However Intimate the Elements: A Craft Essay on “Having First Heard of the Ivory-Billed Woodpecker on its Being Pronounced Extinct”
by Jed Myers
I believe a poem has its moment of conception—a moment we may not be conscious of, and that might never be recognized, even when it leads to the viable birth of a lasting vibrant piece of writing. And if that first spark does register in awareness, it may be forgotten even before the poem that comes of it is formed enough to be born. Memory of a poem’s conception may be lost in the very immersion that is the poem’s further development. I’ve been curious about such moments of conception. How does the world seed us with these beginnings, and can it help our craft to look into this?
Here's an instance in which I had some lasting awareness of a poem’s conception. It was late summer, and I’d read the news that the ivory-billed woodpecker had been declared extinct*. I felt a little ashamed that this was the first I’d ever heard of the ivory-billed woodpecker, so I’d taken some time to look up what I could about the creature—where it lived, how it sang. It was troubling, this loss of a particular winged form. It added to my chronic worry and sorrow over the disappearance in our era of countless species. The image of a lone bright-beaked bird, the last of its kind, on a branch in a humid forest persisted in the background of my musings.
The poem, “Having First Heard of the Ivory-Billed Woodpecker on its Being Pronounced Extinct,” had not yet been conceived. I hadn’t yet entertained any notion of writing on the matter, and I hadn’t yet taken a certain afternoon walk in my part of Seattle.
My walks frequently take me across a footbridge that spans a creek ravine. The view of the treetops above the creek is reliably magnificent in all seasons. There’s a preponderance of deciduous growth, owing to the logging of these slopes over a century ago. I feel more deeply at home when I’m surrounded by leafy trees rather than conifers, as I grew up in Pennsylvania in the company of big maples, oaks, and sycamores. When I took this particular walk, it was the end of September—autumn had begun flaring the leaves, there was a drizzle in the cooling air, a chill in the breeze, and it stirred my memories, sad and sweet, of times in that little valley and on that same bridge with my kids when they were small. I recalled the exhilaration of one summer afternoon, holding my toddler son up in one arm to let him see over the bridge rail—his squirming exuberance, for me, a thrill. And savoring that recollection, I imagined how I might’ve gestured with a sweep of my free hand, showing my little one that what lay before us—wooded expanse, distant mountains, clouds . . . all of it together—was home. Not a house we’ve made but the living surround that makes us.
The poem had still not quite been conceived. I was about to remember the ivory-billed woodpecker, and to picture it perched on a branch nearby, pecking and calling where I’d seen other woodpeckers through the years—the piliated, the downy, the flickers—and listened to their fast drumming. I was about to wonder what other creatures these woods were losing.
By then, I was caught up in more reverie than memory—in a swirling-together of recall and fantasy, a spin of reminiscence’s joy and sorrow, a mix of possibility’s brightness and futility’s blues. In that thrall, I felt the visceral rush of the years like a wind through my core—felt and in a way saw my son leaving my arms for the sky before me as if on wings, “flown” into the wide world that was his home.
It was a moment of exquisite convergence—elation and emptiness, wonder and despair. Those trees, whose fall-singed leaves gleamed softly in the misted light, harbored life and the dwindling forms of life. I heard the thin groan of a small-engine prop, a seaplane heading down toward Lake Union most likely, and I felt my loneliness in that lean music. I felt the helplessness of not being able to protect that child released into the unknown, and I felt the undeniable fullness of having nurtured and set loose a new life.
This, I’d say, was the moment of the poem’s conception, though I still had no thought of writing. Over the days that followed, I’d return to that surge of remembering, feeling, wonder, and sensation. I’d experience the inner press to “do something” with it, which could mean talking about it, walking back to the bridge again, actively reaching back into those memories, looking up more about the ivory-billed woodpecker and other disappearing species . . . or it could mean writing.
I can see from here how I might never have written the poem. But it did gestate, started kicking, and soon pressed for emergence. Once it was born, I nursed it with revisions, until I felt it was ready to, well, fly.
Now, as I write about the poem’s becoming, I also recognize how it might keep becoming—not in my hands, but in the responses of others. Will a phrase in this poem set another’s memories resonating? Will another’s unique reverie be catalyzed?
And I’m thinking, whatever “craft” is exercised in the making of this or any poem, it’s only a holding, carrying, nourishing, ushering . . . until the creation flies off. From complex mysterious conception to the poem’s journeying out among other lives, however intimate are the elements it’s made of, it’s never really the crafter’s. The world writes our poems—they come through us, not from us. And I believe this sense of non-ownership, regarding poems or children, helps keep our practice humbler, less forced, more reverent, and more tolerant of what we may not understand of these creations life commissions us to foster.
*The ivory-billed woodpecker was subsequently found not to be extinct.
