How Poetry Can Speak to the Skin

The labor and illumination of craft

This Weekend Edition of Ecstatic features Hallie Waugh

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I know a poem is good when I feel, as Dickinson said, like no fire could ever warm me. Or, alternately, like no ice could ever cool me, because sometimes a poem catches fire in my chest. Poetry is a bodily venture. The first time through, I read it with the sensations on my skin and in my gut. I read it the way a person reads Braille or a barometer reads atmosphere.

The first time I remember experiencing this phenomenon, I had been assigned William Wordsworth’s “Lines Written Above Tintern Abbey” for a college assignment. As I read, my body shivered to life.

—And I have felt
A presence that disturbs me with the joy
Of elevated thoughts; a sense sublime
Of something far more deeply interfused,
Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns…

I felt the poem before it could fully unfold in my mind. My sensory organs knew what my mind had yet to grasp: the numinous—whatever that meant—was nearby, hovering just out of sight. Sitting at an old wood desk in an abandoned corridor of my college’s library, I felt my body leap in recognition, like an unborn John the Baptist stirring in Elizabeth’s womb.

I read in a book on poetic craft that metaphor is pre-logic; we can understand before our brains have a chance to trace each ligament of reason, connecting one thing to another. Our metaphors are everywhere. They are the sinews of thought, the boats we use to cross rivers of unknowing.

T.S. Eliot, in his essay on Dante Alighieri, says it this way: “Genuine poetry can communicate before it is understood.” Dana Gioia, elaborating on this quote, asserts that poetry speaks to us “just as music and dance can communicate in ways that are physical and sensory rather than conceptual.”

Trompe l’Oeil with a Bust of Venus by Caesar Van Everdingen (1665)

My favorite poems arrive as if I’ve always known them. There you are, my sense and spirit say in unison. I remember you. A few poems always have this bodily effect on me, while others are assigned a specific time to work their magic—bewitching and powerful for a season, and then the ember no longer catches fire. Even now, I hold somewhere deep in my being lines of poetry from Elizabeth Bishop and Tomas Tranströmer, Luci Shaw and Louise Glück, William Stafford and Wallace Stevens, Maggie Smith and Ada Limón, Carl Dennis and Billy Collins, dear friends and poets whose names I don’t remember.

But what is it that makes a poem announce itself in the body? At my most earnest and naïve, I would believe that a poem’s resonance is all thanks to a “spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings,” as the first part of Wordsworth’s famous definition of poetry states. Genuine emotion, it may seem, generates resonant poems. But I’ve written enough boring and confusing poems—which, at the time, were the products of overwhelming emotion—to know that simply isn’t true. Emotion alone can’t make a poem resound with its reader. It can offer catharsis, even healing. But emotion is not enough to cross the gulf between writer and reader. It only gets us part of the way.

The latter part of Wordsworth's definition is what I’m curious about. Poetry is, to Wordsworth, “emotion recollected in tranquility.” It begins with a lightning-bolt moment of inspiration, a pouring forth of expression. But a poem finds its final, most resonant form through thoughtfulness, labor, and recollection. It requires a certain level of equanimity and an unyielding commitment to the keystones of craft—sound, form, rhythm, controlling metaphor, pacing, tension, a believable speaker. It requires striking out every single word or syllable that is anything less than essential. It is, in short, hard work. 

During my master’s program in poetry, I was required to produce what felt like a near-impossible number of poems each month. Despite the high demands, I spent hours upon hours simply sitting still and thinking. I’d arrive at a metaphor and think it through, all the way to its end. I’d consider its implications, what other images and sounds might help me build that metaphor further. For every glowing moment of inspiration—when an opening line would arrive in my mind and I’d rush to my notes app to get it down—a hundred movements of logic and labor followed.

I love the work of poetry. And despite its rigorous process, I love the fact that both writing and reading verse transports me to a realm of openness and attention; a place where anything might happen. A metaphor might arrive in my mind as if dropped from a divine hand. Or I might read a poem and feel like someone stands behind the poem speaking directly to me. The craft of poetry, with its mystical logic and exacting labor, primes the conditions for this peculiar and powerful resonance.

I was raised in churches, singing songs, praying prayers, and studying scriptures with a common aim: ferrying me toward God and an idealized self. Show me a church building, and I’ll show you the backdrop of my entire life. The song lyrics I used to sing in corporate worship services were rarely, if ever, deeply poetic, and yet my body responded to them all the same. During worship or prayer circles, I have often felt my skin, tear ducts, and stomach react to the reading of Scripture or the start of a song. I’ve wept, knelt, jumped, lain prostrate, danced, crumpled in praise. I’ve felt as if some large divine hand were pressed against my shoulder blades or over the top of my head. And I’ve experienced miracles—things it’s almost impossible to believe even when they’ve happened to me. Headaches and wrist pains instantly gone, chest tightness plucked out like a splinter.

Though these experiences were ineffable, they always felt familiar. I remember, my body would say. I’d leave these encounters buzzing, certain that I had inched closer to the elusive place where God dwelled. I had arrived in a higher stratosphere of holiness—or at least I was on my way there. I would be free of struggle and sin, finally at ease, finally and fully sanctified.

It was, of course, not like that. The shine always wore off, and where I once felt God’s presence just inches beyond me, there was only the gaping hole of distance. Prayers left my mouth and felt like they thudded to the floor, the moment of awe having dissipated.

In one of my favorite Old Testament stories, Yahweh hides Moses in the cleft of the rock and passes by. God says to Moses, I want you to see, not my face, not my body, but the place where I’ve just been—the trailing of my robe, the ends of my hair. See the shadow fall behind me; find the warmth of where I just was.

Moses watches Yahweh pass. He then records the Ten Commandments, straight from God’s mouth to a stone tablet by his hand. He comes down from the mountain with his face aglow. But then he sets about the rigorous work of leading a stubborn people, building a tabernacle, an ark, a lampstand, an altar. He had basked in God’s glory, sure, but then he had work to do to make good on that glory in the light of day.

I try to do much the same; I don’t always feel like God is near, but I keep my eyes peeled anyway. In the meantime, I commit to the work of embracing humility, seeking beauty, and honoring my own humanity as well as my neighbor’s. It is hard work, and it’s hard to know for sure if it means anything. It’s the best I know to do.

It is natural to crave the moments of illumination. The miracle, the glimpse of transcendence, the perfect metaphor, the clear-as-day opening line—these are smooth and easy, like a river stone in hand. It’s thrilling to receive some sort of transmission from beyond yourself, as if someone is there behind the thin veil of our earthbound reality. The work that follows this poetic and spiritual lightning strike is far more arduous, equally necessary, and even more rewarding. I see it now as two essential parts of an enriching and vital process: receiving the gift of inspiration, and honoring that gift with my work. One part is the product of God’s labor, the other part is the product of mine.

I catch glimpses that leave me in awe, prick my skin, and flutter in my stomach. It feels, at regular intervals, like someone is laboring alongside me, or like they are behind a scrim sending messages to me. I soak these moments in. And then I put my head down and do the work I hope will make my art and my life worthy of such glory, such sublime excess.

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Hallie Waugh
Poet & Copywriter

Hallie is a strategist & copywriter by day, poet and essayist by night. She holds an MFA in Poetry from Seattle Pacific, and her poetry and essays have been published in Fathom, Mom Egg Review, Windhover, The Curator, and New York Quarterly.

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