Process

Delta Heritage Trail (52 Parks : 52 Poems)

Date of Visit: 25 February 2024

Barton Visitor Center, Walnut Corner, AR

62º partly sunny, breezy

I closed out this three-park journey with Delta Heritage, a rails-to-trails project running north-south along the eastern border of Arkansas from Lexa to Arkansas City (roughly from Helena-West Helena to 14 miles south of Rohwer). Eventually, the trail will run for about 85 miles. When I visited, I walked a bit of the 21 miles now open from Lexa to Elaine. At the southern end, the trail is open from Watson to Arkansas City for 24 miles. In 1992, Union Pacific Corporation donated 73 miles of railroad, and in 2010, the state parks extended the southernmost trail by another 14 miles on the Mississippi River Mainline Levee.

On arrival at the Barton entrance, the visitor center, a converted cotton gin, offers some history of the railroad and some info on local wildlife. Lucky to visit on a very quiet day, I got a tour of the behind-the-scenes rooms so I could take in the enormity of the gin from the inside. In terms of accessibility, this trail gets a huge thumbs up. With a need to accommodate walkers, runners, and bicyclists, the wide trail of compacted gravel made for an easy stretch of the legs. While I didn’t choose to bike on my visit, wanting to do so makes adding this park to my “must return to” list a no-brainer. In fact, I’m even more curious now about the southern portion that runs along the levee.

Because the park is all about movement on the trail and I visited at midday, there wasn’t much in the way of wildlife. I enjoyed tracking a red-bellied woodpecker as I practiced with my brand new set of binoculars. Of course, an abundancy of squirrels kept me entertained, along with many LBBs and LGBs (little brown birds and little gray birds 🙂 ). However, given a slow pace and great sunshine, I stopped to photograph some blooming moss. This has come to be one of my favorite photos from all of my park adventures. For the sake of the moss, I cheered the lack of bicyclists.

Next up: Historic Washington

Posted by Sandy Longhorn

Mississippi River (52 Parks : 52 Poems)

Date of Visit: 24-25 February 2024

Marianna, AR

57º sunny & breezy

Typing out the name of this, my 21st park, Mississippi River, makes me itchy to add “State Park” to distinguish from a visit to the river itself. As the photo shows, the park rests within the St. Francis National Forest. While my overnight trip to the park proved fun and fruitful, I was quite disappointed that it lacks a focus on and easy access to the river itself. Instead, most of the park highlights the southern tip of Crowley’s Ridge, Arkansas’ least-known and least-understood ecoregion. Even in the visitors center most of the presentation material centers on the land, beginning with the Louisiana Purchase survey. I did appreciate the chance to read more about this after having been to Louisiana Purchase State Park earlier in the day.

Per my usual routine, I started the visit at the welcome center and took in all of the informational displays. I stood for a long time in front of the box (maybe 18″ x 18″) with the chains shown in the picture here. Having visited the headwater swamp where the survey began, I imagined men working these lengths into straight lines in cardinal directions, marking out the land one slow, trudging, bushwhacking, malaria-suffering mile at a time. Stunning.

In the visitor center, a cut-away diagram of Crowley’s Ridge rising up out of the delta also dazzled me. Fun fact: the ridge is not an uplift formation. Instead, much like the Ozark Mountains in the northwest, the ridge is the product of erosion created by wind, rain, and eventually rivers. In fact, the St. Francis River forms the eastern border border and the L’Anguille River the west.

For this trip, I lucked out and a good friend accompanied me. We gave the camper cabins at the park a double thumbs up, and we found the Bear Creek Loop Trail fascinating. The trail provides a chance to learn to identify at least a dozen trees native to Arkansas, as placards in front of key species offer information on height, leaves, flowers, and bark. My friend is a master naturalist and general fan of all things nature. To my delight she caught this wee cricket frog so we could take a closer look before letting it get back to doing whatever it is that little frogs do. We saw deer and raccoon tracks, caught prairie trillium coming up out of the ground, checked out the stiff bristle fern growing on tree trunks, and at the very end of our hike, thought a bear or a very large person must be hiking off trail based on the sound of the disturbance in the leaf litter down below us. Turns out it was an armadillo scrambling around. A lot of noise for such a pint-sized creature.

The next morning, our luck ran out. We headed out from the cabin by car, determined to find the confluence of the St. Francis and Mississippi Rivers. After all, the title of the park promised as much, and I could see a little road marked on the map. Alas, we made it to within 500 yards (so said my GPS), when flooding forced us to turn back. Here’s a picture of the dry road that we took out of the park, windows down to catch the birdsong and to better view the swampy surroundings. It seems that at every park I’m left saying, “I need to come back so I can … .” This one was no exception. Heads up, confluence, I’ll be back next year (after I’ve managed to visit all 52 parks once) to check you out.

Next up: Delta Heritage Trail

Posted by Sandy Longhorn

Marks’ Mills and Jenkins Ferry Battlegrounds (52 Parks : 52 Poems)

21 February 2024

Hwy 8 & 97, Hwy 46 north of Leola (respectively)

65º partly cloudy with breezes

Even though it will mess up the math of having 52 individual posts on the blog, I’m writing about Marks’ Mills and Jenkins Ferry Battlegrounds together. First because Marks’ Mills is quite small and second because they are the continuation of the battle story started with Poison Springs Battleground of my last post. I’m already stressing about whether I will write three individual poems or if they will end up three parts of one long poem, thus screwing up my math even more. Ah, poet troubles.

Marks’ Mills occupies a thin wedge of land created by the angled intersection of Arkansas highways 8 and 97, northwest of New Edinburg. A small stand of pine trees, saved from the lumber industry that surrounds it, shelters a few picnic tables and three informational placards. Biggest surprise here: this isn’t the actual battleground; instead, the park commemorates the battle that took place roughly a half a mile away on the private land of the Marks family. Again, this battle centered around a wagon train. This time though, it was a train returning to Pine Bluff after resupplying Steele’s Union army at Camden, following the defeat at Poison Springs. Confederates captured over a thousand horses and mules, wagons, ambulances, 4 big guns, and official Union communications. Among the Union train were 300 refugee slaves trying to get north. The Confederate soldiers murdered over 100 of these people.

The placards offer directions if anyone wants to drive the byways back into the woods to visit the actual site. With this history heavy on my heart, I didn’t need to stand on the exact land to feel the weight.

After Poison Springs and Marks’ Mills, and my reading ahead of time, I knew Jenkins Ferry would be another difficult visit, although with a somewhat happier ending, if one can even say that of a battle. At this park, 37 acres of Saline River bottomlands where the river intersects highway 46 northeast of Leola, there are the requisite picnic tables and placards, but the trees turn to oaks along the shoreline, and the river offers its own marking of history. The space provided much needed room to stretch my legs and ramble along the muddy banks.

I stood where the old ferry once ran and revisited the battle. After the overwhelming losses in the previous fights, General Steele took the remains of the Union Army in Arkansas and abandoned Camden to retreat north to Little Rock. It was April, the river flooding. At the site of the ferry, Steele ordered his engineers to construct an India rubber pontoon bridge that the forces used to traverse the waters. Once across, Steele’s men scuttled the pontoons, sinking the safe passage and stranding Confederate forces on the southern side of the Saline. The area was probably much greener then, in April, but the muted February colors gave the place a haunted vibe as I walked, again, on bloodied land.

For me, the happier ending was, of course, the escape of the Union troops. Yes, I am now more Arkansan than Iowan, but I will never be able to see the Confederate side.

Turning away from war, the park rewarded me with more wilderness than the previous two provided. As I finished my tromping through old leaves and scattered trees, I looked down and caught sight of a giant paw print and a small heap of fresh scat. (I’ll spare you the picture of the scat.) While I desperately wanted this to be a bobcat, I saw the claw marks immediately and knew it could not be. Bobcats, like nearly all felines, retract their claws when they walk (because who wants dirty nails!). Once home, I celebrated when I identified the print and scat as coyote. Who knew I would come to love identifying all things wild?

Next up: Louisiana Purchase

Posted by Sandy Longhorn

Poison Springs Battleground (52 Parks : 52 Poems)

Date of Visit: 20 February 2024

Halfway between Chidester and Camden off Hwy 24

72º sunny skies, small breezes

Poison Springs Battleground (park #17) and the two parks to follow — Marks’ Mills Battleground and Jenkins Ferry Battleground — took me back to my trip to northwest Arkansas last summer and my visit to Prairie Grove Battlefield. These sites focus on some of our most violent and vitriolic history. For this reason, I read up ahead of time and learned about the Red River Campaign and the Camden Expedition, the last major victory for the Confederacy in the Civil War. I also noted that none of these parks offer services beyond a scattering of picnic tables, some outdoor grills, and educational placards. Poison Springs does offer a small trail down toward a creek, perhaps the produce of the spring itself.

The hardest truth, among many: on this site, the First Kansas Colored Infantry Regiment fought in the battle the Union lost, and the Confederacy did not take prisoners from African American troops; they slaughtered them. And yet, the battle reminds me that no one survives a war blameless. The Union forces had been on a foraging venture, being half-starved in their Camden encampment, and by all reports, Union soldiers did not limit their theft to corn from area farms and plantations. Civilians reported the looting of household goods: silver, jewelry, and clothing, including that for women and children. This inspired the Confederates to engage the wagon train. In the end, Union forces numbered 1,134 (236 killed, 65 wounded, 125 captured) to the Confederate’s 3,335 (16 killed, 88 wounded, 10 missing). As always, I speculate about the language of the placards. 125 Union men “captured,” but 10 Confederate men “missing.” Only 16 Confederate soldier’s dead? Accurate or not, many lives ended here; none of them ended easily.

Interesting to me: I found no mention on site of the rumor about the place name. Many of my friends born and raised in Arkansas had told me the tale of Confederates putting something in the water to make Union soldiers ill. According to the Encyclopedia of Arkansas, “The name Poison Spring was known to Camden area residents at the time of the engagement and was used in battle reports, but its origins are uncertain. Later legends suggested that Union soldiers became ill after drinking the cold spring water, but no contemporary accounts confirm this story.” Again, history proves an imprecise science. As I walked along the trail among the trees, I remembered what a friend had texted earlier that day in response to my preparations for such a grim visit. She wrote, “The civil war is full of sadness. But today they [the grounds] are nice habitats.” Indeed. Nature takes no sides; it suffers and thrives regardless.

Next up: Marks’ Mills

Posted by Sandy Longhorn

Lower White River Museum

Date of Visit: 25 January 2024

Des Arc, AR

55º dense fog advisory, light rain

If Pinnacle Mountain caused me to ask “who gets to determine what a mountain is?” then my 15th park, Lower White River Museum made me ask “who gets to determine what a park is?” Located in Des Arc (population approx. 1,900), this museum park is self-contained within four walls. While small, I found lots and lots of information here about the White River in general, and about the lower portion of the river specifically. The museum houses exhibits on the history of the local area concerning: the Civil War, Education, Medicine, Agriculture, Timber, Fishing & Hunting, and the most important of all, Pearling and Button Making.

I started my visit with this amazing map used by a local lumber company, labeled “a blue line copy of a hand-drawn map from the early 1900s.” What the picture fails to depict accurately is the size of the map. I’m terrible at estimations, but this thing is quite large, and I couldn’t help but think of who might have carried it around, folding and unfolding it, while navigating the land and the river. Around the corner from this display, I found information on early Euro-American settlers to the shores of the river. These folx poled up the river on flatboats that they hauled up on shore and dismantled to use the wood as material for their first shelters. What is that old story about any number of explorers/conquerers burning their ships so their people would have no choice but to go forward? Farther along, in the Civil War display, I learned that the “deadliest single shot” of the war killed 105 Union troops in the Battle of St. Charles. I had to investigate and found out this happened when a Confederate artillery shell hit a Union ship square in the steam drum, which did the initial damage.

The education exhibit provided some levity, offering up a set of “Teacher Rules” from 1872. These included the following. #4 “Men teachers may take one evening each week for courting purposes, or two evenings a week if they go to church regularly.” #6 “Women teachers who marry or engage in unseemly conduct will be dismissed.” And #7 “Every teacher should lay aside from each pay a goodly sum … for their benefit during their declining years so that they will not become a burden to society.” All this and you had to provide the water and the coal each day, too! By 1915, some new rules ruled, including this #4 “You may not loiter downtown in ice cream stores.” This begs the imagination to ponder just exactly what those teachers got up to!

Pearling and button-making take up the greatest share of the museum, given how important the industry was from the end of the 19th century until the mid-twentieth. Originally harvested by hand and searched for pearls, the mussel industry expanded in 1900 “with the invention of a machine that could cut buttons from [the] shells.” And here is where I got very excited because, the factories along the White River and many, many others, including the Mississippi River, mostly cut “blanks,” the button rounds. The cutting factories shipped these buttons where? To Iowa, of course, where Muscatine became known as “Pearl City.” I love finding these connections between where I’m from and where I am. Shellers harvested the mussels using “crowfoot hooks,” shown in this picture. They dragged long bars from which these hooks dangled over the mussel beds. Irritated by the hooks, the mussels opened up and clamped down on them, only to be pulled from the riverbed.

I ended my time in the museum as it began, with a map. This one entirely different. Equally as cool as the lumber map, this one, of the entire state and the major rivers, was made entirely of carpet and mounted on the wall from floor to ceiling. Those rivers are not dyed! Someone hand cut the brown carpet and the blue carpet to create this map.

After my visit, a short drive from the museum took me down to a nice riverside park where I mulled over all of the history while watching the rain-bloated river roll by.

Up next: 3/4 of the Red River Campaign: Jenkins Ferry Battleground, Mark’s Mills Battleground, and Poison Springs Battleground.

Posted by Sandy Longhorn

Ozark Folk Center (52 Parks : 52 Poems)

Date of Visit: 21 October 2023

Mountain View, AR

65º and sunny

Unique among Arkansas’ state parks, The Ozark Folk Center serves as a place both educational and recreational and draws crowds of people together to experience the legacy of highland Ozark Mountain crafts and music. Having heard of the park for years, especially about the famous Ozark Highlands Theater via their radio show, I thought I understood what to expect. However, after visiting the previous 11 parks where I wandered and hiked solo (even at Prairie Grove Battlefield’s museum, I was alone as I toured both the outdoor and the indoor exhibits), it took me about a half an hour to adjust to this quite different experience. Confined to a relatively small space, the Craft Village gave my recovering knee a good break at the end of my three-day set of parks. Still, I felt awkward for much of the day as I passed in and out of shops and bumped up against other visitors.

Entering the Craft Village, I let my ears dictate my first stop: the Blacksmith Stage. As promised, the village featured live music all day and made the $15 entrance fee well worth it. Lucky for me, a local group of three women known as Sweet Jam performed on my visit. I fell hard for this music and these women, who were generous enough to talk with those in the audience about their instruments (banjo, dulcimer, and fiddle), the music, and their own journeys to becoming performers. When they revealed that they had all taken up their instruments after retirement and none of them had known how to play anything until then, I about fell onto the wooden floor. I am always telling myself that it is too late to learn an instrument because, like a foreign language, music takes a young person’s mind. Sweet Jam proved me wrong. They played instrumental-only versions of traditional folk music, like “The Girl I Left Behind Me,” which Civil War generals banned from being played at night because men would get homesick for their beloveds and go AWOL, or so the legend goes. My trip didn’t extend to any evening music in the theater, but Sweet Jam provided such a great experience that I didn’t miss it.

I visited every shop open that day and saw lots and lots of beautiful work, even getting in some early Christmas shopping and getting to talk to the people who had created what I purchased. However, after Sweet Jam, my second most favorite part of the day was taking a Picnic Swing ride courtesy of a 17-year-old donkey named Whiskey, whose sibling is named Tango. The two switch out powerhouse duties. I believe this swing is authentic to its era, and I’m kicking myself for not writing down what Whiskey’s owner Tina Marie Wilcox (also the village’s herbalist) said about that. Regardless, I enjoyed climbing into the wooden slat bucket seat and hearing Wilcox talk of how Whiskey powering the swing replicated how grist mills worked. Of course, I also jumped (down) at the chance to talk to Whiskey one-on-one at the end of the ride and reward him with a good scratch between the ears.

I’m not sure where the poem will go on this one, but I bet it features Sweet Jam and Whiskey, and maybe a sense of the community created each day between the visitors and park & village staff.

Next up: Lake Dardanelle

Posted by Sandy Longhorn

Withrow Springs (52 Parks : 52 Poems)

Date of Visit: 14 July 2023

Huntsville, AR

77º after storms early morning, cloudy skies

Withrow Springs is near Hobbs, so I stayed over in Eureka Springs with friends (thank you, friends!) while making these two site visits. With the heat of July definitely ramping up, I was fortunate to have two stormy nights that cooled things off a bit for the morning hours and created lots of wispy clouds on the mountain roads. The Visitor Center at Withrow Springs is relatively small, but like all my other park visits was staffed with friendly and knowledgable people. After getting my map squared away and making my plan for hiking, I stepped outside and met an incredibly young, but super nice park interpreter who was corralling a giant beetle on the sidewalk. He was delighted when I showed him the Seek by iNaturalist app on my phone, and then I was delighted when the app identified the bug as a variety of longhorn beetle. It was an auspicious beginning to my day.

A short drive took me to the trailheads for the War Eagle Trail (overlooking War Eagle Creek) and the Dogwood Nature Trail. Because I was only there for the morning and couldn’t do both trails, I opted to hike down to the overlook on the War Eagle Trail first. Besides my Seek app, whenever I’m hiking, I’ve usually got my Merlin app from the Cornell Lab of Ornithology going as well. On this hike, a Kentucky warbler sang out from directly above me, but despite all of my neck-craning and my slow dance around the base of the tree, I couldn’t find it for the life of me. (Sneaky birds!) Unlike some of my other hiking in June and July, it wasn’t particularly hot while I was out on the trail, but it was incredibly humid. I was flummoxed over and over by my glasses fogging up on the trail. Regardless, the view from the overlook was stunning (once I stopped long enough from my lenses to clear up)!

The Dogwood Nature Trail, 3/4 of a mile, was the highlight of my day. Most of the trail was a relatively narrow path through all the trees! Various species of maple, oak, and hickory, along with the titular dogwoods, and a smattering of other upland Ozark forest varieties, including Eastern red cedar and paw paw with their huge leaves. The trail is all hillside and ravine and the ground is covered in ferns as far as you can see into the understory. As I discovered, along with all of this green comes a plethora of spiders. In this case arrowhead orbweavers galore. Turns out, each night they weave their sticky nets across the path because just as the trail funnels people through the forest, it also funnels insects right into the hungry hungry spiders’ webs. After being covered in bits of web and the remains of many a winged insect for the third or fourth time, I finally learned to lead with my trekking pole. I mastered a sweeping, circular move that allowed me to gather the web in front of me and move the remains to nearby trees. I felt terrible destroying all that labor, but not as terrible as I felt covered in yuck and the occasional spider.

While on the Dogwood Trail, which definitely changes elevation as you move up and down the hillside and cross tiny creaks, streams, and rivulets, I stumbled on another great find. The skeletal remains of either a raccoon or a possum. While not intact, I’d say I found about 80% of the skeleton alongside the shallow creak bed. As I studied the bones, I dreamt up a scenario of a black bear or bobcat making a nice meal out of the unfortunate smaller mammal. This could have been the case, but given their numbers, a lowly coyote was the more likely diner. After studying the remains, I meandered the rest of the way back to my car, covered in a sheet of sweat and about a pound of trail dirt that I’d managed to kick up onto my legs. The last note in my logbook reads: a great day if somewhat damp. Indeed.

Unlike the nearly non-existent poem draft for Hobbs, the draft of Withrow Springs came much more easily. Sneak peak: there are ferns; there are spiders.

Next up: Mount Nebo (and it’s a doozy!)

Posted by Sandy Longhorn

Process Notes: The Dolorist Confesses

83º at almost noon ~ no heat index! window open, cicadas doing their thing, home construction noises in the background, the sun delightful & no threat

With lots of busy work under my belt, work for the C.D. Wright Women Writers Conference mostly, but also some recording of rejections from recent poem submissions, followed by sending out the poems anew, I have turned back to a focus on writing new poems. Lately, I’ve gotten back into the habit of walking, perhaps the writer’s best physical support system. All through history, in both the West and the East, great writers have recorded the connection between walking and writing, and I’ve seen that connection at work in my own past many times. It’s great to be returning to an activity that sparks new poems. (I should note that the spark only works for me if I’m walking without listening to any kind of music, NPR, or audio books. It works when I simply walk and observe, listening to the world around me.)

Because of this recent return to walking, I’ve had several lines rattling around in my head. I knew these lines were the beginning of a political poem, one that, again, records just how exhausting it is to be woke. However, once I put the lines down in my journal and then in the computer, I knew the poem wasn’t finished. It hadn’t accrued that critical mass necessary for survival. This time, I turned to a trusted friend and sent the “wee draft” for a diagnosis. Said friend hit the nail on the head and gave me awesome advice for coming back to the poem in the future. Thanks, friend!

In the meantime, with those lines out of my head and off in the world, I started re-reading (Laynie Browne’s The Scented Fox) and word-gathering. Normally, this sparks lines to form. Instead, it sparked me to remember a thought I’d had while walking this morning. I was thinking about a letter that I needed to write and about how I went into a minor depression at the beginning of the summer, a depression I’m working myself out of thanks, in part, to walking. So, I set down the lines I’d imagined including in the letter.

It wasn’t a lack of funds that kept me
but a lack of fortitude, of fiber.

The poem evolved in couplets today (my native form), and at first the poem was titled after a phrase from Browne’s book. After the poem showed me where it needed to go, that title no longer fit. I cast about. I scrambled. I came up with “The Dolorist Confesses,” but I’m not super happy with it.

Also, I had the poem laid out in three parts with subheadings. However, with only three couplets per section, the headings quickly proved to be too heavy. Then, when I got to the last “section,” I realized that the real ending would need four couplets instead of three. The three sections announced the onset of the depression, described what happened to my body because of it, and then detailed how I started pulling myself up out of it. Now, they are simply one poem made up of ten couplets, still covering the same content. I did use several of the words I’d gathered from Browne’s book, but much of the energy of the poem came from the initial phrase I’d constructed while walking.

Here’s to breathable air and the time to stretch my legs (and mind) in it.

Posted by Sandy Longhorn

Process Notes: The 14 Most Common Causes of Fatigue

95º feels like 108º ~ SCUBA weather out there

After two weeks of silence, two posts in one day. Wahoooza.

I’m happy to report that I did meet my goal of drafting a new poem today, as I stated earlier. I wasn’t sure I would, given the chaos of the last two weeks. And therein lies a problem of mine. I tend to convince myself of certain narratives about my own being. One of these narratives is that I must have calm and quiet, long periods of focus, to write. I hold the summer up as WRITING TIME. This summer, I have taken on many new roles at UCA which have meant extending my work off contract (that’s right…I don’t get paid for these hours). This has “cluttered” my life with tasks and problem-solving that have nothing to do with writing poetry (directly). So, I need to break out of my own narrative. Really, all I need to write is a small chunk of time amidst the busy-ness of the rest of life. I’m hoping this realization, this work against my own inner critic, will extend into the real chaos of the academic year. Fingers crossed.

So, after finishing that last blog post, I turned to my journal. I let myself spew for two pages, jotting down all the inner dialogue, all the inner questioning. Then I wrote, “the truth is…” and recorded some more objective observations about my recent days. Finally, I turned to a new page, labeled it, as always, “Tell the Truth” and wrote 4 really horrible lines. I’m still thinking about political poetry, and at the same time, I’ve been struggling with some mild depression and fatigue (of all kinds) this summer. Today, I started writing about headline fatigue and the fact that no amount of “feel good” news can counteract the difficulties of this world today. These were the really horrible lines.

Then, I turned to my old friend, the Oxford English Dictionary, through our subscription at school, and I searched “fatigue.” As soon as the results popped up, I realized that I’d spent some time on these pages two and a half weeks ago when last I wrote. So, I opened another tab and thought I’d give Google a whirl. One of the first hits was from a pseudo-medical site, “The 14 Most Common Causes of Fatigue.” This was the typical info-article interspersed with a zillion ads. It listed things like sleep dysfunction, anemia, diabetes, heart disease, depression, etc. and gave very brief information about each.

It struck me that I’d used a headline to generate a poem earlier this month, so I copied down the title and started drafting a catalog poem. In my journal, I didn’t consider the order of my list. Instead, I focused on trying to generate images that would stand for the things that have been making me fatigued lately. One example is a bit about “grass that insists on growing” and the mower waiting there like a truancy officer. Of course, mowing a tiny lawn is no big deal, but I mean it to stand for all the everyday chores that must still be done, even as we try to make positive change in this world.

Once I turned to the computer to draft out the complete poem, I considered order. I actually only used about 3/4 of the list from my journal and created new “entries” once I was on the screen. The screen can reveal soft or clunky lines more easily than the handwritten page. While a catalog poem seems easy on first sight, there are many considerations. The order of the entries should create a kind of forward momentum, and since, in my case, there’s no narrative to the content, this has to be an emotional movement. Also, the poem must transcend the form of a list. In other words, I couldn’t “fill” any of the entries with fluff just to make the number. Yes, 14 was arbitrary based on the headline of the article and I could have cut myself some slack and changed that number, but for the draft I wanted to get there. As with all poetry, concision is the key, and every word counts, so adding more is a tricky business.

Finally, I was conscious the whole time that I wanted this poem to stretch beyond my own experience to encapsulate the fatigue I know so many people are feeling these days about the political environment. While some of the entries in my list are taken directly from my daily life, the others are plucked from headlines (e.g. the famine in South Sudan) to broaden the scope of the speaker. Like most of the political poems I’ve been writing, I’m hesitant about this one. I will set it aside for a few days and return with fresh eyes.

The whole process I just described reminded me, again, of John Keats and Negative Capability. For those unaware, Keats defined NC as when a person is “capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason.” It struck me again today that the whole process of drafting (of creating any kind of art, really) requires this of us. I had to find a way to set aside the inner critic and my own attempt to control the process. I had to “dwell in Possibility” as Emily Dickinson wrote. Today, I’ll mark my attempt down as a success, as a goal met, regardless of whether the poem makes it to publication or not.

Posted by Sandy Longhorn

Process Notes: Transplant

78º ~ rain-cooled, headed for a high of 90º ~ birdsong replacing the thunder

I preach to my students about the BIC method of writing, which would be the Butt-In-Chair method. There’s one sure thing in this world; if your butt isn’t in the chair (which also means switching off the noise of social media and actually giving your body & brain the time & space necessary to go deep), you won’t get anything written. Once again, practicing what I preach has made all the difference.

I did my duty this morning. I repeated my goal of drafting a poem and I sat BIC. I scribbled some ugly lines with no music. I read a few poems. I cast about. I let myself be in the stillness. I continued to think about my current obsession: how can I interrogate my whiteness? How can I make art that might make a difference in this difficult time?

Once again, the key was getting specific. Most of the horrible lines in my journal circle around generalizations, falling into cliché and propaganda. Suddenly, I remembered the feeling, the physical feeling of my white guilt (a sinking and burning in my gut) when I heard family members express their own racism in jokes. I wondered why I had such a reaction and didn’t believe what they believed. I thought of the specific experiences in my childhood that gave me empathy and understanding for those who looked differently than I did. Finally, all of this made me remember coming to the South around the turn of the century and realizing that many native southerners had no idea that outright racism existed in the North. And so the poem began:

In the South, everyone knows Iowa is a pretty
white state, but I have to explain, not
in my hometown

This opening lacks the specific imagery and sound play that I usually rely on, but it does have a kickass linebreak. Because I’m working with some narrative in this draft, I fear I’ve lost a lot of my lyric strengths, so I’ll definitely be going back and trying to up the images and figurative language. This is one of my concerns about writing overtly political poems. The process is very different for me, coming at the poem with some ideas, some philosophy already in place, and I worry about being capable enough as a poet to create that strange elixir that is my goal.

The poem fell into four, five-line stanzas, and does go on to explore several specific, key moments from my childhood. It juxtaposes those moments with older relatives making what they considered “jokes” but were really moments of racist othering. In those instances, I’m afraid, I always remained silent, and I hope that by trying to tell the truth about where I come from, about my own silent complicity, I might be taking a step in the direction of interrogating my own skin, in making a tiny difference by (eventually) sharing the poem through publication.

Posted by Sandy Longhorn