everyday I wake up waiting to get to where I write, which is
sometimes at the kitchen table and sometimes at a desk I keep in a backroom
where most of my books are, where all my poetry books are, where there’s
protection, where books surround me with their elegant patience
every day to write is what I live to do, though no days turn
out to be all that typical in particular if I write something that it seems to
me impossible to believe I could have written it
when I’m lost in what I’m writing, I’m lost in there,
everything becomes strange and wonderful
life has been understood by me—as little as I understand it—my
life has been understood by me as always on edge, an accident about to announce
itself, an incident getting going to be undergone, a disaster in waiting, waiting
to happen, as if always there is a trap set near by, in 3D dimensional space or
ordinary time—a trap waiting for me into which I am doomed to go, unbidden,
undone
to live in a life always dangerously close to being over
comes close to the way it can feel sometimes when one is ending a poem
this life on the edge may come from an early life living
with farm animals whose existence is precarious, whose well-being is always
endangered,
or tending to crops about to be spoiled by too little or too
much water, insects, consequential acts of humans or extra-terrestrial beings—
the river will flood, the sun will relentlessly absorb all
water and wilt everything with roots, a plague will descend, some one will catch
hoof and mouth disease, someone will step on a rusty nail, someone will put a
foot or fingers right where poisonous snakes take their stands, it’s always
been touch and go
there is a water moccasin waiting under that plank bridge,
there is a rooster who wants to take out your eyes, there are the meanest boy
cousins on the planet waiting to torture you, there are parasites and worms,
fleas, and ticks and mosquitos, wasps and more snakes, a mink can look as if it
wants to eat your face off, some cows want to kick you in the chest, some cats
scratch, there’s an uncle who can’t get through a day without tormenting you,
karen crows are always high up there taking their time cruising on thermals,
there is always a river both beautiful and dangerous barely out of reach of
your doorstep
that’s the ordinary background before which I write
whenever writing begins to happen—it’s changed over the
years—where and when, what’s typical shifts, transforms, meta-morphs, takes
dead ends, takes round-about routes, goes off-road, and usually prefers to be
near some kind of water—in one way living by the river taught me everything I
needed to know—
over the years I’ve written on paper scraps, on brown paper
bags, in pencil, on schoolroom lined pages, with fountain pens, in blank page
notebooks, only on the right hand page, keeping the left hand page free for
later additions, on a 1940s Royal table model my father rescued for me from a
school depository, on a black & blue IBM Selectric my husband gave me, and
now on this laptop
I wake up every day waiting to get to writing, my way is to always,
which is never always—it can’t be—always to be if not writing, thinking about
writing, or just about to write, keeping those magnets and channels and
receivers in working condition, practicing
paying attention to how thoughts come into being, how
thoughts beget more thinking, how words love to be used, how words love how
they sound as much as how they seem or what they mean, how words love the
nervous systems of syntax, and the long history of rhetoric, and how strings of
words are weaving for us so many things we didn’t know to know before
before I had kids I wrote whenever I wanted to, except when
I was doing whatever it was I needed to be doing to make a living, to buy
myself time and circumstances so writing could keep on happening
once my daughter and my son came into this world, I wrote
whenever I could, except when I was doing whatever it was I needed to be doing
to take good care of my children
shirts with pockets in them were necessary, to be a place
for whatever folded up page I’d started, whatever it was I wanted to think
about writing that day
whether I took it out of my pocket to look at it or not, it
was there, where else, right nearby, close by my heart
they grew up, I went back to being able to write whenever I
wanted to write, for over twenty years I wrote in my study at my husband’s
house; we wrote in adjacent rooms from around 2pm until we’d finish for the
day, this could have been at 5 at 6 at 7 at 8, depending; we could always hear
one another’s loud bass-toned Selectrics humming along
he didn’t like it when I switched to a laptop, too quiet, he
couldn’t tell what I was doing, I might
be doing nothing
he missed the bursts of
Selectric jack-hammering
but I could take a little laptop with me anywhere I went, so
I had to make that switch
he and I agreed it’s best not to face a window when one is writing,
too many distractions
he and I agreed the best thing that happens is you begin and
end a poem on the same day
we shared a habit of reading something, just about anything, typically something
nonfiction and rarely poetry, as a bridge between not writing and writing,
keeping something going nearby
I keep a dictionary, unabridged Merriam Webster, nearby open
on a stand, but not so near I don’t have to get up to go looking around in it
I may aim for one word in particular though my real mission
is to run into words along the way
I think my all time favorite pre-writing zone up to now was reading
all of Van Gogh’s letters to his brother Theodor over a period of maybe 7
months—that’s when I wrote the book I guess I confess has to be my favorite
one, Reverse Rapture
Dara Wier was
born in New Orleans, Louisiana. Her 13 books include in the still of the night (2017), YOU GOOD THING
(2014), REMNANTS OF HANNAH (2006), REVERSE RAPTURE (2005), HAT ON A POND (2002) and VOYAGES IN ENGLISH (2001). Awards include the American Poetry Review’s
Jerome Shestack Prize, The Poetry Center Book Award, a Guggenheim Foundation
Fellowship, a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship and a Massachusetts
Cultural Council Artists Award. Her
poems are included the Pushcart Prize and Best Americann Poetry
anthologies. A limited edition, (X IN FIX) (2003) is #10 in RainTaxi’s brainstorm series. With James
Tate, she rescued THE LOST EPIC OF ARTHUR
DAVIDSON FICKE, THE AUTHOR’S ANNOTATIONS, COMMENTARY, AND NOTES OF REFERENCE
FOR A MILLENNIUM’S TEARDROP (1999). Poems can be found in Granta, BigBig Wednesday, The Nation,
American Poetry Review, Conduit, Volt, Denver Quarterly, Octopus, Gulf Coast and so on. She's been poet-in-residence at the
University of Montana, University of Texas Austin, Emory University and the
University of Utah; she was the 2005 Louis Rubin chair at Hollins University in
Roanoke, Virginia. She is a member of
the poetry faculty of the mfa program for poets and writers at the University
of Massachusetts Amherst. She co-founded
the Juniper Initiative for literary arts and action at the University of
Massachusetts, the Juniper Summer Writing Institute and Workshops, and is
currently serving as publisher and editor of the poetry and found prose and
images journal jubilat.
♥️
ReplyDelete