Radha Marcum on “Hours of American Prairie” and Caesura

Born and raised in the American West, I think a lot about the poetics of landscape. As a poet interested in place and ecology, I seek to engender a more truthful and nuanced view of the West and its ecosystems. I’ve often felt that our dry, open landscapes don’t lend themselves to the fluid, sometimes dense poetic structures of the landscape tradition I inherited—from Wordsworth’s Prelude to Whitman’s long, ecstatic sentences in Leaves of Grass.

Set on the plains near where I live in Colorado, “Hours of American Prairie” took its cues directly from the landscape. Colorado’s Front Range has absorbed millions of new residents over the last decade. We watch as bulldozers scrape prairie down to dirt and housing developments replace open grassland and divert water. During the pandemic, I started spending a lot of time birding with my son on small parcels of public land—islands of grassland, lakes, and ponds—between suburban neighborhoods or, further out, past farms and gigantic fracking operations. His devoted attention to local migratory bird species—coupled with recent reports on dwindling avian populations—forged a new, tender connection in me to these places.  

I arrived at the form of “Hours of American Prairie” intuitively while attending to my experience and to the poem’s emerging music and meaning. I explored extending the line (I tend toward short lines) but didn’t want to give up the perceptual shifts offered by enjambment. Marta Werner says about Emily Dickinson’s poems: “The boundary lines . . . create a kind of physical caesura that gets repeated in the lines—where there is also a kind of braking action, or a kind of leap across the boundary. Caesura and syncope. We hear the grammar of discontinuity.” 

It was that kind of intense discontinuity I felt in the landscape. I compromised by inserting midline spaces. As I worked on the poem, I began to trust that long lines paused by caesurae was how I “heard” the landscape—a broad horizontal space, disrupted. Embracing caesura in the poem created rhythmic (emotive) pauses in the voice, while still suggesting abrupt shifts in perception and meaning. I liked how the form embodied continuity and disconnection. 

Since intuiting this form, I've applied it to other poems. I’m interested in how the midline spaces also make vertical shapes down the page—ribbons of silence that look like watersheds, dry riverbeds, or the cracks that form in mud as it dries. Metaphorically they suggest tears in the fabric of ecosystems, the separations within our current social structures and belief systems. There is for me as the poet, and I hope for the reader, a lot more meaning to the form than just a surprising layout on the page.