LOOK AT A THING: W.C. WILLIAMS, ROBINSON JEFFERS, CHARLES SIMIC
Russian Formalists have a word, “ostranenie,” which means constantly attempting to discover new ways of looking at everyday things. There are almost always two realities rubbing up against one another in every poem, whether they are specified or not, and whether they are used consciously or not. These are the internal realities of the poet—her thoughts, feelings, and imaginings—and the external reality—the circumstances of time, weather, season, landscape, the things of the world, Stevens’s Necessary Angel, everything that is not us. One way to enter the poem as a writer is to focus the poem’s attention outward onto a physical object. Poets have been doing this since the first words were broken into lines. So let’s start there.
Focus for a minute, fifteen, an hour, on one small thing of this world: a candle, for instance, the wax powdery white, the wick curled over and frayed at the tip, unlit, squat, inert, waiting to be put to use. To truly see an object is to imagine the life of the object: the struck match in a tin tray alongside the arm of a girl reading a book, the wall behind her trembling with shadows, the air around her eaten away by the flame.
The life of the object implies other lives, other objects, and begins to gather a world around itself: in the drawer a candle, the storm and the candle, a candle in a window or two, a funeral candle, the rim dipped in black. Wherever the candle is, you are there: a row of tapered wedding candles white as the bride’s dress, glossy as the icing on a tiered cake, the bride’s waxy
