Glen Vecchione on “Twister” and “Wildflowers”

As I’m sure it is with many of today’s poets, each sprint of my poetry-writing has been interrupted by long stretches of more practical concerns. But these creative breaks turned out to be a mixed blessing. With each interruption came an incubation, a new way of seeing the world, and a commensurate interest in exploring a type of poem I’d never tried to write before.

I have no idea why. I hadn’t read poetry during the off years or even thought about poetry. The glimmer of a poem, when it popped into my consciousness from time to time, resembled a small dog trailing behind me on an overlong leash, resisting my pull forward, forcing me to slow down and . . . look at things.

So, I began looking, not with the desire to find a resonance in Nature with some emotion that preoccupied me, but simply to look. As a scientist might look. As a human being who occupies a culture at odds with the natural world might look. And finally, as an American gifted with a language that accommodates both clarity and sensuality might look. Nature thrives both within and without. The poem connects.

My earliest poems, in my mid-thirties, were about ordinary things: the rain, the clouds, the lights on the river, a celebration of what a thousand poets before me have celebrated. Then I slept, and when I woke up, the world had changed. Now, I wanted to describe extraordinary ordinary things: social upheavals, tremors in the earth’s crust, a world on fire, and, of course, the cascade of deadly storms battering coasts and heartlands.

The thing about a twister: it’s an attenuated force that balances contraction with expansion, centrifugal with centripetal. The detritus of its destruction becomes a swarm of debris in a crazed orbit that appears unstoppable – until it just stops. I wanted to capture all of this, but how? After exploring many formal techniques – rhymed and unrhymed, strophic and cyclical – the unlikely 12th century Italian sestina, with its cyclonic staggering of line endings and ruthless syllabic pattering (like a hard rain), seemed the perfect fit for this indigenous American terror. And I was emboldened by the knowledge that even the venerable Dante had used the sestina to frighten his jaded contemporaries with hellish images in “The Inferno.” A well-conceived form adapts well to literary exigencies; it transcends history, culture, and language. Herein lay the proof.

The inspiration for “Wildflowers,” on the other hand, came quietly while hiking through the Laguna Mountains of Southern California after a week of gentle rains. The high meadows exploded with flowers, crowding out even the sturdier clovers and bittercress. At first, I wanted to do what most determined-to-reach-their-destination hikers do: tromp straight through each meadow to join the trailhead on the opposite side. But something came over me, a kind of tenderness for the flowers’ stoic vulnerability, and I sat at the first meadow’s edge to study a few outliers. For one thing, I’d never appreciated the utter strangeness of wildflowers before, their delicate topologies of leaf, blossom, and stamen. Colorful little hats, miniature spaceships, creatures a world apart from the steroid-pumped roses and begonias of suburban front yards. So exotic, and so easily damaged, and so soon gone. The poem found its legs as a freeform improvisation that wandered wherever it wanted to go, crowding out any conventional idea of formal organization.

My workaday life lies behind me now, and I don’t anticipate any more productive interruptions nor visionary breakthroughs. These days, it’s full speed ahead until the end, and writing poetry, if not revelatory, is at least a more rewarding pastime than watching a stream of potboilers on Netflix. I do, however, offer encouraging advice to those who choose to undertake this “most fatiguing of occupations,” as the poet Delmore Schwartz once described it: take heart, even if stuck for the foreseeable future with balancing solvency and feeding the soul.  The good news is that if you love poetry and scratch something out every few years, the demon-spirit of the poem will worm its way into your brain and stay there, preening its mandibles, until you let it out again to track across your imagination.