On Poetry

from Tulum, Mexico

I struggle to write poetry in the city because of the noise. For me, a background of constant sound lends itself to linguistic compression: there is never enough room, or time, or literal space to expand, still less upon the page. When I am away from city noise, it becomes easier to tap into the undercurrent that moves at the speed of writing.

I like my writing better when I am away from home. (The trouble is, “away” is not a permanent state of being (& lives in direct tension with my love of home & peaceful stability. Also, there is no “away” without home to ground us — otherwise, “away” from what?) I am an avid journaler, beginning most days with at least one page of reflection in my notebook. Underneath the turquoise & fuchsia pattern on its front, this journal has tiny ridges! I hold this book in my hands every day and never noticed.

At its core, poetry is a practice of paying attention, of noticing. I haven’t “written a poem” on this trip yet, but I did spend some time contemplating the marvelous phenomenon of an ice crystal forming a perfect circle on the window of the plane — and THAT is the genesis of a poem. I’m glad I know it when I see it, even if bringing the poem to bear will take some time & doing.

“…the poem is a map, but after the fact; not a way of getting somewhere, but a record of having been lost, of where that lostness brought me, until what was uncharted country became, for the space of the poem, a place to live.”

-Carl Phillips, My Trade is Mystery: Seven Meditations from a Life in Writing

Poetry is not a practice of outputs. If I thought it were like playing piano scales daily, I would commit to writing a poem every day (or hell, a poem every hour!). Carl Phillips describes poems as “a record of having been lost,” something impossible to determine in advance, only made possible in retrospect, in looking behind. At the height of the pandemic, I used to take daily walks to stay sane. I would wander two, sometimes three miles a day, challenging myself to notice at least 3 new things about my neighborhood that I hadn’t noticed before. My physical route was possible to predict, but the new things I noticed were not. My neighbor’s shed door painted fuchsia. The weathered inscription on a park bench plaque. But to see where I had walked, I had to come back home and look back over my steps. The coming home, the sitting down at the blank page, was not the beginning of the poetic process but rather the itinerant middle.

This fall, I am interested in shifting even deeper into a poetics of noticing. Intentionally setting aside time to pay attention is what germinates seed-ideas of new poems. It will soon be time to let the land lie fallow for the winter, then plant fresh seed for the spring.