EMRY TRANTHAM

EMRY TRANTHAM ON “THREE RACCOONS”

Three baby raccoons.

They were in my backyard, they were unafraid, and they were orphaned. We ascertained that much by the second day. They were also impossibly precious – tiny woodland things with curious eyes and a toddling gait. I looked for them when I woke up in the morning, when I returned home in the evening, and again before bed. I went out and photographed them, their whiskers beautifully crisp against the bokeh of late summer leaves. They delighted me.

What I wanted to do: keep them forever. Put them in a box with a warm towel, give them scraps and treats, bottles if they’d take them.  Love them until they loved me back. They would have, eventually. They followed me around the yard as it was. But I had three dogs, three children, and a small house, not to mention the anxious temperament of a lifelong rule follower. There could be no successful taming of raccoons, no matter how I longed to mother them.

There was no one else for the job, either. There are few wildlife rehabilitators period, even fewer licensed to handle raccoons (often rabies vectors), and not one I could find. A local woman who had cared for many a squirrel and possum offered her backyard to them – if we could catch them, we could release them on her property. 

Would that have been the right choice? Maybe. At the time, I couldn’t imagine trapping them and moving them to a place they didn’t know. Our backyard was at least familiar to them. They slept in a hole beneath a rotting stump, curled up like commas. We had abundant acorns, light traffic and a few neighbors’ trash cans to pillage. And there was always the hope, however dim, that their mother would come back for them. What if she came back, finally, and they were gone? Their mother’s presence was their best chance for survival.

And yet: If I’d taken them to the rehabilitator’s backyard, my hound dog wouldn’t have leapt the fence and injured the smallest one. My daughters and I wouldn’t have had to watch in horror as she shook the squealing kit. I wouldn’t have had to place it in a box and watch it breathe, staring at me, for the next hour before I handed it over to the officer who would kill it humanely.

If the first one hadn’t died, would the others have?  It’s likely they were too young to survive without a mother, regardless of their numbers. All I know for certain is that they left us, one by one, and I felt a little more responsible for each death. I could have done something. I should have done something.

I wrote “Three Raccoons” a month or so after the raccoons came and went. They left me heavy; guilt, shame, sadness – it was all tangled together in my throat every time I thought of them. When my throat is too constricted to speak, of course, I write poems. The feelings become untangled and visible, so that I might inspect them from a distance.

I sat with the poem for a long time. My question was still: What should we have done with three orphaned racoons? I didn’t feel as if the poem had answered the question.

This summer, our youngest dog caught a baby possum. My husband pulled the fuzzy baby from the lab’s mouth and handed it to me. This time, the answer was simple. I took it inside, dried it off, warmed it up, and gave it food. I let it rest for a few days, then released it.

During the process of caring for the possum, I began to research wildlife rehabilitation. Maybe I could become a person to take in the animals and care for them without feeling as if I were doing the animals a disservice. During my research, I came across the lines that would become the epigraph of my poem. Most species of wildlife have evolved ways of compensating for very high annual mortality. Interference by humans to save any one individual will do little for the population one way or the other. In other words: Let nature take its course. An orphaned racoon is nothing, and nothing multiplied by three? Still nothing.

The opening of the poem was the last piece I needed. Finding the epigraph marked its completion – not a defense, exactly, because it didn’t absolve me of my choices. But it succinctly made the argument I was trying to interrogate in my poem. It was one simple answer for the question my poem asks, and I hope that in my poem it is clear that though it is an answer, I still don’t know if it is the right one.

And that’s okay. Sometimes there is no right answer. There is only the one I already chose. 

Martha Silano

Martha Silano: Notes on Drafting and Revising “Once,”

As I prepared to write this essay, I considered how I would click on my voluminous Unfinished folder and find at least a dozen versions. However, when I searched, I found only three drafts.

Some of my poems take years to write, but this one came relatively quickly, or so it appeared. I wasn’t sure, though – maybe I had written a long-hand draft in a diary I’d tossed into a box with the dozens of others from the past year or two. After some searching, I found a few notes I’d jotted down on April 24, 2022:

From a swirl of gases, hydrogen and helium, mostly – from an exploded supernova –

sulfur

neon

nitrogen

carbon

iron

I need a container for this info – a sonnet???

That a supernova had to explode.

That a star had to coalesce. A fusion reaction.

The bulge in the middle became the sun.

One of the planets was Earth.

And then, just before I presumably switched to my laptop to write the first draft:

(I don’t know how to tell this story in an interesting/fresh/new way. The facts of it are just incredible. Don’t need much doctoring up.)

I remember the place and time. I was in my backyard in my favorite beach chair, sitting under a cherry tree. I had gone out there to commune with the robins and crows, but also with the hope I might write a first draft of a poem about a book I’d read aloud to my partner during the early part of lockdown. I’d checked it out from the library, but since libraries were closed, I didn’t have to return it until June. We finished the book, and I returned it.

My partner and I love to reminisce about how this book helped keep things in perspective as the pandemic raged on, as humans began to die in droves, as we worried when a random passerby stopped to pet our outdoor cat, then snuggled up with us in bed. Was Nacho a vector?

It helped us fall sleep.

Fast forward two years. I was still thinking about The Story of Earth: The First 4.5 Billion Years, from Stardust to Living Planet, by Robert M. Hazen. Why didn’t I own a copy? A few days later, I did. Soon after, I’d decided to write a poem about the origin of our planet.

Under the cherry tree, I re-read the first two chapters. It was harder reading then I’d recalled, even more incomprehensible. No matter how many times I read about the Big Bang origin story, my head can’t quite wrap itself around the tiny speck that inflated into a cosmos 93 billion light years in diameter.

How do I explain what happened after I dropped my pen and turned to my computer screen? The first draft is not too different from the one I submitted to Split Rock Review. I put the poem aside, and then I returned to sharpen a few images. I brought it to my poetry critique group, and they suggested I play with the ending (I did).

As I re-read this poem today and try to remember how I wrote it, I pretty much can’t, though I do recall having fun with choosing some of the things we have on Earth – mouthwash and lemons, pavement and flukes. I also recall looking up the word stook. Who knew that a hay bale was a stook? I liked the sound of it.

So, yeah, I was in a trance. My friends that day were intuition and the most important thing a teacher ever told me: listen. I pushed hard against my doubts. Then, I was hypnotized. Where the poem wanted me to go, I went.

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.