Essay on "Zinc Fingers"

PETER MEINKE

I began "Zinc Fingers" in January 1994, when my wife and I were living in Paris, directing a Winter Term program for Eckerd College. We had herded our large group of students onto the Paris metro during rush hour, and suddenly we were all crammed tightly together as another group of people crowded in behind us. Although I could hardly move, somewhere along the line I managed to work my hand to my front pocket, where my wallet was, and encountered another man's hand! I instinctively grabbed his wrist but there we were, stuck together. My wife, trapped nearby, thought I was going crazy or having some kind of attack, as I was attempting to stare with my most ferocious macho look at the man--who fortunately was smaller than I--but he wouldn't look at me, didn't say anything, and didn't even try to take his hand away. We stood there for what seemed like an hour, but was probably about a minute and half, the usual time between stations. At the next stop when the crowd shifted he lurched away without looking back (and without my wallet).
     That's my pickpocket story. When we got back to the hotel, I wrote it down, trying to remember all the details, his smell, his wrinkled and greasy coat. I began a poem about it, beginning more or less with the current fourth line, about a man slipping his hand into my pocket, and our holding hands together as the train hurtled through the tunnels under Paris. I had some unfocused idea about the theme being the odd ways the different cultures come together, something about France and America jammed together on the planet--but nothing really clicked in my head, so it just waited there in my notebook for a few months.
     Then I read an article--probably in the International Herald Tribune --about American prisons; it mentioned, in passing, a study showing that a high percentage of prison inmates had a low percentage of zinc in their systems, and, thinking of the pickpocket, I made the sort of joking remark to my wife that now begins the poem.
     But this led me to remember something that would get the poem started again. Our biochemist daughter Gretchen worked for some time on a project at Yale University called "Zinc Fingers," a wonderful name that I wrote down in my notebook, knowing somehow I could use it one day. Basically (as I understand it, which isn't very far) the project studied proteins which attach themselves to strands of our DNA and give directions to the various cells: you'll be a nerve cell, you'll be a muscle cell, etc. This is basic research: how cells become what they become. The proteins attach themselves with pseudopods that had traces of zinc in them, hence the project's name.
     Once I thought of the fingers, they very quickly pointed out the direction of this poem for me: it was to be a poem telling the pickpocket story, musing on the combination of randomness and determination that governs our lives. Anyway, that's what I think it is. A friend of ours claims that poets should never read their own poems: "First of all, they don't understand them . . ."
     My early drafts were variations of one long free verse poem, with too much extraneous information: I had my students there, the name of the stop we began in (Palais Royal), descriptions of the man (balding, etc.) and the train (complete with advertisements for the Lido). I have a general theory that every poem has its ideal shape, whether free verse or formal, and as I searched for this one's, I noticed that pretty much in the middle was the line beginning "I lost concentration"--which I recognized as a natural break. All poems don't have to be in stanzas, but in general stanza breaks help clarify a poem by separating its major parts.
     So I separated the line and as soon as I did it, it seemed right and very helpful: it suggested to me a train (a train of thought!) rolling along between the left and right banks of Paris (the first and second stanzas) and as such suitable to the sense of the poem, and more or less true geographically, as the train was going along the Seine, which divides Paris in half.
     That led me to "balance" the poem by making the "banks" the same size. The preliminary result, as the excess weight was whittled off, was a line running between two sixteen-line stanzas. The poem was getting close to being finished, but still seemed "soft" and wordy to me; then, as I typed and retyped it I saw that, although it was in free verse, a high percentage of the lines, including the central one, "I lost concentration and began to think," consisted of eleven syllables.
     I decided to try it as a syllabic poem. This is a scientific poem, I thought, that could use a little numerical underpinning. Once again, the over-all effect of this was to weed the poem down. Syllabic poetry works best when it doesn't have hyphens calling attention to the form (in fact, I hope most readers didn't notice the form, at least at first: form should be a window through which the reader views the material of the poem). This took a lot of manipulating, and the end result was a syllabic poem consisting of two fourteen-line stanzas (semi-accidentally the length of sonnets) around the central line--all lines eleven syllables long.
     Fulfilling the obligations of a form, of course, doesn't make a good poem: all the other requirements of poetry must be fulfilled as well. It should be an original idea or an old idea presented in a new way, and it should sound interesting. My final changes in the poem involved underlining certain sounds: the whispering "s" sounds in the beginning (scientists/inform us/insufficient), assonance (eyes/shy; date/Élysées), consonance (DNA/determine; gold/gets/going), and even rhyme (OK/away), etc. I wanted the poem to be tightly constructed, natural-seeming, and pleasing to the ear. One advantage of syllabic poetry is that it's kind of a regulated free verse, giving some shape but still being pretty loose. I should add that I didn't do all this in quite so linear a way as talking about it makes it sound. Rather, I worked on everything at once more or less steadily, and gradually, this is what emerged. How do you know when to stop? Well, I'm sure this could be better, but working in form, or shape, is a help. After a while, like a kid on a beach patting his sandcastle into shape, I decided, That's it, and backed away, brushing sand from my hands and getting ready for the next wave.