I recently accompanied my husband to the American Association of Geographers’ Annual Meeting and snuck into a few fascinating sessions on, of all things, the geography of poetry. I wrote non-stop during those sessions as the geographers’ words sparked lines in my head.

It’s appropriate that I have sat down to edit some of them while attending the Canadian Association of Geographer’s Annual Meeting, which is being held in conjunction with the Canadian Cartographic Association. Inspiration is all around me at every table.

Today’s poem owes particular gratitude to Adele J. Haft, Professor of Classics at Hunter College of The City University of New York. The paper she presented at the AAG was called ‘”Like Maps Laid Face to Face”: Bodies as Maps from Aristophanes to Louise Bogan and Sharon Olds’. She introduced ‘fifteen twentieth-century poems and touche[d] upon their map-related themes and debts to cartographic literature, maps, and the history of exploration’ (from her abstract). It isn’t published yet but meanwhile, you can read her other articles on maps and poetry by checking out her CV.

Having talked about the inspiration for this poem, I have to confess that its first few lines didn’t come from the conference. They were scribbled late at night by flashlight:

Staying Up Late

postponing the wrapping of sleep’s caul, the rolling
of sleep’s tight rug, holding your eyes open against
the words your brain whispers in the night, the words you wake
to turn against, a shovel
digging, boot firm against the sharp lip while stars
take their light years to remember

To continue this poem, I turned to my files from Adele’s presentation. I immediately discarded the poem fragments I’d written then because they were irredeemably bad. But individual lines could be worked with. I chose the ones below:

having to walk the map as your body, the one you redrew over & over as a child

your body a map you can’t follow, stretching your legs like roads into a new city, one you can’t explore
your face a map showing the way things were, a topography that holds you back as you age,

mirror world you could enjoy, green tunnels leading you to a cool world

all our histories a stutter in time, a leaf’s shake

You have no myths

Having put the lines together, the poem first came out like this:

Studying Cartography

You stay up late
postponing the wrapping of sleep’s caul, the rolling
of sleep’s rug tight
around you, holding your eyes open against
the words your brain whispers in the night, the words you wake
to turn against, waking to turn and turn, a shovel
in the earth digging, boot firm against
the sharp edges while stars open
their blind eyes, taking light years to remember
your name. The hum
of the air conditioner perfumes the air, the green
curtain descending, your body falling, falling, as you walk
the map of your body, the one you redrew
as a child, your face showing the way things were, your legs
stretched, roads into a new city, one tourists knew
well. You remember the mirrors, green
tunnels leading you to a cool world, the glaciers
at opposing poles they once believed
would never melt, history a stutter, a leaf’s
shake, a foreign country that was always
on your to do list. But Icarus’ wings never
appealed. You were too smart
for melting wax. You knew the sun’s
raging heat from textbooks and so you sit,
the woman who threw her coat
on the floor and left.

This was scary. The poem had flowed so well under my hands, I was convinced I had a winner. But rereading it, it didn’t work. It’s too obvious, for starters, which is a standard weakness of mine. I think there probably is a rule against using the word ‘whispers’ in a poem. If there isn’t, there should be. It’s trite. Grossly overdone. (I convict myself here.) So I replaced it with ‘repeats’. After all, we’re all kept awake at night by lists of things undone, by worries and regrets we rehearse.

The poem has a lot of images in it, so I seriously considered removing the shovel image (and may still). Again, I run the risk of cliché here. The only reason I’m still allowing it at this stage is because I think the setting is surprising. It’s a bit of a jolt every time I read it and I like that. Instead, I changed the mirrors further down to lakes, allowing the lakes to become mirrors so that the image remains consistent with the topography at that point.

The next stage of editing was about taking out anything that telegraphed what I wanted to say. So the word ‘stretched’ went, as did the whole section on glaciers. For the latter, the word ‘cool’ will suffice. So then you might ask why I allowed ‘waking to turn and turn’ to remain in, since the previous phrase says the same thing. As I’m learning from reading others, repetition can be good if it’s used in the right place. I deliberately repeat the ‘wrapping of sleep’ the ‘rolling of sleep’ and contrast it with ‘waking to turn’ and its repeat. This is the point where I’m setting up the poem and my narrator’s restlessness. I do not want to say the word ‘fear’. I simply want to set a picture of it in place. So I aim to make sleep sound like a nervous respite (‘caul’ ‘tight’) and waking worse (‘shovel’ ‘sharp edges’ ‘blind’, etc.).

Using cartographic images, the mapping of the body, gives me the freshness this poem needs, particularly in the context of my writing as I seem to be a little obsessed with night/sleep/stars. Insomnia will do that to you. So turning my eyes in a new direction, constantly turning my mind in new directions, is good. I thank geographers, and especially Adele today, for what they teach me.

Here’s the current version of today’s poem:

Studying Cartography

You stay up late
postponing the wrapping of sleep’s caul, the rolling
of sleep’s rug tight
around you, holding your eyes open against
the words your brain repeats in the night, the words you wake
to turn against, waking to turn and turn, a shovel
in the earth digging, boot firm against
the sharp edges while stars open
their blind eyes taking light years to remember
your name. The hum
of the air conditioner perfumes the air, the green
curtain descending, your body falling, falling as you walk
the map of your body, your face showing the way
things were, your legs roads into
the old city, ones tourists travelled
often. You remember the lakes, green
mirrors leading to a cool place, history
a stutter, a leaf’s shake, a foreign country always
on your to do list. But Icarus’ wings never
appealed. You were too smart
for melting wax, having studied the sun’s
raging heat in textbooks. Yet how boring
dusk becomes, smoothing the land’s contours until
the sky is tranquil. You can’t help yourself. Your head becomes
a soft pillow
on the sofa.