The Most Important Skill

Someone asks me what’s the most important skill a poet can have and I start to say the power of observation. The world awaits us with all sorts of small truths that can’t easily be seen. When I lose touch with the details around me, I have a devil of a time expressing myself. I don’t mean facts here; facts aren’t always sacred. But the various ways that life identifies itself, shakes its tail feathers, empties its pockets of coins and stones, bathes in vats of light.

But then I think of music, how a poem sings when the rest of the room is chewing on gravel. What would we have without the music inside the words? Shopping lists, prescriptions, scribbles. A close rhyme can cash in on a harmony that sends shivers through my entire skeleton. A smattering of alliteration and a nail sinks into a hard piece of wood. A touch of assonance and even woodchucks hum.

Or maybe it’s the ability to leap from tree to tree like a squirrel. Or a knack for metaphor, always something standing in for something else. Could it be a grand vocabulary? A willingness to state the truth and nothing but? An ability to make an echo chamber out of your obsessive nature?

I get confused over what comes first: the word or the speaking. “Being alive” I finally say. You have to be alive to observe, to hit the high notes, to bang and whistle, to love language so much that nothing else will do.

The views expressed in the Writer-in-Residence blogs are those held by the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of Open Book: Toronto.