and to the sacred seeds of language. Poetry presents a channel from which we can tune out the external world, listen to our hearts and souls, and record or cultivate whatever impression, feeling or perception rises from the deepest portals of our being. These portals stretch back to the beginning of human time, to the memory of our collective unconscious. No other literary device can bring us closer.

I have always believed that it is essential to compose and refine poems with the hand - handwriting in its purest form. Channel the experience, perception or vibration as it transforms from the wordless void into language. Assemble it into the form that best represents its music. Scratch and re-scratch words, lines, until the poem refines and flows with the full essence of its truth still intact. Do all of this by hand.

This might sound like retrogressive snobbery in today's world of computers, e-books and the Internet. However, can there be any other way to faithfully record the purity of a poem but by one's own hand? There are two reasons for this: First, handwriting is organic. Our hand connects to our body, mind, heart and soul, both physically and spiritually. Thus, it can feel and record the four memories that are accessible to us whenever we write from the heart and soul, the memories that feed a poem: tactile, cellular, soul and mental memories. Our hands feel everything; our hands record everything in their cells (the outer manifestation of which are the palm lines). If we attune ourselves deeply enough, listen with the inner ear, turn inward to the depths beyond our joy or pain, the soul and heart will connect the dots and transmit them to the hand. The hand will bring the memories to light. And the memories within our bodies, souls, hearts and minds are extensive: a starry night in the mountains is no more crowded.

Rilke referred to the scope of these memories when he wrote, “One must be able to think back to roads in unknown regions, to unexpected meetings and to partings one had long seen coming; to days of childhood that are still unexplained, to parents whom one had to hurt when they brought one joy and one did not grasp it; to childhood illnesses that so strangely begin with such a number of profound and grave transformations, to days in rooms withdrawn and quiet and to mornings by the sea, to the sea itself, to seas, to nights of travel that rushed along on high and flew with all the stars…”

The other reason is entirely primal and tribal: Handwriting connects us back to our ancient forbears, which opens up an incredible wealth of experience to us. We all descend from the Indo-Aryans, the Ancient Egyptians, the ancient Yogis, the Babylonians, Cro-Magnon man and, I believe, a couple of lost continents on which existed advanced civilizations long before the first paintings were etched on Pyrenees caves. The family tree draws back to a single trunk, and we can access that. People have used their hands to write since they first put symbols onto whatever surface served their purposes. The hand-written poem offers us a direct connection to these ancient forbears, to the hells and heavens they experienced within their beings, in their external worlds. In the works of some, this connection resonates so brilliantly that one can hear the waters or mountains rushing in and out of the subjects' hearts, or feel the torment of the image crushing their skulls. Some glowing examples of this ability to connect ancient memory with the present are Gary Snyder, Walt Whitman, Wolfgang Goethe, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Dante Allegheri, Michelangelo Buonarotti and almost any Native American poet or Chinese poet from the Golden Age. All of them wrote every word of every poem by hand; only Snyder and some Native Americans are alive to transfer their poems to computer.

A handwritten poem combines so many actions at once. It is a meditation of words. It is a purging of mind, heart and soul. It is a transmission of an impulse. It is the recitation of a music that courses the heart. It is the broadcasting of an old and ancient voice that decided that your vessel or mine was the proper transmitter for the poem. It is feeling the snowflakes of a winter poem; it is touching the summit of a mountain; it is transcribing the wetness of rain onto the page. The act of writing a poem by hand also creates its own memory, its own world.

Wildflower madness,
Rapturous hills

Last time I was here,
The creek was gasping -

Today, torrents,
Waters rushing life
Into the sea-womb,
Draining and feeding
The only sound on earth,
Water filling holes,
Drowning,
A sound with no echo.

Every time I look at “Sound With No Echo,” I feel my hands holding wet soil, rock, splashes of waterfall, as they did one wet April morning years ago in Big Sur. I am immediately transported to the place where Salmon Creek drops into a small waterfall and rests briefly before beginning its sudden final descent to the Pacific. This moment, as these reflective words come out, my hands return to Big Sur, and the poem sits inside the pores of my skin, in the cells. To communicate this with any other device but a pencil, paper and hand would deprive the poem of a vital link to its source.

Most of all, the hand hears, smells, touches, tastes and sees the poem-in-process. The hand not only embodies the five senses, but it also navigates the process. Think of the hand as a riverboat taking a treasure from one port to the next; the treasure will never arrive in the same manner if it cannot pick up the splashes of water, grit, talk and fire that it collects during its voyage. The hand enables the poet and writer to communicate the story of his/her inner being within the words of the poem. Sometimes, these stories are more fascinating than the poem; sometimes, one can feel the turmoil or ecstasy, the sheer tearing sound of the poem emerging from the cosmic or deep heart womb by looking at the style of handwriting, the scratches, the agony of finding the right word.

I would give plenty to see what Handel's original manuscripts of “The Messiah” looks like. He wrote down notes and bars as fast as his hand could channel the inspiration during the 72 hours of self-imposed lockdown in his room that ended with a musical masterpiece on one end and an exhausted genius on the other. In the hand-written poem, we can taste the naked marrow, blood, sweat, fears, tears, inspiration, realization, perception, lifetime of meditation or lifetime of pain that sufficiently tuned the writer to bring these words into the light - or darkness, as the case may be. We can live on several levels and dimensions with the writer; we can feel those dimensions. We can feast on a table that stretches all the way into the antiquity of our civilization, of civilizations before us, back to Original Man - and that is what I seek to find if a particular poem moves me. And the rare poet, like Gary Snyder, actually draws the maps in his work.

Will the act of hand-writing a poem survive the onslaught of technology that has given us software for fiction plotting, software for screenwriting, e-books, instant access to editors, the ability to make Libraries of our own literary Congress and so many other conveniences? I sure hope so. After all, the organic connection to the body is a vital part of what makes a poem the most distilled, succinct, profound and timeless form of writing that we have ever known.

POETRY REFERENCES:

“A Hobo's Heart,” ©1998 Robert L. Yehling
“The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge,” Rilkeˆ
“Sound With No Echo,” ©1991 Robert L. Yehling