I wrote “Our Snail” on December 25, 2024, the day after Christmas is celebrated in Germany. We were in Dillweißenstein, a small village in the northern Black Forest where my partner grew up. Christmas dinner in the apartment upstairs—raclette, schnapps, glühwein—home to Oma Lola, then ninety-four years old. Oma Lola shared with me an anecdote from her childhood, how her father would invent stories about a snail to entertain her and her twin sister. In one story, a snail tries and fails to travel to the big book convention in Leipzig. Oma Lola, however, speaks in thick dialect, and with my rudimentary German, I understood about half the story. I wrote the poem the next day based on what I understood, participating in the father’s invention.
The poem was originally written in consistent blank verse, which was lost through revision and various drafts, a process during which I was thinking about the talk poems of Robert Frost. Sentence sounds. A nearly sinister ambivalence that begets clarity of another sort. I was reminded too, as I revised, about a conversation I had with poetry scholar Bonnie Costello about Wallace Stevens’s poem “Sailing After Lunch,” how the final line of that poem falls into an iambic pattern to enact an ultimate feeling of being launched, parsing the waves: “By light, the way one feels, sharp white, / And then rush brightly through the summer air.” If the ghost of a long-altered meter exists behind “Our Snail,” it too features a final launch:
Because we did not want to leave our bed,
my sister and I, we listened to our father
improvise. He sang in the church choir.
He never spoke about refining gold.
The poem ends by finally finding the pattern it seeks while prioritizing the obfuscated aspects of storytelling: an anti-war father who was briefly drafted into then released from Nazi military service because he was such a skilled goldsmith.
When talking about my own work, of course, I want to be useful in a practical sense—which perhaps means not merely articulating what is otherwise obvious. This poem has lines and sentences. The sentences are of varying length that, hopefully, lend a rhythmic pulse that inflects the emotional dimension of this speech. To my mind, all poems—from those that are metered and rhymed to avant-garde typographical experiments—prioritize their relationship to sound, just to varying degrees. This particular poem’s relationship to sound is one of talking-around: preserving and deepening the context for a particular story without articulating those measures. The ulterior aspects of speech are preserved in form. In the midst of inventing the story, the father realizes his children’s devastation at the snail’s failure, and he must improvise:
By that point in the story we felt a solemn
visceral empathy that only
children feel to that degree. We needed
our snail to make it to Leipzig; our father knew
this and began to revise in real time:
This was a poem about writing, I realized after the fact. Earlier in Who Follow the Gleam, in the collection’s opening poem, “Sympathetic Magic from the Black Forest,” I feature my own translation of a folk song written by this man who died over half a century ago, Tanja’s great-grandfather, Dillweiẞensteiner-Heimatlied.
This is a poem about, about, about. One useful thing I can say about my writing process is that a poem, for me, never begins in conceit, is never led by idea. Poetry, for me, begins in verbal play—and I don’t mean “play” with any amount of levity. This is an utterly serious thing, or can be: patterns of repetition and variation that allow a poem to dramatize parts of our lives that are otherwise inexpressible. Pleasure, sure, but also intuition. Our four-year-old daughter Lola, who is learning both German and English, will sometimes speak in gibberish when she’s asked to respond in a particular language but can’t find the words. This is also communication, just one that doesn’t make itself immediately legible, sometimes panicked, sometimes filled with pleasure, often both.
Which also means I do not write—did not write “Our Snail”, that is—to articulate a rhetorical vision:
Eventually
a crowd formed around the snail
at the bottom of the hill, each person
reciting a story. The snail never left
and neither did the people, that’s how
our town began, with that crowd . . .’
The father’s snail-story ends with a moment of community formation; perhaps here one is reminded of the title’s pronoun. But if the poem left its own narrative at that, its tone would seem grossly self-congratulatory or, in other words, untrue. I write in another poem from this book, “distrust is necessary for the story to work,” and “Our Snail” follows the same principle. The ulterior aspects of language and their associated complexities and silences need, ultimately, to feel animated by experience, not artifice:
By that
point in the story we knew he had lied,
or at least imagined that parts of our shared life
were not true.
If the father was not lying—and if I were not inventing based on what I half-understood and know for certain—an idea would be communicated. The poem would be saying: congratulations, reader, you’ve understood the point of poetry. That’s not why I read, and that’s not why I write.
The snail could not exist for Oma Lola and her twin because once the rules of form had been changed to accommodate their reaction, the story adopted a different motive, from entertainment to diversion. Who can blame their father for not wanting them to feel sadness? Was the goal to make a story animated with complexity, or was the story to comfort his daughters during a time of post-war reconstruction? Oma Lola gave me an answer, but I didn’t understand.
