,
collaborating with Julie Carr
* * * * * *
On November 26, Julie emails an extended version of her “River,” writing: “It’s US thanksgiving - Already making pies.” Our thanksgiving, of course, sat a month earlier. We have American President Abraham Lincoln to thank for the original holiday, crafting a bit of sentimental acknowledgment and historic inaccuracy from Of Plymouth Plantation, the memoir/journal composed by Yorkshire-born Puritan William Bradford (1590-1657), founder of the Plymouth Colony after landing via the Mayflower. Bradford was known neither for his pies, nor for his easy relationships with the aboriginal peoples. He barely made it out alive, his soul far less intact than he himself might have hoped. Or even wished to admit.
She adds a half-page further to her original poem, shifting where I thought this might go. I had presumed, somehow, that her second “response” would be another stand-alone section, roughly the length of the first she’d sent along. The new sections include:
I give over to you. or could.
and then the phone alarms : a photo of a little girl in orange who is ours:
for we, they, she is legion, feathery and promiscuous and
*
light. I woke to the snow how it paints
the top sides of sturdy limbs
and draws the soft boughs down
wanting to fall
toward the something that is new.
Where does her river flow? I spend a day shaping, reshaping my own response. My “estuaries : two” includes:
these small mercies , nest
and
shelter,
our two girls on their tablets,
a
morning of personalized moments,
wrinkled pajamas,
a
paint
of seawater, fresh I woke
to
the snow,
*
sunroom: pressurized
bursts
of
carbonated cans of ice,
three
season space: , a snowy
bricolage
of
flavoured slush,
I’ve always favoured writing that exudes breath; writing that moves through the lyric with the understanding that language includes both music and breath. Akin to a flow of water, perhaps. One should spend a certain amount of time learning to listen to the water.
To state what might seem obvious: poems are constructed out of words, of language; before subject, tone or biographical elements. Before sentences, or any potential narrative or story. Writing is built out of words, and the words themselves, an evolution of agreed-upon sound and meaning. These are the block with which we build our houses. The houses in which we build, and choose to live.
To paraphrase Meredith Quartermain: “What the language poets miss is that words can’t help but mean.” The material of language and the elements of domestic, reference and collage.
Nepal
and China have just announced that Mount Everest is taller than it used to be. How
might I be able to use that in a poem?
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