Catharina Coenen

CATHARINA COENEN ON “CONNEAUT”

Twenty years ago, during my first March in the snowbelt, I asked my students whether it was going to keep snowing all the way up to Spring Break. They stared, then said: You don’t understand. They said: We’ll be lucky if it doesn’t keep on snowing too much after Spring Break. 

I am a botanist. Where I grew up, March lives well past the snowdrops, past the crocus, way past the ivy’s tiny yellow blossoms feeding bees along thousand-year old sandstone walls. Where I grew up, March hails the primrose, the coltsfoot aglow beside the roadside ditch, the scent of violets. Forsythias beam yellow sunshine through any rain or gray.

Like Pennsylvania’s hemlock groves, who feel heat rushing towards them as the climate shifts, I feel displaced. Except I’ve shifted into cold. 

Last year, I signed up for a poetry webinar because, where I live now, March means snow. 

I signed up because March is snowy and months and months away from my summer conference with the International Women’s Writing Guild. In March, I miss a world that isn’t icy white. I miss my conference teachers and my friends. I miss shared words.

Last March, for four dark Sunday evenings, women writers beamed at each other from a screen. We scribbled, laughed, and frowned. 

Together, we read: All night I woke to rain on a strangers’ windows. [i]

Together, we read:      Home is the place we head for in our sleep. [ii]

We read:                      We walked five blocks

to the elementary school,

my mother’s high heels

crunching through playground gravel. [iii]

We read:                      I’m not from around here

I’m not from around here. [iv]

Through March, I walked along the marsh, beneath leafless maples, and through hemlock groves. I walked by last year’s cattail stalks, red osier twigs aglow against the gray, frozen ditches, frozen ponds. I walked, asleep, awake, words snoozing under snow, words crunching gravel, words wriggling under last year’s leaves. 

I knelt to watch skunk cabbage blossoms melt their way upward, through the ice. Back in class, I lectured on the uncoupling of electron transport by an enzyme in the maroon flowers’ cells, how mitochondria give up energy as heat, so that the skunk cabbage can advertise its corpse-like blooms to flies well before any other flowers are awake.

Where I come from, the sweet March violets are transplants from Iran. Forsythias are from China.

I wondered what it takes to be from here. 

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[i] From: When I Was Straight by Julie Marie Wade

[ii] From: Indian Boarding School: The Runaways by Louise Erdrich

[iii] From: My Mother Goes to Vote by Judith Harris

[iv] From: Hotel Days by Michael Dickman

James Armstrong

James Armstrong on “American Toad”

The poem “American Toad” was written during a week in June when Trump was giving a rally in Duluth.  My wife and I were staying at a cabin near Two Harbors and one day we hiked the trail that ascends the Split Rock River gorge. It is probably my favorite trail on the North Shore because the river tumbles over bedrock in cataract after cataract under steep, cedar-hung cliffs.  There is a scenic turnout every few steps, giving the hiker a one spectacular vista after another.  The hike always reminds me of that ancient Chinese scroll which Gary Snyder writes about in Mountains and Rivers Without End: the slowly unrolling landscape of “a web of waters streaming over rocks, / air misty but not raining . . . .”  Snyder describes how in the painting “The path comes down along a lowland stream / slips behind boulders and leafy hardwoods, / reappears in a pine grove.”  It was my feeling that this hiking trail in the Superior Uplands, with its wooden stairways and simple log bridges crossing tributary streams functioned very much like Zen scripture.  Each little turnout, overlooking a roaring falls or a rooster-tailing rapids, was an opportunity to contemplate the sublime energies of the world.  To quote Snyder again:

Step back and gaze again at the land:

it rises and subsides—

ravines and cliffs like waves of blowing leaves—

stamp the foot, walk with it, clap! turn,

the creeks come in, ah!

strained through boulders,

mountains walking on the water,

water ripples every hill.

No wonder I always feel as though a hike on the Split Rock is akin to a religious rite.  This particular hike was noteworthy for the wildlife as well—garter snakes, white admiral butterflies, and at one point beside the path a large toad, looking rather pleased with himself. 

All during the hike I had been conscious of the President’s rally, happening just down the road.  Trump’s bloviating spirit, his unctuous pandering to the worst instincts in his fan base seemed to hang over everything.  When we got back to the cabin and I opened my journal, I thought of the toad; as I described it the comparisons to Trump seemed striking.  However, as I revised and tightened the poem, I found it difficult to retain any overt reference to the President.  Having him in the poem threatened to turn it into a cheap allegory.  I realized that the toad should not be reduced to a symbol.  For one thing, I wanted to resist Trump’s own belief that everything should be about him.  For another, the toad was really quite fascinating and should be given its own existence, free from our human foolishness.  But I hope the poem still gives off a slight whiff of politics.  

Farah Marklevits

Farah Marklevits on “The Hottest Year on Record: 1997”

To write from what we call the present about the present or the past often carries the authority and weight of realism. To write from what we call the present about the future, however, is often seen as attached to the real world only by the pinprick end of a dreamer’s slender string, easily snipped.

And yet we make resolutions, raise children the way we were or wish we were raised, sketch plans, plot goals, save. We make these everyday contracts with the future in ways that don’t feel fictional. That is, not for the we who can assume the present to be relatively stable.

The global climate crisis, however, throws us all into a firsthand experience of the anxiety of a provisional future. It’s a cliché to lament that there is no one definitive manual for parenting. But the quality of future we now face seems to make the work and care of raising children even more uncertain. Into what, exactly, are we raising them? How do we raise people into a dire we-don’t-know-what?

This all hit home a few years ago, when I realized the science underlying the greenhouse effect had been well established since I was old enough to start learning to think for myself. Not only did scientists know, but the political representatives my parents could have had a hand in electing understood the science and many of its implications for our planet’s climate.

From the vantage point of 2020, that’s over 30 years of knowledge without meaningful action. That’s over 30 years of growing up and living a life, much of it myself oblivious to the crisis looming. This realization made me wonder how many years of my life have been designated “the hottest on record.” What was I doing and thinking in those years?

This wondering turned my poem-making to the past. And because poetry often begins in wonder that quickly spills over into obsession, I found myself reading and pulling from texts and history to investigate ways of seeing one life within the larger contexts of a warming world. The result of these investigations is a multi-sectioned poem I’m calling “The Hottest Year on Record.”

In 1997, as in many sections, a central interest is the speaker’s shortsightedness within a complex situation. Over 20 years ago, as an undergraduate student who had never traveled by plane before, I found myself in the middle of the swollen streams and endless mud created in Costa Rica by the most powerful El Niño event ever recorded, an event that turned out to be only one sign of what would come.

The heart of this section is the speaker’s physical experience of the intersections of weather, geography, and culture. That physical immersion in what was then happening and was yet to come is one part of the story of how humans are quickly changing the Earth’s climate and yet are still fundamentally animals. The means and mechanisms that brought a white, female American liberal arts college student from a family that had recently pulled itself into the middle class to a study abroad trip in Costa Rica tell another part of that story.

I do not intend the poem’s representations of this moment to replace the understanding of experts in Costa Rican culture, history, and ecology or to obscure the work of Tico artists and writers. This is further suggested by my audio recording, made clumsy and self-conscious by my lack of facility with Spanish.

Perhaps the poem fails that intention. But the point I want to make is that I don’t claim mastery. If we, and by ‘we’ I mean especially middle-class white Americans, need to learn anything in this moment, it’s that none of us can or should step into the future thinking of ourselves as masters.

Poetry, for me, has become a wrestling match between the power poetry grants to give voice to thought and the responsibility to divest myself of powers that oppress other living things. To un-master. To struggle for just worship.

Marc Frazier

Marc Frazier on “After”

One of the strongest influences in my poetry is place. Having been raised in the wide-open space of farm country has shaped and affected my psyche, spirit, and world-view as the prairie affected generations of people. Place is more than geographical location; its metaphorical connections are varied and deep.

My travel to different places sets a flurry of journaling to take place, from which poems are gathered and put in tow. Lately, water has entered my work with a big splash. Somehow, I think the coast frees me of all the strictures of a land-locked life. In “After,” where the place of the poem is contemporary America, I flee to the ocean and its view of sky. 

The creation of Art requires more than one self. These selves become one in an aesthetically complete poem, as much by craft as by inspiration. I continually add my observations, my experience, to that which is inherent in the world around me. A poet’s greatest gift is the gift of seeing where a poem lies.

I never visualize my poetry before it appears on the page. However, once the words are there I think of the Michelangelo quote: “Every block of stone has a statue inside it and it is the task of the sculptor to discover it.” I view my block of words as that block of stone and that I need to discover the form of my poem. I consider finding the poem’s form one of the most important aspects of revision and editing. 

Usually I feel like I need to “open up” my poems in revision. The first draft is too crowded. I think certain words, lines, and stanzas need breathing space. I can often hear how the poem is meant to sound as I “open it up.” Where it needs to pause, where it needs to stutter, where it needs to hurry. I do mostly depend on the stanza and line form, so I experiment with how many lines per stanza work for the flow of the poem. I often try couplets, even short-lined couplets. If that doesn’t work, I try three- or four-line stanzas. I play around with indenting a pattern of lines, such as indenting the second and fourth lines in each four-line stanza. I also work with extra space between words in individual lines as well. There are also times when a poem needs the freedom to spread its words all over the page. In those cases, I mostly hear how the poem needs to read orally. The sound of a poem is very important; you don’t have to be working with a rhyme scheme for this to be the case.

I once took a speed-reading course that ended up helping immensely with my writing. Since reading is based on eye movements that move across and downward, I keep this in mind when I revise poems. I can control the pace of how the reader reads my poem by how I place words and white space on the page. I can write a poem that reads quickly down the page if I so choose or one that slows down at carefully chosen times or one that has the eye wandering back and forth across the page where words are scattered.

Poems want to have the right form. I have let a poem finally find its innate structure after years of coming back to it. So sometimes it takes a long time, but not usually that long.  I spend a significant part of my time in revision and editing with finding the very best structure for my words. With time I recognize when my poem is dressed in the right clothes. I knew early on that “After” would be in prose poem form. Its narrative came to me quite flowingly. It didn’t take long to write, and then, of course, I tweaked it several times. I also had a word list of random, evocative words that I referred to in writing it. This is a strategy I often use when composing a new piece. After writing and reading poetry for years, I have an innate sense of what words work well in a poem.

Three realms inform my poem “After”: the socio-political, the natural world, and my personal self, including my physical self. The word “after” has always obsessed me; I find it to be one of the most evocative words I know. It intimates an entire ocean of possibilities that follow an event or period of time. My poem opens with a reference to a socio-political time in which “new hatreds” arrive. The apocalyptic overtones appear at the beginning of “After” and continue throughout. Later, “a nest of new ideas pulse,” but they come to nothing. In my imagination I feel their vibrations. 

A new Age of Reason ensues and I flee, beginning my downward spiral. I turn to non-rational powers such as crystals for protection, yet I feel the possibility of my life ending, my skin parchment. There is a memory of a meaningful relationship in which we shared the natural world and conversations were meaningful, but now I can only see it through a hazy light. Now my world is one of suffering and decay. A thread of semen is not life affirming but part of what may be rough sex with aftershocks of violence.

The final image humanizes the natural world in the form of the fleshy tulips, a key image in the poem. They represent the permanent at a time when I am passing away. I am just a physical being full of blood to be spilled. This is the final apocalyptic vision as it implies that having my blood spilled may soon occur; it is what my journey through this poem has been leading to.