This week I went clamming. As verbs go, that one’s under a lot of pressure to produce a poem (much more so than mussel harvesting, which I was also doing but takes up too many drab syllables), and so as I searched for signs of clam life I tried to prepare the scene for my clamming poem. Will it start here, I thought, as I crossed a tiny shrinking mud-creek (and if so I’ll need to look up the word for mud-creek), or will it start with my baby in his carrier (for the poem it would need to be a sling, or my arms) peering over my shoulder into the mud, or will it start with the unidentified shorebirds staring at us? I kept sinking into the mud. The actual clamming took a back burner. I was so excited to be doing a poetic thing.
In grad school I kept a list of words I would not allow myself to use in a poem: oranges, sardines, socket, dawn, forsythia, cicada, whiskey, flotilla, small, ochre, oyster, onion skin. These were words I kept coming across in poems and that I thought needed a rest. They felt like clubhouse words and I didn’t want in the club. For a couple years my snide little list grew and I wrote surreal, unspecific narrative poems.
But then, ten months ago, I had a baby and suddenly my days rarely supply the poetic fodder to which I had grown accustomed. No more late night walks, hardly any whiskey, no movies, hardly any reading, few conversations beyond the baby. I caught myself thinking I should eat some sardines for lunch because that would be nice in a poem. This was after I had tried unsuccessfully to write from my new days–tried to write a poem about medical reimbursement, tried one about baby monitors and how you can hear next door’s baby on our monitor sometimes, tried one about dinner, one about the darn cat. For the first time my life felt like it wasn’t good enough for poems, which wasn’t what I expected from something as big and wonderful as having a baby. But especially in those early months, and still some now, I felt my conversations falter and my mind retreat to the napkins, the insurance claims, the trajectory of my nursing schedule. Where before I had used my days to get fodder for poems, now my days were so apart (and not in an Emily Dickinson way, unfortunately) they offered me nothing that felt right to write about. The cocktail party test (is there at least something in this poem interesting enough that I’d want to tell it to a stranger at a cocktail party?) which I’d used before to help me focus revisions wasn’t working.
Are some periods in life more poetic than others? Do I have to keep reminiscing about my grad school days, or worse, my childhood, to get something going on the page? Can there be a poetry of reimbursement? Of teething? Why are some things more prone to poetry than others? What is it about the moon?
Tony Hoagland’s poetry includes some of the minutia I’m talking about, and Dean Young. Frank O’Hara. C.K. Williams’ lines have the space for it. Their kind of miscellany, though, is decidedly masculine, junk drawers full of remembered cars and odd keys and phone numbers. I’m really looking for the effluvium of motherhood, and for that I’m having a hard time finding good models outside of Erma Bombeck.
So back to clamming: I was grateful to see the poem in what I was doing after all these foggy months. Not that I wrote it. Before I do, I want to see if I can find a way into the poetry of reimbursement.