Can you go through the step-by-step process of writing this poem from the moment the idea was first conceived in your brain until final form?
In 2011, my students and I set up our first Poetry Stand at the Newburyport Literary Festival on the North Shore of Massachusetts. Our plan, after an idea I had read about in American Scholar Magazine, was to take orders from customers and write poems on the spot for free. It was the beginning of more than ten years of taking the Stand out.
Click or copy/past ethe below link to read “The Stand” by Diana Goetsch and published by American Scholar Magazine.
Over 200 students wrote hundreds of poems for strangers. As a high school teacher who is also a writer, I smugly prided myself on never asking my students to do what I had not done myself, but I had never done this: Asked people to request poems I had to write no matter what. So, a few years later, after I’d taken time off from writing poetry to work on a novel, I decided to ask for requests and write poems that way, instead. I sent out requests in batches and forced myself to write no matter what.
Click on the below link to purchase BEWILDERED stories from the
University of Massachusetts Press; First Edition (September 24, 2014)
The request from this poem came from my former sister-in-law who said: “Can you write a poem about how quickly time passes?” Ugh, I thought. Me and my stupid ideas.
But this way of writing forced me to start poems with research–something I had never done before. For this poem I Googled “Time” and was amazed to see all of the ways in which we’ve kept time, so I had that list in my head but still no place to start. The difference, however, in writing a poem for yourself and in writing a poem for someone else, is that you can’t give up on it. So another thing that happened with this method was that I kept mulling the idea, waiting for a spark because I knew, one way or the other, I had to write it.
Where were you when you started to actually write the poem? And please describe the place in great detail.
A friend of mine had a small house on a lake in New Hampshire. Although we had rented lake houses for a week each summer when our daughters were very young, we hadn’t done so in a few years, and when this friend offered her place, we made a last-minute decision. Our daughters (BELOW) were 15, 14, and 13 and each, for the first time, brought a friend.
The house had three tiny bedrooms and a fold out couch. It sat on a grassy rise with a few other small cottages along the shore of Lake Winnisquam. The lake was so clear, you could see to the bottom of it and on one end was a loon nursery. We could hear their calls each night.
Meanwhile, my husband came and went as we had animals at home he checked in on. Between the girls having friends and my husband only being with us part of the week, I had a lot of time on my hands. I spent much of it watching the girls interact with their friends and remembering the summers when I would plop a sand chair in the water and they would play for hours around me. Now, they swam out to a dock and sunned themselves. When they were hungry, they helped themselves to the food we’d brought. They were so self-contained, I could take lengthy walks, kayak alone, and write.
I’d taken along a bundle of old letters my best friend, Teresa, had given me from the years before email when I wrote to her regularly. I read through some of them on the small deck that overlooked the water. They chronicled both my life and hers. I don’t think I would have been more honest in a journal than I was with Teresa. I don’t remember connecting the letters or the change in my role as a parent to the poem request, but then, one morning, I was walking along the road that wound around the lake.
Typically New England, it featured old clapboard-sided Cape Cod houses and abandoned barns, fields outlined in stone walls, an occasional sway-backed horse grazing in a small pasture. Above one old barn, I noticed a hawk perched on a telephone pole. Tall grasses nearly covered a rusted red New Holland baler–the same baler we’d used during my own childhood on my family’s farm. I thought: Great place to wait for a rodent.
Suddenly, the poem started. I don’t know why that hawk synthesized all of these ideas of time, but it did. One theory is that it helped to begin in the present with an image that caught my imagination. That’s the way poems had always started for me before this particular creative phase. I also knew (and drafts confirm) that it had to begin with the letters as the trigger. BELOW: Red Tailed Hawk.
Later, I would add the line about Kant from my research. I hurried back to the house to start writing and the poem came together relatively quickly. Those examples of how humans kept time throughout the ages acted as helpful guideposts, but I’d done so much time pre-writing in my head and trying to fit pieces together, that I guess I had been drafting something all along and had kept myself open for whatever the catalyst would finally be.
What month and year did you start writing this poem?
August, 2014
Were there any lines in any of your rough drafts of this poem that were not in the final version? And can you share them with us?
Somewhere, if you’re lucky,
someone is remembering your voice.
What do you want readers of this poem to take from this poem?
I’m happy with whatever they take from it, but working on it and watching our girls grow has highlighted for me how non-linear time is. It’s such a strange concept with which to grapple, especially the older one gets.
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Which part of the poem was the most emotional of you to write and why?
Because this trip marked a real transition in parenting, when I thought back to how close physically my girls had been to me (the appendages part of the poem) was the most emotional to write. I remember one day, many years before this, sitting on my sofa with all three around me, vying for space actually on some part of me, thinking: Will I ever have my body to myself? It’s unimaginable, both when you’re being climbed all over and then when you’re kayaking along past a loon nursery and your own babies’ voices are carrying over the water to you, that time will change anything.
BELOW:1918 illustration of a variety of loons by Archibald Thorburn. Top: Common loon, Mid-left: red-throated loon, Mid-right: yellow-billed loon, Bottom: black-throated loon
I don’t know if it was the combination of changes currently underway for me (even emailing vs. letter writing!), or if it was just the rush of the pieces coming together, but the entire poem felt very cathartic. I hadn’t written anything like it before and had to wrestle with something that felt so overwhelming from the outset.
Click or copy/past the below link to read Carla Panciera’s bio and poetry.
