Bringing what is behind the scenes into the scene of the poem
In late October of 2022, I attended the ALSCW Conference at Yale University to present, in the Resurrected Genres Seminar, a paper called “Crippled Poets Writing Crippled Sonnets.” During this conference, I attended numerous other seminars, including one on Proust—a writer I’ve not much read. At the seminar, I took a seat in the back of a classroom in the sort of tiny desk I had not sat in since middle school—right beside Rosanna Warren. As handouts were distributed by seminar speakers, copies kept running out when they got to Rosanna. So, as presentations got underway, Rosanna offered to share her handouts with me. I scooted my desk a bit closer and leaned over, politely pretending to read excerpts of French text.
Eventually, I took a break from pretending and began fidgeting with my phone. Contrary to what many may assume, this behavior is a way of stimming that usually helps me pay better attention. Soon, however, I was absorbed in writing in my Notes application. As usual, I wrote one phrase after another until I got to the end of the fourteenth line. Also, common to my poem-making, I wrote things happening in my immediate environment into the poem: beginning with writing in a whimsical and anthropomorphizing way about the room itself and imagining it in conversation with the poem’s narrator.
From there I wrote simple descriptions of two panelists into the poem. Then, around the end of the first stanza (and right after mentions of chin-stroking and mask-wearing), the poem takes a turn toward the ponderous and the evasive. At this point in the poem, the narration and scene-setting conclude, and things become more abstract as sentences begin jumbling onto each other. Probably this all can be taken as, to some extent, a satirizing of an automatic ponderousness that can be a part of academic writing. Yet, I also hoped—while stimming away by typing—to convey a sincere feeling that comes from my genuine appreciation of scholarly labor.
With its final sentence, I hoped for this poem to expand beyond the realm of the scholarly, outward in a serious way relating to societal circumstances we are in together at present—and by societal I mean the global society of human beings sharing a planet, one tragically in a vortex of cascading concerns including war, surging debt and inflation, climate crisis, resource depletion and the crossing of planetary boundaries, growing inequality, artificial intelligence and synthetic biology, and the backsliding of democracy. In this regard, use of the word ‘shit’ is both glib and, I’m afraid, accurate.
As with nearly all poems I write, this was completed in a single draft and essentially came out of a kind of stimming that involves fidgeting with my phone by writing down words and phrases that somehow regularly coalesce into flights of imagination—an imagination situated here and now (where else could it be?), as we humans strive in some ways to resist the large-scale and probably intractable disasters we are simultaneously in other ways making.
Lastly, this poem was typed out in just a few minutes as I listened with one ear to a paper summary on the three trees at Hudimesnil, featuring in Proust’s long novel, In Search of Lost Time—a novel delving, among much else, into involuntary memory. A connection between Proust’s mystifying image and the contents of my poem may be more difficult to suss out than anything in the poem itself. Hopefully, any connection is less something to think and more something to feel, as my wish was not simply to say, doomer-style, we are in dire trouble—and that is all. I wanted this poem to also evoke the feeling of wonder still beating at the heart of being alive now, the glimmers of hope still shining here.
