from A river runs through it: a writing diary

, collaborating with Julie Carr

As part of my recent substack, I’ve started posting (among other things) sections of this particular and lengthy essay-in-fragments, and thought it would be worth including a section here as well, to catch your attention. The essay is some forty-ish manuscript pages, and is currently out at a potential publisher for consideration. It reads real nice as a whole unit. Hopefully these fragment-sections read well also.

 

* * * * * *

 

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?