The trees in Ithaca are getting slutty for spring. Walking around town, I inhale deeply as I pass branches full of pink, white, or light purple blooms. Sweet, fresh, floral. Awash in possibility and renewal. Like one endless living, breathing poem.
It feels appropriate that April is National Poetry Month because reading a poem that lands with you can sometimes feel like spring. Or the day re-dawning after going dark for a minute or two of totality during a solar eclipse. I was in Geneva with my husband, some friends, and our friends’ family. The sky was so overcast I could barely make out through the clouds the moon starting to move over the sun. But there was no mistaking that something was happening once the temperature dropped, the light shifted, and the forsythia bush in the backyard seemed the brightest thing around us. A streetlight came on. Then it was night for two minutes in the middle of the afternoon. It was startling, strange, and awesome. Yet brief. And then sunrise again. Light coming over the horizon, peering over the brim, then bright, as though nothing had happened. The minor pause in the day ended, the usual resumed. The drive home that would ordinarily take one hour took two and a half hours. Dave and I bumped along backroads, moving through neighborhoods and small towns we hadn’t seen before, despite living here for twelve years.
I’ve shared before my affinity for making a list. Yet any list I could make trying to explain “Why poetry…” feels flimsy. If I say poetry is an invitation to pay attention on a micro-level, I could just as easily point out that deep, intentional focus isn’t exclusive to poetry and it isn’t even exclusive to writers. (Imagine the person drawing your blood not paying attention.)
All writing is about paying attention—ditto: all of being human and dialed in to whatever it is we’re doing here. Poetry happens to be one space where I enjoy looking closely. Revealing something within the constraints of a line, if the lines are broken. Uncovering a secret within a prose poem, something true and honest nestled within an accumulation of sentences. Again, this happens in fiction, nonfiction, etc. Poetry is just one place I like to look for secrets.
I could also point to poetry as a transformative experience within a limited container. That isn’t exclusive to genre either because poems can be long and novels can leave us feeling changed. Again, I think it’s the “I choose this” that makes poetry special and interesting and fun and, yes, challenging.
Poetry remains a space for me where non-sequitur logic can somehow make sense, or at least conjure a mystery worth witnessing. (This feels adjacent to nonfiction, but really, really far from how I approach fiction at this point.) I have this tendency: make associative leaps without connecting the dots—a blessing at times, a curse at others. Stories and essays can do this as well, sure, and plenty do. A favorite story that comes to mind without even going to my bookshelf is Rachel B. Glaser’s “Pee On Water”—which was originally published in an all-women issue of New York Tyrant called Lady Tyrant.
***This is a good time to read “Pee On Water” because at the end of this sentence I’m going to share some thoughts on the story.***
I reread the story and wonder if maybe I wasn’t getting ahead of myself using words like non-sequitur and associative. But this isn’t a story about Judy going to the store or attending a dinner party. It moves in a different way. It’s something else. A modern mythic dispatch. A taxonomy of inhabitants of planet Earth and the ecosystems therein. Architectures: of bodies, buildings, nature. Animal life (human and non) existing and fading to extinction alongside plant life. A study in momentum, giving the self over to the sentence and language. The sentences? Cut crystal, precise and focused, even if they make non-narrative leaps from one to the next. Echoes of precise repetition with enough contrast to shift gears and keep things moving. At once, there’s this unsettling sense of the primal colliding with the modern; the braiding of human and non-human. Do you find it unsettling at first? Wondering, What’s it about? and Where are we? and Who is speaking? and before you know it you give up on a logline and give yourself over to asking questions: Is it an anthem for the anthropocene with flashes of long-before and forever-in-the-future? Is this how life looks now? Reading “Pee On Water” I find the experience is similar to looking into a View-Master, clicking the reel and never quite knowing what will come next, but each image is so compelling I keep clicking through. Accumulation is one engine here. A grasping toward human understanding is another.
This is a story, not a poem. In my heart though, it’s both. Much of my favorite writing live across genre. Fluid, porous, yet contained. Stories can be poetic. Poems can be narrative. Essays can be associative.
If I’d assign anything this month in honor of National Poetry Month, I’d go for The Rose Metal Press Field Guide to Prose Poetry. I love this book because it includes: brief essays on the form from folks who write it and glimpses of their work. No exercises or prompts, more of a conversation about prose poetry paired with examples. I think this form can be a great approach to split the difference between a nebulous spell and not writing. Or those times I’m writing and want a more limited container than “Sit down and write” (or what I like to call an “everything-and-the-kitchen-sink” draft), but less rigidity than “Now break the line.”
When are we not traveling between time, place, genre, the hope that something we witness will transform us and the skepticism that we should know better, and how we keep showing up anyways.
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I love the "everything-and-the-kitchen-sink" draft. I'm going to steal that.