Process notes

11
Apr
2024

Millwood (52 Parks : 52 Poems)

Date of Visit: 17 March 2024

Ashdown, AR

62º post rain, cloudy with some wind

Park 25, I arrived at Millwood in the aftermath of a night’s good soaking rain. Driving in, I couldn’t help but be awed by the size and scope of the earthen dam (the largest in the state) that created Millwood Lake. Completed in 1966 by the Army Corps of Engineers to control flooding like so many of Arkansas’ lakes, the dam rises up out of the valley of the Little River. With the road into the park atop this huge mound of dirt, the drive in provides a spectacular view of the expanse of the lake and the surrounding forests.

Confronting another lake-based park, I stopped at the visitor center to get oriented and find out more about the two hiking trails I’d read about earlier. (While we fished a lot when I was a kid, I haven’t touched a pole in years and am not drawn to the hobby. I do hope to get onto some of the lakes via kayak but I’m waiting for warmer weather!) I knew the park held a short trail (1.5 miles) and a long trail (4 miles). Wildlife Lane Nature Trail, the 4-miler, held most of my interest, especially as it winds past a beaver mound. Sadly, the park staff told me that because of the rain the night before that trailhead might be impassible. Still hopeful, I took the brochure for that one and for the shorter, Waterfowl Way.

Both trails begin together at the old campground that flooded out in 2015 (we can try to control floodwaters with lakes and dams, but sometimes the water wins). Where the trails diverged, a low spot in the land, water greeted me in nearly every direction moving forward. Try as I might, hopping over puddles and rivulets, I couldn’t get past several large and deep pools to get to the open trail ahead on Wildlife Lane. Instead, I turned for Waterfowl Way, which in the end proved fortuitous. The trail led me along the bank of a nearby bog and then along one of the lake’s many gorgeous inlets. Not pictured here: the half a dozen fishing boats and their hopeful crews.

Glad I’d grabbed both brochures, I kept Waterfowl Way’s information handy as I walked, often picking my way at the edges of the trail to avoid standing water in the middle. I’m thankful whenever a park provides trail details and stopped often to read, look around, and absorb before moving on. Right around the halfway point, I walked around a blind curve and found myself looking at the roots of an upended oak tree. FYI: I love to look at upended roots. As I took in this tree where it fell, I first left the trail to crouch down and look closer because of the shelf fungi (hairy curtain crust).

I spent quite a while examining the intricacies of the patterns, getting nearly nose-deep in the stuff and taking more than a few photos. The looking deeply led me to discover a Carolina mantleslug hanging out in one of the bark grooves. Drawn in now, I ended up examining the entire length of the tree from the rootball to what had been the topmost branches. And at some point in that observing, magic happened. The lines of a poem coalesced in my head, and I started writing in my journal what would become “How to Fall in Love with a Downed Oak.” This was the very first time in the project where I actually started writing the poem in the midst of the experience of the park. As I said: magic.

My experience at Millwood proved again that I can prepare all I want in advance of these trips, but nature, weather, and my own body or emotions often change the plans once I’m on site. Letting go of preconceived notions has been one of the biggest challenges of this project. Oh, I’m going to X park, I’ll think. That means I’ll be writing about Y. Then, I get there and that’s not what happens at all. And thank goodness for that!

Given that Millwood is a lake park, I did end my visit by stopping at the marina to smell the fishy smells undercut by gasoline and engine oil. From the parking lot, I took some video of the wind pushing the lake into the rocky shore to capture that great lulling sound of water hitting stone over and over again.

Next up: Arkansas Museum of Natural Resources

Posted by Sandy Longhorn
09
Mar
2024

Louisiana Purchase (52 Parks : 52 Poems)

Date of Visit: 24 February 2024

Hwy 49 south of Blackton, 34.645540, -91.053230

54º windy

People ask about my favorite parks. Even before I visited, I knew Louisiana Purchase State Park would rank in my top 3, and it did not disappoint. Years ago, when reading about township and range lines and how Iowa got parceled out in such neat squares, I learned that while President Jefferson sealed the deal to acquire the land west of the Mississippi, President James Madison, about a dozen years later in 1815, actually ordered the official survey. Madison sent men west to establish the Initial Point as anchor for all future land parcels. These men marked the point 26 miles west of the Mississippi River, north of the confluence of the Arkansas and Mississippi Rivers. From this point, the men used rods and chains to divvy up the land the US government needed to pay veterans of the War of 1812. Today, a monument stone rests in a gorgeous headwater swamp to mark this point.

I found it incredibly difficult to capture the park in photographs, so I encourage you to use the link above to access the park website to get a better sense of this amazing place. The park covers 37.5 acres of mostly swamp over 3 counties, but a spacious, 950-foot boardwalk with interpretive placards makes a small portion accessible by foot. Since I visited in winter, the cypress and tupelo trees showed off their towering, straight stature and flared bottoms. The flared trunks, and for the cypress their knobby knees, help keep them standing tall in water. On this trip, I learned a new geological feature: the “headwater” swamp. Common swamps are “backwater” which fluctuate greatly between flooding and drying out. Headwater swamps maintain a more static existence; they don’t super flood and they don’t dry all the way up. Shallow wetlands, you can imagine that the soil beneath is super rich. So, while there used to be many headwater swamps in the area, almost all have been drained in favor of agriculture. Thank goodness the State Parks preserved this one. The light & shadow, the mirror surface of the still water, and the wind winding through bare branches offered a bit of a haunt to the start of my day.

At the end of the boardwalk, deep in the trees, the monument stone sits as witness to an exact moment of colonization. Surrounded by the wilderness of the swamp, it didn’t slip my mind that I could be awed by the science involved as well as devastated by the damage we managed to do with that science. (Fun fact: In 2002 a new survey using electronics and lasers found that the survey of 1815 was accurate to within one inch!)

Behind the stone in this photo, you’ll see one of 4 “bearing trees” red-tagged at the cardinal directons around the Initial Point. Not pictured, a tree just to the right of here. Dead, decaying and hollowed out in vertical striations, it sang when the wind blew across it. The vibrations brought to mind an orchestra of winds, reeds, and strings. While I definitely want to return in summer to see the place alive in green, traveling in winter meant I only met three other people all together on the boardwalk, and each respected the cathedral-like specter of this untranslatable space.

Next up: Mississippi River

Posted by Sandy Longhorn
16
Feb
2024

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
03
Feb
2024

Lake Chicot (52 Parks : 52 Poems)

Date of Visit: 6-7 January 2024

Lake Village, AR

Day 1 ~ 45º and cloudy; Day 2 ~ 55º bright sun

Sitting in the far southeastern corner of the state, I made Lake Chicot State Park my first official sabbatical park. Sadly, all the cabins were booked, but a good friend put me up in Greenville, MS (thank you, friend!) and I got to traverse the beautiful, “new” suspension bridge on highway 82. During my sabbatical (spring semester) I will travel to at least 22 parks, and I selected all of the parks in the southern half of the state for these trips. I wish I could visit all of them in March and April for the prime weather and prime plants, but alas, some have to be visited “off season.” Lake Chicot does not disappoint, no matter the weather. In fact, it turns out the my visit coincided with a lot of migratory bird activity, as the park falls directly in the path of the Mississippi flyway. I found so much beauty here and so much great information about landforms and history that I’ve already drafted the poem.

On arrival, I spent time in the visitor center, learning that Lake Chicot takes the prize of being the largest, natural oxbow lake in North America. The lake measures over 20 miles from tip to tip. In this picture, you’ll see a great aerial shot that demonstrates how/where natural oxbow lakes form off the natural meanders of rivers. Once upon a time (600 years ago), the crescent labeled “Oxbow Lake” (Lake Chicot) in the map was actually the main river channel. Check out the USGS for how the science works. The name of this park focuses on the lake, but the influence of the Mississippi River can’t be underestimated. In this picture, you can also see the influence of the levee system that separates the farmlands and towns from the river’s main channel (and major flooding). I loved finding a new word for me, “batture,” from the French meaning “to beat,” as in “where the river beats the land” (yay, metaphors!). And I loved the fact that having not been developed, the batture remains quite wild.

On the first day of my trip, I signed up for a levee tour. Traveling in the winter meant I was the lone participant and had the park interpreter all to myself for an hour-long drive along the levee between the lake and the river. The tour departed late in the day to capitalize on birdwatching and we saw quite a few. Great blue herons, great egrets, cormorants, both snow and Canada geese, mallards, buffleheads (a new duck for me!), hawks that I couldn’t specify, a bald eagle soaring, and some of my favorite fellows — 3 different small flocks of wild turkeys. I adore how they run; they look just like some of the running dinosaurs in Jurassic Park! I use my iPhone to take these pictures, so I can’t share any of the bird sightings. However, the end of the tour involved driving down to the actual Mississippi River, just upriver from the Greenville Bridge. Given the record droughts we’ve been having both here and up north, the low, low water level did not surprise me. Still, it was disheartening to see so many feet of riverbank exposed. If you look closely in the photo, in the mid-upper left, you’ll see some grey stone above the rest of the darker bank. That’s the usual waterline. I was standing on the first few feet of river bottom when I took the picture.

On day two, the sun shined hard and I returned to the park to focus on the lake. I attended a park talk demonstrating the formation of oxbow lakes with a clay and sand model. This time I was not alone. The family that joined me showed a lot of patience for my questions! After the demonstration, we all walked down to see the lake and learn more about it, especially about the cypress trees and their knobby knees. Again, no picture of the lake itself because my phone camera doesn’t suffice. But, the drought provided me with access to areas normally underwater here as well and I took a few more than one picture of the exposed cypress roots and knees. In this picture, most of these would normally be underwater up to the bank line about midway through the picture horizontally. Natural architecture wows me every time. While poking around the lake on my own, I added to my birding with red-bellied woodpeckers, Carolina wrens, a northern flicker, and a little group of kinglets. All in all, I couldn’t have been happier with this trip!

Next up: Lower White River Museum State Park

Posted by Sandy Longhorn
09
Nov
2023

Hobbs State Park-Conservation Area (52 Parks : 52 Poems)

Date of Visit: 13 July 2023

Rogers, AR

85º feels like 94º ~ full sun, another heat advisory

A friend of mine had mentioned this day-use only park to me about six months before my visit, and I’d read the park website, of course, but nothing prepared me for the scope of the states largest park, 12,000+ acres, double the size of the next runner-up, Village Creek. The visitor center contains a wealth of information on the flora and fauna of the Ozark forests, as the park and conservation area sprawls across a former logging company site, much like Petit Jean. Located along the southern shore of Beaver Lake, there are also plenty of streams and shoreline to explore. Another remarkable note about Hobbs: it is the only state park where regulated hunting is permitted. Even though I was fairly certain the hiking trails would be “safe,” I confess I had a bit of hesitation over this fact.

After spending nearly an hour reading in the Visitor Center, I headed out to the Ozark Plateau Trail, directly adjacent to the parking lot. This is an ADA compliant asphalt trail that endeared itself to me with its shade, birdsong (buntings, tanagers, and wrens, oh my!), and ease of walking. I fell even more in love with it when I noticed a dirt offshoot on the trail that led to a small talking circle with fallen tree trunks as benches. At the front of the benches rested a sandstone “brick” spray-painted with unless, throwing me into Dr. Seuss’s The Lorax and the lesson that book holds about logging. I confess that I looked around for a moment in search of the The Once-ler!

Later I visited the Historic Van Winkle Trail, the site of the home, mill, and spring of the Peter Van Winkle family during and after the Civil War. The trail itself was beautiful, again with lots of shade trees, but the information presented was troubling. The signage tells of the Van Winkle saw mill and acknowledges that at least 18 slaves “worked” at the mill “on the eve of the Civil War.” These displays never use the word “owned.” The signage makes it a point to state that in 1850 there were 47,100 slaves in Arkansas, but fewer than 200 in Benton County. After visiting Prairie Grove Battlefield, how the state parks approach Arkansas’s history of slavery and oppression of people of color keeps rising to the surface of my visits. And as someone who studies language, how the use of language to present (or not present) the horrors of that history interests, troubles, and disquiets me. I applaud the state parks for creating displays that acknowledge slavery and the treatment of indigenous peoples in the state, but I often find the signage walking a fine line between white-washing and truth-telling. This unsettling continues to be a through-line in all of my park visits to date. As I walked the trail to a portion of the mill foundation along the banks of Clifty Creek, I kept thinking on the presentation and wondering if and how I might discover the “truth” of it all. I have no answers yet.

I rounded out my visit with a hike on the Sinking Stream Trail where everything was damp and fecund after the overnight bout of storms. If it hasn’t become apparent yet, given that much of my hiking in June and July took place during heat warnings, I’ve gained a new depth of appreciation for dense, hardwood forests. This trail gave me a great opportunity to walk in the shade of giant sycamore, oak, and hickory trees. I’ve finally engrained in my knowledge bank the difference between a white oak (rounded leaves) and a red oak (pointy leaves), and I can spot a mockernut hickory from 20 feet away. And all that chalk white bark of the sycamore, well, you don’t even want to get me started. If anyone ever studies this project of mine and finds my cache of trail photos, they will have a ton of tree pictures to swipe through. Trees, creeks, and rocky outcrops, I can’t help it; I’m addicted. Here is pic of what I’ve learned (from visiting Bull Shoals-White River State Park recently) is called a “den tree.” These secret spaces have always fascinated me, but I love them even more now that I know their name. And this is where I return in every park visit, to the idea of being able to name the world around me and in that way, somehow establish this as my home.

At this point, I’ve visited 12 parks, blogged about 7 (counting Hobbs), and have drafts for 8, all but my latest 3 just visited and Hobbs. This poem is being shy. Perhaps the blogging will help the core of the poem surface.

Up next: Withrow Springs

Posted by Sandy Longhorn
31
Jul
2017

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
22
Jul
2017

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
08
Jul
2017

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
02
Jul
2017

Process Notes: Little of What We have Believed has been True

85º feels like 94º ~ dew point 75º (in other words, unless you’ve lived in the mid to deep south, you’ve never really felt humidity) ~ sunny but the trees are so fully leafed and green that I write in shade, the birds call out all day, the cat begs attention

∞

This morning when I sat down to write, I was thinking about writing from headlines, as I did yesterday. Again, I’d checked into the world via my phone before even getting out of bed (I know, I know, this is not necessarily a good habit!). Sure enough, a friend had posted about an event at the White House yesterday, where four astronauts were present, but only the three men were thanked. Sounded like a good lead, so I went in search of information. Turns out the bigger news was what a weird press conference it was, and the woman astronaut, Sandy Magnus, presented a reasonable explanation of why she was not thanked (not there as an astronaut but as an executive director for another organization). So, that fizzled.

I turned then to my email inbox and read the poems there for the day (Poem-a-Day, Poetry Foundation, Writer’s Almanac), which then led me to reading my weekly dose of Brain Pickings, which featured a refresher on Wallace Stevens’ The Necessary Angel, and seemed a moment of synchronicity as Stevens wrote about the role of the poet (his word for all artists) in troubled times. I fell headlong into the excerpts provided by Brain Pickings, having read Necessary Angel 15 years ago and having been stumped by much of it (I have trouble absorbing philosophy & theory). In any case, this time, I couldn’t stop taking notes and making connections. Two of the biggest lines for me were “events…have made the ordinary movement of life seem to be the movement of people in the intervals of a storm” (ellipses mine) and “Little of what we have believed has been true…” (ellipses Stevens).

With five pages of notes, I thought, yes! This is it for today’s draft. Come on: intervals of a storm? Yes! I even thought that I had so much energy for the draft that I didn’t need to start in longhand, so I turned directly to Word and started typing. Big mistake. I typed several really terrible lines and deleted them. Tried another tack and deleted those, too. It all sounded like propaganda, and none of it was based in my reality. So, I took a deep breath and went back to my handwritten lines in the journal, and I asked myself to “tell the truth.”

Stevens sees the artist as the “necessary angel” who can meld imagination and reality, that the artist should not turn away from reality, not escape it by going fully into the imagination. On the other hand, Stevens also notes that the imagination is necessary to the artist, and they can’t turn completely to reality either. In thinking about all of this and asking what my truth is, I discovered, again, my white, upper-middle class guilt about my ability to turn off the news, to move through the storm unafraid for my own life, afraid for the lives of many of my friends for sure, but not for my own. I started thinking about what causes me to avoid the truth, and I struck on this.

Body & brain are wired to walk away
from pain. Sharp & Hot among the first
lessons.

The poem goes on, in lines about this same length, to admit that I “evade the daily news,” but that I can’t completely escape the horrors going on all around me (in which I also include climate change). Obviously, Stevens is in the title, and I bring him back in the last third of the poem when I claim, “I never asked / to wear the wings of a necessary angel.” I confess that I’m exhausted and that I don’t know where to find the energy to resist. I think the ending needs work, but I’m happy with the draft, both content and form. In this case, I have another single-stanza poem (so unusual for me!) because the poem, while still lyric rather than narrative (as is my norm), works on a much more logic-based level than I have in the past. The syntax is normal, and the sentences all directly relate to the previous and the next. Who am I? Sonnets and villanelles in May/June, now column-like, single-stanza work? Through it all, the elements of sound and imagery hold me together and channel my voice.

Posted by Sandy Longhorn
15
Jun
2017

Process Notes: A Being Admitted as Heir

74º ~a line of pop-up storms moving north to south, an oddity, radar-indicated rain non-existent on the ground, our days are reaching the 90s now

∞

Yesterday, I started reading Safiya Sinclair’s amazing book, Cannibal, and I hope to post reading notes about it in the next few days. (I’m only halfway through.) Born in Jamaica, Sinclair looks closely at postcolonial identity and focuses both on the personal and the historical. As I was reading, I was struck by an early poem, “Pocomania,” in which the speaker addresses her father, using “father” as anaphora. It opens:

Father unbending father unbroken father
with the low-hanging belly, father I was cleaved from

In Sinclair’s poem, the speaker deals with a tense, difficult relationship, just as I have been doing. In fact, at one point in the poem she writes, “Father / and his nest of acolyte women” … “Mother and I were none of them.” I had to stop reading for a minute to catch my breath.

Even as I read the poem, I knew I wanted to write one using the same repetition, but this morning, approaching my desk, it struck me, again, that I’ve written little of my mother. So, I sat down to write a mother poem, using the structure Sinclair presents. Sinclair’s poem is one long stanza filled with long lines, and jam-packed with electric images that expose a flawed man who caused his own child to hurt. I tried for the same long lines, the same electric images, but I was working with a healthy relationship, and that changed a few things.

There is a place in Sinclair’s poem where the speaker implores, “Father forgive my impossible demands.” I didn’t draft my poem line by line to imitate Sinclair’s, but I knew I wanted to include such an asking for forgiveness. In my draft, this occurred in line 7, and I wrote “Mother forgive my silences.” Because of the content of that line, it begged to be set off by itself, so I ended up with a 6-line stanza, followed by a single line, then another 6-line stanza and another single line of asking for forgiveness. Then, I started in on another 6 lines and I came up short. I have no idea where this poem wants to go or how it wants to end.

Here’s the issue: poems about difficult things have built-in conflict, which means they have a built-in need to end, to resolve, even if they are largely lyric (image based) rather than narrative. This poem about my mom is a poem of praise, an ode (although not in the formal sense), and I’m struggling with how to resolve it. It is pure lyric, so there is no narrative to wind to a close. I confess that I hit the wall with this draft, and today, the wall won. I had to save & print the draft unfinished, which takes a bit of the shine off the moment.

I’m going to seek out some poems of praise and check out how they end. I’ve always known that “happy” poems were harder to write than difficult ones (for me at least), and here’s the proof, again.

Posted by Sandy Longhorn