A few days ago, at breakfast with friends, someone brought up the name of an Ypsilanti coffee shop I hadn’t thought about in a while. Oh, I thought, I wrote “Cradle Song” there—the poem that ended up being the opening poem in my new collection. So the coffee shop (Bombadill’s, now long closed) is a special place for me, a place where my mind worked, for a few minutes, anyway, a little bit faster than it usually does. But the poem has nothing to do with Bombadill’s itself; or with Michigan, where I had recently moved. It’s just a series of rhymes about an imagined child—a child who would become mind-blowingly real to me eight months later.
The night before this breakfast, I’d been telling my friend Keith Taylor about a class on Michigan poets I’m scheduled to teach this year. I offered my standard joke—“We’ll start with that great Michigan poet, Robert Frost”—and then mentioned some of the other poets (Auden, Hayden, Brodsky, Milosz, Fulton, Carson) who are likely to appear on the syllabus. (Those poets all taught at the University of Michigan at some point. The class will also consider poets who studied at the university: Roethke, O’Hara, Kennedy, Kenyon, Francis, harris.) Keith, who’s much better versed in this history than I am, asked if I’d tracked down the poems Frost wrote during his several years in Ann Arbor. I hadn’t; I hadn’t even thought to ask the question. But a bit of low-level research quickly revealed that he wrote a handful of poems, including “Acquainted with the Night,” while walking the city’s sad lanes and serving as Michigan’s first Fellow in Creative Arts.
In truth, the main thing I know about Frost’s Ann Arbor sojourn is that a local drugstore named one of its ice-cream treats, the Frost-Bite, after him. That’s the kind of detail that sticks in my head. I’m less likely to think about the ways that a certain environment might affect a poet’s work because (I think) my own environment exerts such little influence on my poetry. My writing obsessions—Republican skullduggery, rhyme, the certainty of death—are portable ones: I can explore them in Seattle, or Brooklyn, or Lenox, or Ann Arbor. (And now I’ve just listed the last four places I’ve lived.) My first book was written mostly in Seattle, but is there anything in the book that announces itself as particularly rooted in the Pacific Northwest? I don’t think so. I just flipped through the collection: there’s no Mount Rainier, no Puget Sound, no Mariners, no Seahawks. The word “Seattle” only appears in the acknowledgments section.
Similarly, the poems in my new book never mention Ann Arbor—though most of them were written here. “Michigan Radio” appears in one epigraph; the majority of the poems, seemingly, could’ve been written on the moon. (All of my recent poems have been written inside of Donald Trump’s skull. It’s a terrible place! TripAdvisor rating: zero stars.) More and more, I live online—and I write in generic coffee shops like Panera. Will I ever fill a poem with roaming Michigan frat kids, or with hikers exploring the banks of the Huron River? It feels unlikely. (Though if a pig roast presents itself, as it did to Donald Hall many decades ago, I’ll try to do it justice.)
Which is all to say that, as much as I urge my students to pay attention to their surroundings and to keep a journal for recording their observations, I’ve probably failed my own placement test. In Dora’s recent interview with fiction writer Justin Sanders, she asks about the importance of place in Sanders’s work. He answers: “All characters are influenced by the place they live, and in writing, that place has to be concrete and real. That extends out to me as well; I’m a Baltimore writer. Bmore made me who I am, shaped my perspectives, colored my language.” I grew up in Baltimore, as well—but I almost never write about it, just as I almost never write about Ann Arbor. The title of a Milan Kundera novel comes to mind: Life Is Elsewhere. Wherever I am—in a coffee shop; on a street corner; inside my house, after my kids have gone to sleep—life is elsewhere.