Erin Coughlin Hollowell on “Instructions for compass truing”
Just about every Sunday you can find me in church, a strip of rough shoreline called Bishop’s Beach by the colonizers and Tuggeht by the Indigenous people in Homer, Alaska. Walking the beach is part of a long-term dedication to a place for me, someone who lived in twelve different parts of the United States by the time I was thirty. Deeply learning a singular place has been something new to me. For the last eleven years, I’ve been walking Bishop’s Beach and paying attention, purposefully.
“Instructions for compass truing” is part of a collaboration with artist Andrea Wollensak, sponsored by the Rasmuson Museum in Anchorage, Alaska. When Andrea tasked me with writing poems about water, specifically someplace that I had a relationship with, I thought of Bishop’s Beach and Kachemak Bay. The beach faces a mountain range with several glaciers, and the water is always changing with the weather which is restless, fickle, and often fierce.
Andrea asked me to pay specific attention to the sounds of the beach, to write as many poems as I’d like about that liminal space where the water and land carry out their long relationship of change. The end product was a set of my poems and a set of another poet Jen Stever Ruckle’s poems that were “illustrated” by a computer program developed to create artifacts that looked like wave-smoothed stones and crystalline structures all triggered by the speed and pitch with which we read the work out loud.
But the beginning evocation, to write about the water was a bit daunting. To write about a place like Bishop’s Beach is to risk falling into cliché. To describe it might lead one to vast gestures but none of the intimacy that walking a strip of coastline several times a week brings. So I began to look for other forms that the poems might take that would express the “why” of the act as well as the great churning mystery of the place itself.
I made a list of forms gleaned from other sources: invention, charm, recipe, map, vow, conversation, almanac, instruction, catalog. I felt like having an external form might push me past the cliché of the description of the ocean and allow me make imagistic leaps that might otherwise feel out of place.
I tasked myself to write poems that encapsulated what I felt and thought as I walked along the beach each week. How the beach is the place that I bring my hardest feelings to sort. I walked along Bishop’s Beach while one of my best friends was being removed from life support. I walked along the same shore when my father died. When I had to put my seventeen year old dog down. Always along the water to right-size my emotions which can be tremendously large in my heart and comfortingly small and brief when compared to mountains.
“Instructions for compass truing” is a poem about those emotions and how walking along the beach can assist a person to get their compass trued. Compass truing is a method of calibrating a compass so that it reads correctly for wayfinding. And perhaps that is truly what I’m doing as I walk along Bishop’s Beach – finding my way in the world.