Lana Hechtman Ayers on “Thirteen Ways of Looking at the White Moth at My Window”

Growing up in harrowing circumstances with an abusive parent, books became a very early refuge. In stories, I could escape into adventurous and exciting worlds that offered happy endings. But in poems, I recognized a different kind of sanctuary. The poets whose work I read had faced all kinds of adversity and not only survived it, but thrived to tell about it. Across time and distance, culture and gender, poems reached out to me and inspired hope I could survive my situation as well. So, from the time I could hold a crayon, I began responding to the poems I read with scribbles of my own experiences. It would be a very long time, not until after I completed an MFA at the age of 42, that I would take  my own poetry seriously enough to try submitting it to literary journals. But that early inclination of being in conversation with other poets’ poems has never left me. 

I love the notion of a poem as the beginning of a relationship, a way to express and reveal personal truths. Poems that make me feel, remember, imagine, discover something about myself or the world, or teach me something new, call to me to pen a response of my own. Sometimes, I respond with a poem of my own that in form or content bears very little similarity to the inspiration poem.  Other times, I’ll take a phrase or line from the original poem and use it as epigraph or the first line of my work. In my poem “Thirteen Ways of Looking at the White Moth at My Window,” inspired by Wallace Stevens’s “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird,” I borrow the structure and form of the original poem entirely. With a poem as rich as Stevens’s, I have had more than one conversation. In addition to the white moth, I have looked at my pen, my little black dog, and a Steller’s Jay in thirteen ways. 

Each time I compose a response poem to another poet’s work, despite being separated by time, distance, gender, culture, religion, or any of the ways people feel distant from one another, I feel part of the community of all poets, connected through our love of language, imagery, and artful expression.