Glen Vecchione

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.

Shelley McEuen

SHELLEY McEUEN on  “Pink Confetti”

The day my husband visited a neurologist and walked through the door with news of a Parkinson’s diagnosis was monumental. The news about our trees was still fresh, and the idea of writing about these eventual losses as something intertwined came to me suddenly. However, I ruminated on the idea for several years, unsure of how Kjel might feel about my conflating his condition with that of our beloved trees.

After several discussions and some encouragement from my husband, I started writing. Beginning with researching Verticillium Wilt, I was astonished at the parallels between how Verticillium Disease presents in trees and the ways in which Parkinson’s Disease ravages the body and brain. Taking the time to learn more about what was happening to our trees was the catalyst for digging more deeply into Parkinson’s mysterious manifestations. There was—and continues to be—something about knowledge that helped me face the reality of Kjel’s diagnosis and our future.

Writing about something so deeply individual felt risky; I had never attempted such a piece. While writing about Kjel’s condition, I found myself necessarily taking a rhetorical step back. Becoming more of an observer helped me attend to the details, while offering up a slightly altered perspective, opened only through the writing. What I learned through taking this writing risk was how much could be gained. I encourage those writers who have been reluctant to address such personal topics to venture toward these subjects rather than turn away. Courage and love win.

The hardest part of this essay was the conclusion. How could I end it on a note of hope without sounding trite, contrived? Conclusions are often challenging for me, and I am deeply indebted to my writing friend Susan Swetnam for her advice with this essay, particularly its closing.

Ellen White Rook

Ellen White Rook on “Sparrows Fall”

My mother was a storyteller. She spoke with passion and paid attention to detail so that as I listened, I felt her experience viscerally. She grew up in a Connecticut factory town during the depression. Although she lived in an industrial neighborhood, her parents raised chickens and grew their own vegetables. Many of her friends She could only afford dyed orange margarine and sugar sandwiches on white bread for lunch for lunch. Dust bowl hobos marked their back gate as her mother always gave these men something. My mother shared how heartbroken she felt reading The Grapes of Wrathand watch the film. The way she taught me to cook, sew, clean transmitted what it was to live in a time of hardship.

About 15 years ago, at the Orlando airport on my way home from visiting her in Florida, I decided to pick up a nonfiction book rather than my typical airport police procedural choice. Because her stories of the devastating dust bowl had so touched her and then me, Timothy Egan’s The Worst Hard Time caught my eye on a shelf of new releases. I found Egan’s story of greed, arrogance and the agricultural misuse which resulted compelling. I had previously flown across the country and had been struck by the relentless miles of cultivated land. Ten years before, I had walked through a plot of prairie grass at the Chicago Botanical Gardens[1] and had an inkling of what our country was like when the people who lived her loved and cared for the earth. When I arrived home, I called my mother to ask her if she had remembered when dust storms blackened skies of her hometown as well as the rest of the northeast, but she had no recollection. I was struck by the absence of witness, which seemed as powerful as the act of witnessing.

The misery and suffering of the dust bowl has stayed with me since. I have lent and given away the book numerous times and frequently recommended it, although I’m not sure any of my friends or family has gone on to read it.  “Dust” is one of the most recurrent words in my poetry, and each time I have used the word, it carries a tiny subtext of the dust bowl. When the sky is veiled by pollen shook from pines in springtime and or recent summers when fine ash from wildfires make their way across the country to cook the sun red, I have revisited the feelings of rawness, tenderness, horror, grief, anguish, and anger that were awakened by The Worst Hard Time.

However, it had never occurred to me to write about the dust bowl. I usually write about smaller and more personal things, but I try to respect inspiration, by writing down whatever fragments arise, and it was a personal angle that brought me into this poem: “I asked my mother if she remembered / dust covering the sun. “In revision, I decided I wanted to keep the poem personal but take the mother/daughter relation out of the poem as it might be distracting to the reader and take the focus away from the substance. The recollection of sparrows falling to the earth also arose in the initial fragment. The original line was “sparrows fell,” but it detoured through “sparrows grounded” before arriving in the present tense and becoming the title. I am not a Christian, but I was familiar with Mathew 10:29 and thought it would have resonance for some readers: “Are not two sparrows sold for a farthing? and one of them shall not fall on the ground without your Father.” It was also a disaster of biblical proportions.

There were few facts in the first draft of the poem, but I felt they would be helpful to the reader to understand and feel the enormity of the devastation, so I went back to The Worst Hard Time and also consulted the Connecticut newspapers and, of course, Wikipedia.

While I was writing the poem, I wasn’t sure if it was a prose poem or a verse poem. The first draft looks like a typical contemporary poem with irregular line breaks, but the narrative voice felt like sentences in sequence. I tried to let the anguish and anger I felt shape the line length and the sound choices.

In the original draft of the poem, I also explored the idea of what I personally failed to witness as a child: “the neighbor’s miscarriage . . . my uncles spine consumed by cancer.” I decided that “Sparrows Fall” leaves space for the reader to ask themselves that question. What have I missed? This material may be a start for another poem.

What I discovered writing this poem is that even when we fail to witness, through curiosity and respect for our passion to know and understand, we maintain the ability to see clearly and gain wisdom. With words, image, the musicality of language, even the white space on the page, poets create objects that transmit and evoke experience as my mother did with her stories. Poetry is a way into the world. I was struck by how slow this poem was to take form—perhaps sixty years, with the driving impetus occurring at least fifteen years ago. I’ve found that when we respect what we are curious and passionate about, a poem will come with its own voice, image, and form when it is time. There is so much we need to remember to create a better life for everyone, and as poets, we have so much to give.

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[1] Chicago Botanical Gardens now has a fifteen-acre prairie site: Dixon Prairie.

Matthew Murrey

Matthew Murrey on “Moon Dirt”

I love when I see or hear something in the news that makes me want to write a poem. When that happens, it’s often a bit of striking information about the natural world, or a captivating image, or a story that resonates with my own lived experience. The best thing is when it’s something that involves all of these. My poem, “Moon Dirt,” owes its start to just such an article – “Cress seeds grown in moon dust raise hopes for lunar crops” – which I saw in The Guardian on May 12, 2022. It was a story touching on science, human survival, and humans on the moon. The article also featured photos of green sprouts growing in small samples of moon dirt. I was hooked.

The article stirred up memories, emotions and concerns. I thought about the moon landings of my childhood and how transfixed I was by them. I reflected on how the number of humans on the planet has more than doubled since those days of the Apollo missions and how the human-caused climate catastrophe is now upon us, gravely threatening our future. I also was intrigued by the optimism of the scientists with their hopes for growing food on the moon, and by their excitement at seeing the little sprouts—the first plants to ever grow from moon dirt.

For me, the challenge was to write a poem that might in some way get near the astonishment, wonder, reverie and underlying dread I felt as I read about the work of the scientists.

In my first attempts at this poem I used no stanza breaks and often commented  directly about my doubts and dreads. I wasn’t satisfied and tried using couplets as a way to both pace the poem and pare away some of what felt like intrusive personal commentary. I wanted to find subtler ways to work some of my misgivings and worries into the descriptive language of the poem. I hope that comes through.

Finally, I had no idea where or how the poem would end, and struggled quite a bit with that. As I revised the poem, I kept thinking about the moon. The fact that it always presents only one side to the earth – and how it looks like a somber face when full – helped me bring the poem back to earth, so to speak.