'A Tiny Inkling of Things Far Beyond Me'

“Do you carry a notebook around with you? Do you write things down right away.” 

No, and no. I’m not that organized. My mind operates like a car radio being tuned by a five-year-old, shifting among static, lousy music, commercials and Debussy. I need anchorage. I need to be sitting, preferably at a desk or table, and I need to tell myself, “Now I’m writing.” Nothing is so “inspirational” as the act of writing. I have tested momentum and it works. Boswell quotes his friend in The Journal of a Tour of the Hebrides (1785): “A man may write at any time, if he will set himself doggedly to it.” True, but I’m like a dog with a favorite spot on the porch. Here is Samuel Menashe’s “Inklings” (New and Selected Poems, 2005):   

 

“Inklings sans ink

Cling to the dry

Point of the pen

Whose stem I mouth

Not knowing when

The truth will out”

 

I wondered about inkling and whether it had anything to do with ink, and thus the act of writing. The OED says no. It’s rooted in an older verb, inkle, defined as “to utter or communicate in an undertone or whisper, to hint, give a hint of.” Dr. Johnson has another theory in his Dictionary. He defines the word as “hint; whisper.” Kay Ryan is a poet who shares much with Menashe, starting with concision. Here she is in her 2008 Paris Review interview:

 

“The problem for me was that I willed my poetry at first. I had too much control. But in time the benevolences of metaphor and rhyme sent me down their rabbit holes, in new directions, so that my will—my intention—was sent hither and yon. And in that mix of intention and diversion, I could get a tiny inkling of things far beyond me.”