I’ve just spent a full week riding the rails, crossing the United States from east to west and back again on Amtrak because my husband was going to the big American geography conference in Seattle and we thought this would be the best way to travel. (I am so off airport security, I can’t even write a poem about it.)

We took the northern route there, which proved to be a soggy choice, one that delayed us for a full day on an embankment above the brown flooded fields of North Dakota. Then we came home down the west coast to orange blossom-scented Sacramento and across through the Sierra Nevada to Salt Lake City (at 3 am), the Rocky Mountains, and down into the golden plains to Denver and finally, Chicago, where we abandoned the train to fly home as the times didn’t work from there on.

All this is to explain why I won’t be showing you much more than a minimal edit of a poem today. To my surprise, since this was supposed to be a holiday, I have written non-stop since leaving home on April 7th. I had, of course, planned on writing a poem a day while away. A good musician always keeps their chops in shape. But I have written more than eight hours a day, including during the conference, since I sat in on a few geography of poetry sessions which I found inspirational too.

I also took pictures during the trip and, on the way home, video since I realized, partway through, that I was clearly working on a second book of poems, currently called The Four Seasons, as I plan on taking this same train trip another three times. Okay, I know it’s not an original title, but it too will probably be edited when I have time to breathe again.

Because I need to start editing what I’ve written. By the time you read this post, written on the train, I will have only just arrived home. My inbox will be full of files sent from my phone with the most recent work in them. Some poems exist as fragments, some as longer chunks, and some as major sections of text as I finally stopped trying to format them as poems on my phone’s small screen and decided to just write and leave the formatting to later. I’d like to see this book published as an e-book so it can incorporate the video with the poetry.

Today, I’m going to share just a first thought on this amazing country, this astonishing landscape. I had not expected to fall in love with the States, but that’s my usual mistake of thinking politics are the sum total of a place, which is, of course, nonsense.

It remains a sadness, however. The poverty is visible in the rural States, with many communities at least half made up of trailer homes, some parked so close together, they breathe each others’ air. And too many houses are peeled paint, shingles thinned and patchy. There is a lot of money here, in the monster homes. But there is a lot of hunger too.

The poem below doesn’t look in that direction. It started as a fragment before we left but was written and edited on our first Amtrak ride from Montreal to Schenectady, as we passed a long frozen lake full of birds.

Today you see the black birds from the fields
and white birds flying from the sea and hear
the chittering of sparrows in bushes under
the blue sky, nesting cries, the wild voices free
on the still cold wind, the red buds forming,
like the flames in a fire just catching and you
with your hands held out rejoicing in
the new warmth each new red-gold flicker
brings, the wild shoots, the fresh greens,
the tight unfurlings

This poem shows once again why poetry is not filed under either non-fiction or fiction, why it simply is. I may have been writing about the birds I saw in a lake, but at no point did I want to write that word into the poem. In the first draft, I used sea, but that was because the first two lines are the original fragment of the poem, pre-train. When I revised it, I didn’t want the harsh sound of the ‘k’ in lake. ‘Pond’ lingers much better in that line. Yes, the ‘k’ could have found its echo in the ‘c’ of conversations but by using ‘pond’, that ‘c’ is softened too, all the consonants become rounder.

I chose ‘conversation’ for two reasons: ‘chittering’ is a somewhat overdone verb in relation to sparrows (I’d hate to do a count on it in my own poems) and ‘conversation’ is more intimate and of course was what I was overhearing as I typed, since I couldn’t actually hear the birds we were passing.

After that, I rearranged what was in the original, slipping in what I was seeing before me in the landscape, maintaining the perspective of my new title, but also remembering that brightness is always brighter if there is some darkness. You’ll know this if you edit your photographs. Just adding fill light or highlights whitens out a picture. You always need a bit of contrast to make it work. That’s why I added what I could hear, the train’s cry, ‘the voice of lonely’ and the ‘faint glisten of hoarfrost’ our late spring has left over the land.

So this is the current version of the poem. I’ve read a lot of wonderful poetry on this trip, thanks to the excellent Poetry Foundation iPhone app, and have learned how far I still have to go.

Moving Towards Rejoicing

Today you see the black birds from the fields
and white birds filling a blue pond and overhear
the conversations of sparrows in the bushes by
the red buds forming, flames in a fire catching and you,
hands held out, singing with the red-gold
flickers, the wild shoots, the tight unfurlings,
fresh greens upthrust in leaf-scent, earth running
in brown-streamed gurgling. The sun
blinds you, slipped-disc following you around
the sky, but you refuse to let it go without
the warmth spring beds deserve even though
you hear a train’s cry, the voice
of lonely in the dimming sky. You’re moving
towards rejoicing, only a faint glisten
of hoarfrost holding you down.

I’ve been fortunate to have a lot of writing inspiration lately, though I have to say, hearing Barry Dempster read at Ottawa’s first ever VERSeFest was the highlight. I first encountered Barry’s poetry in an online magazine called Paperplates, where I read his poem ‘The Conversation’ about a man contemplating suicide. Here’s the opening:

Some days are sneakers, tramping through
the leaves, slowly getting soaked. Others
are buses, lumbering from pole to pole,
joining dreams with destinations
like a giant Lego set. Today was smaller, …

It’s a breathtaking poem and I wrote my first ever fan mail. I couldn’t help it. I’ve been learning from his poetry ever since, studying the way he uses metaphor to utterly transform the ordinary.

I’ve needed the lessons, since my writing started out as a lot of ‘he said’ and ‘she did’. Poetry’s power lies in its ability to lift the reader above the short story narrative, to take them deeper into an experience.

First drafts of my poems playing with metaphor, however, are likely to be pretty ugly. Take a look at this one:

Hunger goes with every word, is a drawer
where emptiness sits, the plate is a letter
containing no words. You rearrange alphabet soup
in your mind at lunch time, smelling
the peels of oranges in
the garbage. Each rind is a desert
without the sun. You remember the agony of a school
trip where a two dollar bill would buy
a stuffed animal for the loved, two buns and a patty
for the not, you counting the coins left in your hand.

It clearly needed a lot of work. ‘Hunger … is a drawer where emptiness sits’ is redundant and ‘You rearrange alphabet soup in your mind’ is not very subtle. I found by taking out the word alphabet, I could leave the image hanging in the reader’s mind, especially given the previous phrase. I liked the image of the orange rind but simply cut the rest of the poem.

By the second draft, I had a clearer sense of where the poem was going:

“You don’t miss your water till your well runs dry.” William Bell

Some look at the moon, see only a corpse
in the night sky. Hunger goes in cupboards where
dishes sit, bowls holding letters containing no
words. You rearrange soup in your mind
at lunch time, smelling the peels of oranges in
the garbage. Each rind is a desert
without the sun. The smell is strong
in the cafeteria, rising above the wax sandwiches
came in and the chalk bullies draw pictures in the dust
with. Your hair lies like grief
on your skull, limp as the dress your sister wore
before you. It doesn’t matter. No one notices
the new girl sitting with her back
to the wall watching the principal make
his rounds. If you could have, you would have chosen
a mug to hide in, one of the scarred plastic
ones they served cabbage soup in once, you can tell
each time you pick it up. Hopscotch is too
many squares into a future you can’t
believe. If you could, your well would not
run dry.

It’s getting tighter. But there’s a new problem of smell in this version. I’ve got the orange rind smelling stronger than the wax the sandwiches come in. Hmm. Fortunately, I still remember my school cafeterias. It wasn’t hard to fix.

Next: do bullies really draw pictures with chalk? No. So even though fear is an abstract term I wouldn’t normally use in a poem, by changing the chalk to fear, I leave the reader with a more complex image.

I also changed the description of the girl’s hair. I may as well have put up a neon sign at that point. So instead I went for the more subtle ‘mat’. The whole cabbage soup episode just got cut. It didn’t work. In it’s place, I extended the hopscotch metaphor.

Here’s the current version. I don’t think this is one of my best poems. We’ll see what further edits it undergoes.

Looking Ahead

“You don’t miss your water till your well runs dry.” William Bell

Some look at the moon, see only a corpse
in the night sky. Hunger goes in cupboards where
dishes sit, bowls holding letters containing no
words. You rearrange soup in your mind
at lunch time, smelling the peels of oranges in
the garbage. Each rind is a desert
without the sun. The smell is strong
in the cafeteria, rising above the bologna
and the fear bullies draw pictures
in the dust with. Your hair lies like a mat
on your skull, limp as the dress your sister wore
before you. It doesn’t matter. No one notices
the new girl sitting with her back
to the wall watching the principal make
his rounds. If you could, you’d choose
a square to hide in, one of the blank ones not
yet drawn. But hopscotch is too many squares
into a future you can’t believe. If you could,
your well would not run dry.

I was a bit late noticing this as it was posted while we were in Ghana, but poet Pearl Pirie pulled a Gillian and did a ‘watch me edit’ post on her website. Check out her Editing Rounds.