Joshua McKinney

Joshua McKinney on “Patriotism”

I grew up in northern California, which is not to be confused with the Bay Area. A full third of the state lies north of San Francisco. I mean the real northern California: Siskiyou, Modoc, Lassen, Plumas, Shasta, Trinity, and Humboldt Counties—some of the largest and most sparsely populated counties in the state—and little towns with names like Chester, Hayfork, Etna, Likely. This is the part of California the inhabitants like to refer to as the State of Jefferson. Demographically, it is largely white and politically conservative. The ecosystems of this region, high desert, mountains, coastal rain forest, are striking in their variety and beauty. 

Like many of my poems over the years, “Patriotism” features details regarding my father and our relationship. He did, in fact, say that he “loved his country,” and he meant it literally, taking wry pleasure in the distinction he was making between his love of the land itself and any notion of a “nation under God.” He was born at least a hundred years too late and would have been more content exploring his country before California was a state, perhaps trading with the indigenous peoples of the region whose culture he respected and whose lifestyle he envied. I may have inherited some of his general misanthropy. Certainly, my relationship with the inhabitants of northern California has changed, as I have changed, over the years. 

“Patriotism” evolved as I grappled with my discomfort with the politics of the region where I was, to borrow a phrase from Bob Dylan, “partly raised.” Despite the allure of the landscapes, I no longer feel at home there. Typically, my poems grow towards some kind of conclusion, but “Patriotism” was a poem whose thematic concerns were unclear to me at first, and it grew smaller with each revision. Early drafts contained much more about my father, musings upon being born out of one’s time, and various other ramblings that I would be embarrassed to share. Even Kintpuash—aka Captain Jack, the Modoc chief who, with a small band of followers and outnumbered ten to one, held off the United States Army in the lava beds for several months in 1872-73—even he made an appearance. If there is a lesson in craft here, it is an old one: let the poem sit, get some distance from it, allow the poem to determine its direction, and don’t be afraid to cut. 

In a sense, it was climate change that finished this poem for me. Over the past two decades, California has been increasingly ravaged by wildfires. Fire season is almost yearlong, and this trend shows no sign of abating. We Californians have grown accustomed to “red flag” days and air indexes in the “unhealthy for all groups” range. Mt. Shasta (14, 179 ft.) is home to the four largest glaciers in California. Surprisingly, and in contrast to what is being observed in most areas of the world, the Shasta glaciers are growing. Whitney Glacier, for example, has expanded thirty percent over the last fifty years. This is because increased temperatures have tapped Pacific Ocean moisture, leading to snowfalls that supply the accumulation zone of the glacier with forty percent more snowfall than is melted in the ablation zone. Predictive models suggest, of course, that eventually the glaciers will begin to retreat. 

These hard facts, foregrounded by the epigraph from Frost, subsume the poem’s other particulars. Ultimately, I came to understand that my poem was about change. I hope that the details of “Patriotism,” both personal and climatological, have melded into a whole that resists paraphrase, something a reader will be able to feel rather that fully articulate, something, perhaps, like the feeling of insignificance and awe I felt when gazing down from the slopes of Mt. Shasta. 

Susan Cohen

Susan Cohen on “Omens Being Bad“

“Omens Being Bad” began with snakes. In Northern California, we have both the Northern Pacific Rattlesnake and the Pacific Gopher Snake that can resemble rattlers in color, length, and blotchy back. People kill Gopher Snakes sometimes, not realizing they’re harmless.

Spotting two large snakes stalled directly across my path in one week would have entered my notebook at any time. They seemed to deserve to be the poem, so, in the earliest versions, I described their patterning, where I saw them, and how each slid away—one over a wall, the other into dry grass. It seemed noteworthy that both waited before departing, as if wondering whether I intended harm. In other cultures, surely a two-snake-week would be seen as omen.

But something about seeing them now, when the political and natural world are simultaneously endangered and dangerous, made them even more insistent as an image. The world has never felt more threatening. I’ve found it almost impossible to write this year because almost every attempt brings me back to the pandemic, as if the virus also infects my work. Over and over, I’ve abandoned the poems I started.

One sure escape has been nature, which has nourished my spirit, just as it has always nourished my writing. I walk to get away from my too-familiar walls and to find material to write about. Luckily for me, Berkeley offers both a large regional park in the hills and paved trails along the edge of San Francisco Bay. I find plenty to see and hear besides other humans.

A very short poem like this still can require months of revising. Maybe especially a short poem, because each word bears so much weight. I’m one of those who tend to pare down rather than to expand as I discover where the heat lies for me over weeks or, in some cases, months. Even as I began thinking the snakes offered me a concrete way to grapple with something I was feeling, the actual details about how they looked and where they went became less and less important. What remained essential in every version was the encounter 

I had to acknowledge to myself that this was a pandemic poem, after all. One of the worst aspects of this terrible virus is the way it’s made us stop, jerk back, or step aside when a fellow human being comes too close, even on a narrow hiking trail. We look to see if he is wearing a mask. We wonder whether she is the person who will infect us. Every encounter is a potential threat.

Once I knew what the poem was about, the coincidence of my teapot giving up its whistle had to go in there as an omen, because I see everything now through the lens of the pandemic. In went the incomprehensible number of deaths at that time. The final line came to me last: So far, no one I know. It just popped up, the way a line can, from some voice in my mind that had been whispering too softly for me to hear. As each month goes by, the possibilities of infection and death creep nearer, even as people stand farther apart. 

Bless those snakes who offered me a way express everything I just spent paragraphs discussing, without saying it all. Or did I? Saying and not saying at the same time. Isn’t that what poetry does?

Ana Maria Spagna

In Praise of Un-knowing

Ana Maria Spagna

I have always read poetry. I’d read it in the mornings as a kind of spiritual practice, the heart of which was always a kind of unknowable-ness. I often did not understand what the poems meant, but I felt them. The best poems shifted something in me, almost like a chiropractic move, an adjustment of the spirit.  After reading them, I’d step into the day right.

So, I read poetry, yes, but I did not write it. I wrote nonfiction and occasionally fiction, never poetry. I feared that once I starting making poems, I would understand how they worked, and the act of knowing how or why poems worked seemed not just wrong but dangerous. I was afraid of undoing the magic. 

The fact that I stumbled into Carol Ann Davis’s Fairfield MFA workshop “Poetry for Prose Writers” was less a stroke of luck than a revelation. The experience moved me—changed me—the same way reading a good poem could, and the way she shifted my perspective came as a surprise. I thought my problem would be too much thinking. I like thinking, on the page and off,  and I assumed thinking would get in the way of making poems. Carol Ann disabused me of that notion straight off the bat.

Yes, think, her approach suggested. Just not about meaning. Think about the parts. Think about sound, image, music, rhythm, syntax … and see what comes. Make a nest of language, she’d say, and see what hatches.

The truth is I’d been doing something similar with creative nonfiction for a long time. I abhor an outline. I’ve seen how having a theme—or, god forbid, a thesis—in mind ahead of time can tank a decent essay. If there is a central idea or concept or plotline, the best thing you can do is swerve from it, take a leap. I thought of such moves as “bridges” like in music, a shift in key mid-song, or like on hiking trails, a way across a chasm.  I learned poets call such moves “turns,” and I worked to build nests for them.

When the class ended and the pandemic hit, Carol Ann generously offered to continue a correspondence. She’d send a poem when she had one, and I’d send one when I had one. Like all good mentorships, this relationship had the semblance of camaraderie, of friends, or equals, when in fact I was following her gentle lead. What I learned was that for Carol Ann a snip of unusual syntax provided an opening. When I read her poems using opening lines, I’d imitate them. The anaphora of “Insofar as I know…”, for example, freed me from my prosaic tendencies, but also invited unexpected imagery. The geese, the everyday geese, let me dive into space. Imitation gave me license and encouragement and stripped me of what I might’ve thought I knew. I was grateful, and the gratitude, too, seeped into the poems. 

Later in the summer, I dropped pure imitation and took to bravely following the language where it took me. In the fraught week before I left my wife of 30 years for a (temporary) job across the continent, mid-pandemic, I began to write about cutting green firewood, and all the forces on uncertainty, of unknowing, I didn’t want to confront from teaching remotely to the impending election sneaked their way onto the page. Not one bridge, not one swerve, but several, woven together within language-nest, held by a singular sensibility. 

I realize these lessons aren’t terribly original or earth-shattering, but what’s exciting is that they are so simple to follow. Listen to the words. Imitate those you admire. Lean into gratitude. And don’t leave the thinking out. Just the knowing.

Heidi Seaborn

Heidi Seaborn on “Dendrochronology”

Dendrochronology, the marking of time, especially major events and history through the rings of a tree trunk feels both scientific and spiritual to me. We are learning so much about the life of trees. How they communicate with one another, signaling needs and danger. How one will sacrifice for the other. A quiet symbiosis taking place in forests and jungles. It makes me think of how children have a life separate from their parents and twins often have a language all their own. But now I’ve stepped into my own trap—the desire to personify everything. 

So, when my friend wondered aloud, as we were walking in a park of old growth trees near the Snoqualmie River outside of Seattle, how a tree perceives time, I couldn’t help but humanize that idea. To think of what those old trees have lived through in terms of human milestones—the wars fought, the miracles of invention, the quotidian lives of my friend and me. 

Linking these old trees to me with the connective tissue of metaphor even as I fight against that idea in my very next thought. Fight against the practice of naming the massive Sequoias. Trees that lived through a millennium of wars named after Generals. Worse, named after the very statues of Civil War generals that are finally being scrubbed off this land. 

And so, I’m wrestling with the form of claiming that we do as humans. And how even the small claims that we stake out—to name a tree or, as I did in my childhood, to build a tree fort—tame the natural world. So, while it’s easy to be incensed or rather really pissed off when someone sparks an accidental wildfire during a gender reveal party or by tossing a cigarette out the car window, aren’t those acts just a more deliberate, uglier form of human dominance over nature?

Where I live in the Pacific Northwest, the summers are getting hotter and our forests are burning for longer. Three years ago, the entire month of August was clouded in smoke. I drove up into the mountains and stood where I can always see Mt. Rainier commanding the entire horizon and saw nothing. 

Last September, just after Labor Day, the smoke arrived from the wildfires in California and Oregon. We couldn’t breathe, so my husband and I packed the dog in the car and drove East. On the I-90, a man smoked past us in a GT, top down, past the hills of blackened trees and wheatgrass. “Everything is in the rearview mirror these days,” I thought as his car disappeared into the brown air. 

We had heard that there was a stretch of clear sky yawning across Montana. I wondered aloud about fish and expansive rivers. I imagined I could sleep under a yellow braided willow, hear the last kingfisher sing. And so, we drove to Whitefish and then Missoula. To stay, to catch our breath. Until the wildfires arrived there. The world burning. 

In a time of dry bones and masked lips, of windows and lives shuttered, of shattered norms and dreams, we burnt our children’s house to the ground. At least that’s how it feels to me. This earth that we’ve propositioned for ourselves, that we’ve claimed, lit like a campfire. And now, as I write this, it is winter and the pandemic lockdown continues. We are forced to gather around the fire pit of family. To burn firewood, timbered, cut, hauled and stacked. We huddle around the fire against the cold, against the COVID. Our wool coats will hold the smell of smoke well into the spring. As another ring forms on the trees.