Lately, I’ve been trying to make
some changes.
I’m trying to be kinder. Trying to
watch less news. Trying to be more giving, more contemplative, more focused.
Trying to soften.
I’m also trying to change the way I
write, and to be gentle with myself as I do. I recently lost my friend and
mentor Michelle Boisseau, a superb poet and an incomparable teacher of poetry.
I was lucky enough to have her in my life for almost three decades, having met
her when I was an undergraduate at Morehead State University. The first poem I
handed her then was about rainbows. She handed back instruction in how to be
deeply authentic—to live observantly well below any rainbow—and I was instantly
hooked. That was how I began my life as a poet.
Michelle’s last advice to me had to
do with my habit of writing daily poems—a practice that has been important to
me, almost like meditation, for years. But a few months ago, she asked me why I
was so keen on poem-a-day projects. Why didn’t I invest more time—go further
in?
It had been years since my mentor
had offered direction about my poems, and I wasn’t sure what to do with this guidance.
Daily writing was how I worked. I specialized in small poems, sonnet-sized or
below, and I labored over the page, putting hours into crafting each piece.
There was nothing light about my labor, nothing throwaway about my poems, and I
stand by the work. Still, I couldn’t deny it—there was something to what
Michelle was telling me.
I’m realizing more and more that I
have trained myself to pay big attention to small things—status updates and
tweets. Magazine articles. Songs and sitcoms. Nothing in my daily life prepares
me for sustained thought, and very seldom do I return today to an idea that was
percolating yesterday. Each day brings some new cynosure.
Of course, we can think of many
important poems that were substantively completed in a day. The Romantics offer
plenty of examples. Think of William Wordsworth, practically running as he
approached his door after a ramble, “Tintern Abbey” ready to spill from his
head. Or think of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, frantic to record “Kubla Khan” in
the moments between waking from an opium-enhanced dream and the unfortunate
knock on the door by that damnable Porlockian.
But my little poems about my life
aren’t the same as these. Maybe they have more in common with Emily Dickinson’s
work—her poems born complete on the back flaps of envelopes. I know I flatter
myself with any of these comparisons, but I’m thinking about process as much as
product, and of that part of writing that occurs far from the page, as we
noodle and observe.
I should note that I see my
friend’s advice as very targeted—a suggestion meant specifically for me, a
midlife poet with a book under her belt and another on the way. This probably
isn’t something she would have said to a beginner, for whom experimentation and
variety can be richly instructive and rewarding. I think she was offering
particular advice from a mature poet to a maturing one, and it had to do with allowing
myself to follow my thoughts well into their depths, rather than staying at or
near the surface.
When I first knew Michelle, she
advised our university literary journal, called Inscape. It is not lost on me that the concept of inscape, that
term coined by Gerard Manley Hopkins, is in back of her suggestion. I don’t
think Michelle was telling me to labor more over prosody (although that’s not a
bad idea, either). I think she was seeing the potential in me to explore the
inscape of me and everything around me, and she was giving me permission, in a
life built of student compositions and editing projects and PTA meetings, to
probe the thingness of things, the instress.
It feels incomparably fine to be
recognized as someone whose insights might matter. When I sit at my desk,
though, this new challenge is a bit of a burden. I’d like to tell you the
astonishing thing my young son said in his sleep, or maybe describe what the
sun did to the remnants of the ice storm in the trees. These are not new
thoughts, but they’re beautiful ones, and I’d like to nudge them around a bit,
see where they take me. But I have something big to say, and I can’t be sure
that ice-coated branches will get me there.
Of course they can. What I mean is
that I’m not sure how to get to a big there from my very modest here. There’s
no map, and the way is not direct. And that’s the real poetic challenge, and
one I hope I’m up to—my new job is to lay down that path.
.