#442 Backstory of the Poem “Life List” from RETURN TO A CERTAIN REGION OF CONSCIOUSNESS: NEW AND SELECTED POEMS by Cathryn Hankla, published by Mercer University Press on February 4, 2025
#442 Backstory of the Poem “Life List” from RETURN TO A CERTAIN REGION OF CONSCIOUSNESS: NEW AND SELECTED POEMS by Cathryn Hankla, published by Mercer University Press on February 4, 2025
https://www.mupress.org/Return-to-a-Certain-Region-of-Consciousness-New-Selected-Poems-P1283.aspx
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? I was on my way to the beach from the campground to take a beach walk. I crossed a bridge over an inlet and stopped to read a sign about protected nesting turtles and migrating birds, some endangered and some coming back from risk. As I walked the beach in the March chill with waves coming in and out, I was thinking of decades past when I walked on a nearby beach with my then husband, who wasn’t much of a beach person but always found something of interest to watch, mostly various shore birds. He kept a life list of bird sightings. He had died suddenly almost a year earlier and had been much on my mind for months. I remembered how much he had enjoyed the ruddy turnstones, little clowns rushing along the water’s edges.
Before I knew it there was a line circulating in my head that became the first line of the poem, “Before the piping plovers came to nest.” It’s an iambic pentameter line and that accident set the course of the poem toward a sonnet. The first titles were “Piping Plover” and “Endangered” before I settled later on “Life List.”
https://poemanalysis.com/poetic-meter/iambic-pentameter/
My first jotted notes, taken from that sign about the turtles and birds: “3.25: Piping Plover…endangered, increasing…sparrow-sized bird…shore bird…returns mid-may…”
The first line of the poem remained the first line throughout the drafting and revision process; it was my anchor. And then the second line stayed put after a bit of tinkering.
There was a partial line I transferred to several drafts that eventually I had to let go; one version of lines three and four reads: This sparrow winters southward, where are you?/ Endangered but increasing now…” I never could fill out that fourth line, so eventually I transformed it to an image of his walking along the shore that’s in the final version. The second stanza came more easily than the first, and by that time I was rethinking “Endangered” as the title.
Little changes continued for a while: “bright full moons” and “bright as moons” finally became “brilliant moons” in line seven.
An earlier draft of the ending reads: “A lone mourning dove flushes from cover,/ and for a moment, out of synch, its perch/ is close to me, a breath from leaving me.” The shift from “leaving me” to “leaving us” feels significant, a broadening of the impact of any one death, and acknowledgement of tour shared human condition of being brief candles.
At the last moment, when reading the manuscript of my new & selected for publication, I removed a comma after “dove” in the last three lines of the poem. I’m very glad I did.
The ending of the poem came right out of my experience of walking over to the beach time and again. After I started working on the poem, the next day the dove flew up out of the inlet and nearly brushed me. It felt a bit unnatural and made me think about the porous borders of grief and how it makes worlds that seem so separated, the living and the dead, come close together. Grief is a portal that opens and can make supernatural things occur. We read the world’s messages more intently. (BELOW: Credited to Pablo Picasso)
Where were you when you started to actually write the poem? And please describe the place in great detail. I was camping at Huntington Beach State Park in South Carolina near the Litchfield beaches. It is a three mile stretch of unbuilt beach, which was once home to a railroad industrialist and his sculptor wife and bequeathed to the state of South Carolina for public use. One can get a glimpse of open beach there, without houses or hotels.
I worked on a draft of the complete poem while I was camping at the beach for four days in late March. It’s the first time I’ve ever written anything while camping. I didn’t have my computer with me so I hand wrote the early drafts in a notebook before ever typing it out. This is something I used to do in my youth, of course, but rarely do now. Upon reflection hand writing in an old-fashioned notebook makes perfect sense for this poem, which is so rooted in personal history. Nearby is a beach where my family gathered in a rental house over many years for summer reunions.
What month and year did you start writing this poem? March 25-27, 2024. During those few days the draft came mostly together, although I revised a bit more in the weeks afterward.
What do you want readers of this poem to take from this poem? Maybe a sense of something we all share, life and losing people we love. Places that bring them back to us.
My friend the poet Robert Schultz wrote a detailed response: “The opening nest-left rhyme sets the theme and tone, and then we’re swept by the wave of long-o assonances: shorebirds…flown…beachcombing…your…shore…seafoam…turnstones…” Then after the turn, “tridactyl,” by its sound, sends me back to “wrack.” Then somehow “shaking sand from sandal straps” fells like a memento mori, so of course “your” life list is “endangered.” And of course the flushed dove mourns. But all of this is so indirect, so deflected—so much a deft bank shot—that we feel (I feel) the lifting away of the ibises again. Like the breath of the cooing dove that has not yet but is always about to leave us. I can’t think of another elegy more moving and more delicate.”
Of course, I’m very pleased about what such a close reader as Bob found rewarding in my construction, but if general readers feel any of the poem’s impact, even without close analysis, I’d be very pleased. If the poem resonates with truth in reader’s own lives, that’s what matters.
Which part of the poem was the most emotional of you to write and why? Definitely it was the ending of the poem; the moment that dove flew up from the marsh and startled me, I had an ending. It had been almost a year since my ex-husband’s death, and every time I thought I was through the worst of grief, it washed through me again. In long intimate friendships such as we had, one tends to forget the time limits on life, as the person has become a pillar to your own life, something like breath itself, an automatic function of your nervous system.
https://www.cathrynhankla.com/
