writing

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The Weight of Poetry

Hatfield is foggy this morning, and most of the snow has melted off. My adult kids have returned to their towns, and the holiday leftovers eaten or tossed. I’ve got some books to mail, some poems to send to the black hole of Submittable, and a few new drafts to sit with. 

I woke this morning with the remnant of a dream in which I was talking with a famous poet (I won’t say who) about how heavy poems were. Lately I’ve been working on a poem about trains.  I have my father’s old Lionel train set, which he gave me a couple years ago (I can’t say inherited, because he’s still living, but inherited feels more accurate). While I didn’t really care for toy trains when I was a kid (I had a Tyco racecar track instead), they seem important to me now because it was important to him that I or my brother take the set rather than let it go to a stranger. It’s a post-war classic train set about 75-years old, and amazingly still mostly works. I even added two new cars myself, and the old engine manages to pull them. This year it chugged a circle under my Christmas tree. 

Anyway, I’ve heard people talk about how finishing a poem feels like relieving themselves of a weight, wringing something out of their body. For me, it’s the opposite. When you create something new, you have a responsibility for it, and you carry it with you. It’s like Jacob Marley and his burden of chains. I made those poems, and now I drag them around with me wherever I go. Some I’m quite proud of and wear like a nice sweater, yet there are plenty I’ve spent months working on but would never drag out in public. I think even the ones I’ve deleted and abandoned are still clawing onto me in some way–maybe like adding cars to that old train. 

With each new poem, a poet becomes something more. I’m not sure what it is, or if it’s better or worse, but writing a poem isn’t shedding a skin, it’s adding layers to an existing one. An old poet is a giant snowball after rolling down a hill, twigs and pinecones sticking out at odd angles. 

And I’m starting to like that train poem. 

—Temporary Shelters is now available at Bookshop and Amazon.

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Reading The Water: Form and Content in Fishing and Poetry

Not long ago I hiked down a gameland trail into a gorge thick with hemlock and rhododendron to look for a small creek named Devil’s Hole. The name comes from the way the creek emerges through rocks via an underground aquifer and disappears under the earth a few more times throughout its course to join another creek curiously named Paradise.

After a good rain, Devil’s Hole is still only 10 feet at its widest. It tumbles over and around boulders of Devonian sandstone left there when the Pocono formation was rearranging itself like a dog getting comfortable on a sofa. The topography creates plunge pools, short shallow runs, cascade falls a few feet high, and cutbanks shadowed by the bent elbows of mountain laurel. It is a remote, mysterious, and beautiful place.

I went there looking for brook trout–small, wild jewels far away from the stocked waters where most anglers go. As a catch-and-release fly fisher who likes to avoid people, this kind of angling is more about the experience than about catching fish. I go to observe the motions –water on stone, current on insect, stillness and rise– form and content defining each other.

Water in motion, like poems, is made of multiple currents, obstacles, fast sections and slower spots. The center channel may be deep or shallow. A gravel bottom holds different insects than a silt bottom. Boulders hide small pockets of stillwater. The steep bank is hard to enter, and then again hard to climb out of. Understanding those variations and learning to use them is what anglers call “reading the water.”

Because I know the region pretty well I already knew what kinds of fish and aquatic insects it would hold for the time of year. That’s the kind of knowledge that comes from having read a library’s worth of rivers.

But, as with a good poem, you can’t know everything ahead of time. At some point you’ve read enough Mary Oliver poems to know what you’re getting into when you enter one, but nothing prepares you for “The face of the moose is as sad / as the face of Jesus.” in her poem Some Questions you Might Ask.

So you read each water anew.

“One question leads to another.” says Oliver. Like a good poem, moving water asks you questions over and over again. What will the current do if I mend my line upstream? Will that boulder hide a trout or a hellbender? Can this log support my weight, or am I going to get wet?

I want poems to prompt questions the way a river or creek does. A stanza break, a caesura–these are moments in motion. Moments when you read the currents around them, observe the words doing things to each other, doing things to you, forcing a response. An enjambment is a bend around a boulder; a stanza break may be the stone you cross to continue on the other side. Form is what gets you there, what shapes your approach to the water.

But as any angler knows, some creeks don’t give up their answers easily, though hopefully their questions invite you back to give it another try. Sometimes you land the fish. Sometimes you don’t. Draft, fail, revise.

I encourage my poetry students to be observers and questioners. Why is this element here? What does it do? How does it affect what comes next? It takes time and practice to understand the machinations of water in motion. It’s the mixture of patience and humility that smooths a rough impatient stone.

Lately, I’ve been moving away from leading workshops with the goal of re-engineering a poem, and more toward learning to read it. And also asking the writer to think about why they wrote it the way they did. As an angler, the better you get at reading rivers, the more you’ll appreciate each new water you step foot in, and the better you’ll be at teasing a fish out of it. As a writer, as you learn how water works, you get better at making it work for you.

That trip down to Devil’s Hole included half a dozen creek crossings. I found bear scat along the bank, a few trout in places I expected them to be, and some where I didn’t. It’s that combination of recognition and surprise that makes a good experience on the water. I lost one fish, probably the biggest one of the day, and the strike still sends jolts into me when I think about it.

And I think about it a lot.

My latest book, Temporary Shelters, is now available at Bookshop and Amazon.

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Where Do You Write?

I have a very dull fiberboard desk I bought at Wal-Mart maybe eight years ago. Surrounding my laptop are piles of paper, post-notes, stray computer cables, a little  jade tree, two little buddhas, books, pens, a polished stone skull and other scraps. I painted the office a pleasing green tea color (looks like green tea ice cream). I put book shelves up last summer, but there are more books scattered on the floor. Next to the desk is the small table I use to tie flies. Under that are crates of fur, feathers, hooks and thread. I can see the trees and sunrises out my window, and if I crane my neck around I can see my little goldfish pond and the veggie garden. Why am I telling you this? Because in the Ploughshares blog Aimee Nezhukumatathil  writes about her favorite writing spot and asked all her friends to share theirs. My office isn’t nearly as cool as some she reveals, though it’s bit more functional than others. Mostly I need more shelves and should make more of an effort to pick up my socks. I’d post a picture but I can’t find any of my cameras.

I’m also jealous of Ann Townsend’s dock where she goes when the desk and computer aren’t working out

When I had a job that required me to take a 50 minute train ride twice a day I would often get poems started while commuting with my laptop. Now it’s mostly at night, here, at my desk.  So, where do you write?  At a desk? In the kitchen? Does it matter?

Update: the original post is more than a year old, and my writing and work situation has changed a bit. So that.