Sketching a Poem

A poem about maintaining connections and some thoughts about the process

One of the first Substacks I started following was

Liza Donnelly

’s

Seeing Things

. She shares the most wonderful drawings, but even more generously, she lets us into her creative process, she talks with us about her work. It was her posts that helped me wrap my brain around creating my own space here. I’m inspired by her example of art speaking for itself, but also being spoken of, put into context, or elucidated in some way by the artist. That’s the basis, really, for what I’m trying to do here by sharing poems and offering up some explanation of how or why they came about.

I’m particularly enthralled by the videos Liza posts in which we get to see her create a drawing, either in her studio or out in the wilds of NYC. Like all really talented people, she makes it look so easy. She’s so quick about it, capturing the essence of a scene in just a few strokes, preserving a moment and her perception of it almost in an instant. Maybe it becomes something else eventually, with a meaning or a caption unforeseen at the start. Or maybe not. Maybe its just a sketch and nothing more.

I often start with a sketch of a poem. Not a drawing. I haven’t that gift. But rather a phrase, a few lines, a quick scribble about a moment. Sometimes it’s just that and nothing more. But often I’ll come back later and flesh it out, sometimes with a second notion that has attached it self, magnet-like, to the first. The following poem was like that. It began with the first few lines describing an event, a conversation and its impact on me. I left it for a couple of months and then returned to it this week, on my daughter’s first birthday away from home.

Mother-Daughter Radio

When you asked me how 
to request an absentee ballot 
my eyes prickled with happy tears
 
Away at college you remembered 
to vote and weren’t embarrassed 
to ask me how it’s done

And I thought then
we’re going to be okay, you and me, 
in this new world of ours

with all our shorthand, our subtext, 
that fierce love, and the distance that stretches 
the filament of care to the width of a wire, 

an unbreakable conveyance, that
fills the space that lies now between us 
with the words we’ve already spoken

where they vibrate together, repeating 
themselves, so it's as though we’ve always 
only just stopped speaking

What’s your process like? Do you start with disparate sketches that you weave together? Or are you more of a sculptor, whittling away at something larger until you find the essence?

What I’m Reading:

• I picked up The Maid by Nita Prose at the library because I am a sucker for a good mystery. Confession: sometimes I have to force myself to read fiction that’s not a mystery. It can be a problem.

  

• And I pulled The Tradition, by Jericho Brown off my shelf at home this week and have kept it next to my computer to dip into when the mood strikes, which is often. It’s so gorgeous. Something reminded me of his poem about grocery store workers during the pandemic so I looked that up, then went back to the article that first introduced me to his poetry to read it again. So I’ve been in a Jericho Brown rabbit hole this week, which is really an awfully nice place to spend some time.

Here on Substack:

• I was blown away by this gorgeous poem, “Heavy,” by

  LaVonna Wright
  . Go read it. Right now. You won’t be sorry.

And Elsewhere:

• I thought I’d share this information about The Poets Corner 2024 Chapbook Contest. They are a solid organization in my general neck of the woods who do a lot to foster community amongst poets and readers of poetry. Submissions open in January 2024.

Thanks for Reading!