#NewThisDay Writing From My Photo Stream
Charles River morning
“There is another alphabet, whispering from every leaf, singing from every river, shimmering from every sky.”
― Dejan Stojanovic
Goatsbeard gone to seed, summer of 2018 or 2017
Rain last night over all the new plants and everything in bloom and the grass seed coming soon. I shortened our walk today and only worked in the yard a bit, moving some stones for a border, so that I could work on my poem for tonight. I did what I intended: inspired by Fleda Brown’s poem, “Bladder Campion,” I wrote a draft of a poem about yellow Goatsbeard gone to seed. I didn’t know what I was doing; I wanted some magic. But there’s nothing to do but sit down and put a word and another down on the page. I looked at my pictures. I have such wonderful pictures of goatsbeard gone to seed. I looked at my pictures again and again and I read about Goatsbeard and I thought about this Philip Larkin quote and how it applied to my experience of Goatsbeard:
“It is sometimes useful to remind ourselves of the simpler aspects or things normally regarded as complicated. Take, for instance, the writing of a poem. It consists of three stages:
1. The first is when a [person] becomes obsessed with an emotional concept to such a degree that [s]he is compelled to do something about it.
2. What [s]he does is the second stage, namely, construct a verbal device that will reproduce this emotional concept in anyone who cares to read it, anywhere, any time.
3. The third stage is the recurrent situation of people in different times and places setting off the device and re-creating in themselves what the poet felt when he wrote it. ”
I stayed at the poem a few hours. Once I flipped the two stanzas I’d drafted I knew what I was trying to do, and felt it might be working. Still, one never knows. I could get to my group and discover all the flaws I hadn’t worked out. But, that’s not what happened. The rarest of rare things happened. They admired it, one and all. I drove home a little bit giddy with gratitute for Fleda Brown, for Philip Larkin, for the willingness to leave the woods, the yard, to go inside and sit and think, but also, simply to look at a picture and write some words until they made sense.
My book has arrived in my hands. Available for purchase at Nixes Mate Books