Hillsdale

I've signed up for a course at a nearby community college. It's a poetry workshop. On the first day the instructor gave to those of us who were there for the first time (only a few of us, in a class of returnees) a writing exercise consisting of a series of eleven prompts, like "Name something you can hold in your hand," "What scares you?" and "Quote a line from a song.")

It was suggested that we might try jotting down quick answers to each of the questions, and then attempt to make a poem out of the raw material that appeared on the page. I've done exercises of this kind before—and asked my students to do them as well—but not one with these particular questions. So this afternoon I gave it a shot. My first draft wound up being something like 16 lines, which was close enough to sonnet length that I figured cutting it back would give me something to work against. Here, FWIW, is the very wet draft:

Hillsdale

Pen in hand, she sits at her desk by the window, watching the sun

descend toward the woods behind the house. She is waiting

for the words that might express her heartache, her fear that

the willful disregard for facts she sees in the lives of her friends

and neighbors will only increase in intensity in the coming months

and years, even as the west coast burns, the midwest dries up,

the east coast drowns, home-grown refugees by the millions

take arms against whoever has food or water left to steal.

She recalls her years in Honolulu: once the city of sunshine

and clean air, now choking on traffic, streets awash in homeless

people displaced by entrepreneurs looking for the quick kill.

Wishing she could be invincible, she sits, simmering in onyx anger,

pen poised over the paper, waiting for words. Outside, crows

caw out their warnings. It's not dark yet, but it's getting there.

Process Reflection: The list of questions gave me a word bank to work from, and there were enough different kinds of questions to introduce the same kind of randomness that I sometimes find interesting to work through when I do collages. There's of course a tendency for these elements to pull in different directions. For example, Honolulu would not have shown up in this poem if it wasn't the answer to one of the questions. The challenge was to find a way to have it arrive in a form that fits the emerging narrative, so I had it be the narrator's recollection. The first question had to with owning a large estate, and that provided my frame: from the time I was twelve until I was fifteen I lived on a farm in Hillsdale, New York. So even though Hillsdale and Honolulu are poles apart in any normal geographical or cultural sense, they are both part of my experience. And, as my legions of long-time fans may recall, the existential angst that haunts the poem's narrator is not exactly foreign to me either. It did give me pleasure to tip my hat to Brother Bob, another long-time mentor of sorts, there at the end...

Also, to perhaps belabor the obvious, the poem wound up being a piece of writing about a writer, who inevitably, I suppose, is sort of a stand in for me, in that her concerns as she sits at her desk waiting for the words to come are pretty much the concerns that I have when I sit at my desk waiting for the words to come. The dilemma being that the words, whatever the turn out to be, must necessarily always fall short. I was reading Stephen Dobyns yesterday, his introduction to his second book on craft, Next Word, Better Word, and I think he about nailed it: "The main problem with turning the world into language is that it's, well, impossible. The word is always less than the thing that it wants to represent. No matter how complicated, exact, true, and beautiful the language may become,  it is always a diminishment of the reality described." Or, if you want to go back 160 years or so, Flaubert, in Madame Bovary, famously put it this way:

As if the soul’s fullness didn’t sometimes overflow into the emptiest of metaphors, for no one, ever, can give the exact measure of his needs, his apprehensions, or his sorrows; and human speech is like a cracked cauldron on which we bang out tunes that make bears dance, when we want to move the stars to pity.

PS: Two late emendations: after writing and posting the first version of this poem, I went back and changed the word "invisible," which is the word that came up in the original list, to "invincible," which is close in sound but closer to what turned out to be the controlling idea in this poem. And then I was thinking about the word "olive," which came from the list of questions ("Name a color") but didn't feel right here. So I changed it to "onyx." And tinkered with the line about the crows as well. In short, it's still falling into place.




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