On Poetry and Letting It All In
San Francisco’s Sutro Tower is a radio and TV antenna. At first San Francisco residents thought it was an eyesore, but now it’s a landmark of the city, the gangly cousin of the Golden Gate. Photo by William Bout.
In the fifth grade, I didn’t get a perfect score on a writing assignment about a memorable experience. The conventions of my essay, the grammar and spelling and sentence structure were great, but my teacher felt I veered too off-topic. I wrote about getting four stitches in my left knee after I slipped and cut it open. I wrote about how later that day, my cat had a small litter of kittens. To me those things were related. I was trying to say that even though my knee was sore and stitched up and I couldn’t play or swim, it didn’t matter. I had these new kittens. I must not have been able to convey that. I don’t think the kitten-birth is off topic when the topic is a memorable experience, a day in my life. Maybe one could argue the birth of the kittens would be an experience in addition to my injury. Two memorable experiences. I suppose I see the whole day as the memorable experience.
the experience of getting four stitches was more than one experience.
it was the slip, white socks on hardwood, not sure what i cut my knee on. it was the scream i didn’t even hear that brought my brother inside from out in the backyard and brought the neighbor over from next door to see if i was okay; it was the bathwater cleaning my leg, the red blood streaming down, the trip to the emergency room, the faces of the people in the waiting room. experience of expectation: the pain of the needle, lined with thread. i am so small and so scared laying on a table, the brown iodine being wiped on my skin, then the experience of not wanting to watch. the needle for numbing. wondering if the doctor already started. i must have said that out loud cuz the doctor says “guess what, i’m already done.” the color of the bright blue thread, shiny, almost pretty. and then we get videos from blockbuster after and have pizza and that night my cat gave birth to four small kittens.
How could that be off topic when it all happened to me and it was all memorable?
Eleven years after writing that essay, in my last year of college, in a poetry workshop taught by Barbara Tomash, I ask about what belongs in a poem, what is relevant. And Barbara says, “It all belongs in the poem, let it all in.” She says, of course, you can edit later.
A few years after that, when I was in a period of un-inspiration and talking with my friend and poet Simon Crafts about how I forgot to write poetry, Simon says, “Think of yourself as an antenna, you’re not writing poetry, but receiving and transmitting waves.”
Sometimes I think about my fifth grade teacher, Mrs. Fish, who said I strayed from the prompt, who announced, at the end of the school year, that she was pregnant with her first baby. She died six years after I was in her class. She was only thirty years old and left behind two daughters and a son and a husband, all so young. I think about my writing, how I like to let everything in.
All that’s happening should come into the poem, should exist in the poem. Just as in life everything exists all at once.
