Every poem has a prompt. The thought, feeling, or circumstance that brings it into the world. In his foundational essay on the topic, Richard Hugo called it the “triggering subject,” which he envisioned as a town you once lived in, whose memories bubble forth and spark the idea for a poem.
I take a wider view of this impulse, and instead of a trigger, I think of this as a poem’s Occasion. All poems have occasions, whether we call them “occasional” or not. In the larger context of the poems three vectors, along with form and content, occasion begins to comprise many of the unseen, unspoken, or unidentified aspects of a poem.
But let’s start by thinking through what Occasion might mean in the most obvious of terms: the event that prompted the poem.
As one of the three vectors of a poem, Occasion can be dialed way down so that the poem’s origins remain a mystery to almost everyone except the poet, and it can be dialed up so much that the poem’s occasion is its main source of meaning. Think of this latter category as a greeting card, many of which come with pre-written poems. These poems are, of course, almost universally “bad”—compared to poems published in books, these poems often push to the forefront a sentimentality that comes off as saccharine and treacly at best, and laughable at worst. While the poems in most greeting cards don’t measure up artistically to contemporary poems, that’s also not their role or responsibility. These poems are designed to live in the shadow of the occasion—the birthday, the wedding, the funeral. They aspire to be as universal and non-specific as possible. Unfortunately, this approach often has the opposite, unwanted effect—the cards themselves seem stiff and impersonal instead. Yet we give them because it’s not the content that matters—here the Form (greeting card) has more significance, while the Occasion (holiday or event) is the poem’s defining factor.
We’ll discuss what happens to
