Battlecock and Shuttledore

The Highest Cauldron

by Anita Sullivan

And there they play for evermore

At battlecock and shuttledore

—Edward Lear, “The Daddy Long-Legs and the Fly”

EUGENE Oregon—(Weekly Hubris)—2/27/12—Writing a poem can be very like a game.

I’m calling it battlecock and shuttledore. If you look up “battledore” on Wikipedia you will start to see what I’m getting at.

The deathless whimsy of Edward Lear.

As in most games, there’s a two-sided-ness to any kind of writing. Physically, writing entails a flat little trail of black print moving slowly from left to right across a white page—with an ENORMOUS UNIVERSE of everything else pulsing around it. Among the “everything else” are your thoughts, ideas, passions, visions, hopes, fears, etc.—all of which must squash themselves down into this flat little trail, as if the words are gate-keepers, and only they are equipped to siphon all that pent-up energy inside you out into the physical world where it will make sense, even to you.

“There, there, what happened? Just tell Grandma, she will understand. . . .”  croons the Gate-keeper, as you stand there sagging under the wriggling contents of your entire mind, body, and imagination.

And because Grandma speaks only one language, the language of words, and because she seems to
offer you quick relief—you waste no time before you start to shrink down from your hyperactive state of highest enchantment where you jolly ought to remain, your entire self inflated like a balloon with plenty of room inside and, instead, you collapse back to your normal, everyday shape. You act like she’s merely asking you something simple like “How was school?” or “What’s your favorite color?” Your head was just now filled with ten-dimensional dreams; you opened your mouth to donate these dreams to the universe, but only invisible bubbles came drifting out and floated away, twinkling. Then—because Grandma-Gatekeeper is so encouraging—you try to write exactly what you remember from your recent brush with full-bore experience. You write one thing after another, the way things happen in the normal world.

Except, of course, they don’t. And poetry is on your side: it knows this.

Real poems have shape, and heft, and elasticity. They sometimes squish when you squeeze them, or shatter into tiny droplets. Some poems you can mold like taffy or clay, or knead like bread dough. The point is, there’s room inside a poem: a poem is not flat.

And one reason it’s not flat is that it is made up of many parts, some of which you supply from your own little Cabinet of Ideas, and some of which you have swept up from the various bits and pieces leftover from the necessary explosion that got the whole poem going in the first place.

Every poem is like this—a collation of elements that would never, under the normal conditions that Grandma-the-Gatekeeper is in charge of—would never come together inside the same space.

This is battlecock and shuttledore, that mysterious game between imagination and reason, between chaos and order, which are forever skating around in a magical rink somewhere, waiting for the poet to come in and turn the whole thing into a game. To make a poem. Again. A thing that was not in the Universe at all, previously.