I spent a lovely day this week reading three books of poems I’ve wanted to sit down with for some time: The Love Hunter and Other Poems by Meg Files, Boxing the Compass by Holly J. Hughes, and Small Knots, poems by Kelli Russell Agodon. Reading these three collections, one after the other, I understood again that no matter how trampled or walled off one’s heart may seem, reading and writing poetry provides the chance to reignite life by not looking away.

After I share my experience reading the three collections, I’ll show you how a short meditation on lines from these poems helped me locate an occasion for a poem from my recent experience and write it.

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The Love Hunter

Meg Files’ poetry awakens me: In “Play,” she writes that “gubbity gubbity” was the language of her baby dolls and she played “pick from catalogs/one choice each per page,” and board games in her friend’s father’s bomb shelter and crack the whip on the ice rink her father made, and she planted mysteries to figure out and impress the others “baffled/in the dark and the danger.” Writing poems is a solving of mysteries we ourselves have set up. To do it we must want to examine the dark, not be afraid of emotional danger and pain. In “Cause or Source of Pain,” Meg Files writes:

In my Roget’s are listings for pain,
for capability of giving pain, cause
or source of pain–but Plath wrote
her pain when she gave up
her thesaurus, and who among poets
can sever the pains–the thorn
from the air, the wood from
the flesh, the water from the bone?

Pain allows us, Meg Files tell us, to “feel the love as it passes.” Because she reminds me of this, I am willing to go with her into any landscape and any idea she writes about.

I imagine her father’s Arizona retirement community (in “Retirement Community Arts & Crafts Fair) where while buying a raffle for “gilded earrings, turquoise stones / glued on, switchable for pierced or clip-on,” she feels, “At the end we give up on art. / Here we cover ourselves with nervous craft.”

 I take on the outlook (in “California Bay Laurel”) of someone who has left the desert for the green brush of a coastal state and muses amidst the green, “We live, greened in the space / between heaven and grave, the only space that is.”

I mourn a murdered student as if I were one who knows the desert (“The Love Hunter”) and take him, “down a sandy/windrowed wash, laying him out / among the weeds, and I will speak / a flash of words to flood him, / to sweep him to love’s country.”

I call to the one whose love I want to revive (“The Dolphin as Lover”) when I read that a dolphin was “once terrestrial,” that its skin has “free nerve endings densely packed,” and its leg bones “evolved to fins.” With Meg Files, I breech above the surf of inertia with these words, “You were man once, / walking, counting bones trussed by hide. / Now before we are fish / food, in this suffused blue, be skin only; for we will go to sand.”

Reading Meg Files’ poetry — including “Diane’s New Apartment,” for a friend recently separated, “Plucking Nancy’s Petunias” inspired by helping a friend and colleague garden soon after visiting a very elderly aunt, “White,” dedicated to me when she heard of my son’s death, and “Aspen Fire,” written for her new granddaughter, who arrived the same summer that the Aspen Fire burned nearly 85,000 acres outside of Tucson–I am awed by how completing poems allows a poet to preserve moments and relive insight, to defeat life in its trick of gobbling up moments. I am renewed in my belief that writing what we feel and what we think is valuable and brings great gifts to others.

Awakened to my sense of how what is painful must be absorbed, documented, and made to be a part of the whole of my life, I went on to read Holly J. Hugh’s Boxing the Compass. Her poems acknowledge difficult experience by attempting to put them in context. In a short prose poem, “What the World Takes,” the poet works with images from her life as a fisherwoman. A day’s catch is recorded in a log and a receipt book is as thick as an accordion. Things are kept and things are tossed: a plastic Joy bottle, a tennis shoe, a memory of another dropping a fish pick overboard and watching it sink out of sight, storm petrel “skittered down on deck” and riding across the Gulf. As the poet acknowledges that the world takes and gives back, she lets the memory of a fisherman gone overboard float up, the way he was found the next morning tangled in his net, his boat drifting. The poet must document what she has seen, document how it fits in the life she has lived, the dangers she has faced.

In “Jetsam: What is Jettisoned,” another of the six short prose poems sprinkled throughout her collection, the poet places us in the moment of a relationship’s ending by using the language of someone who must lighten cargo. The poet narrates the event with lists that follow an inner dialog: “First to go,” “Easy to throw,” “Let them go,” and “Stow the ring, sign the papers.” We move from leaky hip boots and Helly Hansen bibs streaked with salmon blood to a deer the ex-lover carved as a gift and then to words the poet wished he’d said and words he did. The pleasure of this poem is in the way it starts with the jettisoning of real objects and moves to the intangibles, the words and expectations that the speaker must also let go. I read the poem and I think, what love has not felt as if it is adrift on a vast ocean? What ending of love has not brought moments that must be stowed and brought forward into the rest of one’s life?

And after the end of love, there is the opening to a new love, but an opening that is somehow wiser, tentative perhaps but yielding. In “The Coriolis Effect,” the poet uses images from the oceans’ currents to evoke the way we re-enter the world of love after a great love is over: “Everything swings back sooner or later…/ …Take my / right arm. Who knows why left shoes land on one beach, right shoes/ another? /… How we always fetch up somewhere other than we plan.”

The last poem in the collection, “All the Unseen Forces,” is also a prose poem. It evokes truth using the images of a seafarer. In nine lines, margin to margin, the poet comes to grips with the fact that life is made up of unseen forces, forces that make terns “fly pole to pole,” “monarchs drift down a continent,” and a “horizon folded under every wave.” When Holly Hughes offers, “Knots that won’t hold,” “a magnetic pole that shifts, true north not true at all. In the end, only these lines to catch the world,” I think about lines of poetry, fishing lines, the lines of boats and lifelines. The poet has done her work, and I have been able through the language of her seascape to get a fix on the unfixable, a hold on the impermanent, the only is that is.

The rain that had been falling all afternoon as I read by Discovery Bay on the Olympic Peninsula stopped and over the grey waters, the last daylight illuminated a wooded spit of land I look at every day. Holly Hughes poems transported me to a place I could go to and look back at where I live and what has happened; they made me acknowledge the horizon, the unknowable.

In this mood, I was ready to read more poetry and opened Kelli Russell Agodon’s collection Small Knots. I was impressed with the first poem, “Fifty-six Knots.” In the poem, the poet says she is counting the women in her family between the wooden beads of her rosary, the ones who watched the fragility of fathers and sons and were left with broken promises. She imagines women around the world putting broken rosaries in collection plates, one woman untying each knot so the sound of beads baptizes marble floors and women leave the church hand in hand. I know Kelly Agodon’s poetry is aiming to set a few things straight.

In “The History of __________,” the poet writes about her great-great-grandmother trading England for a new coast, birthing seven children, and becoming a “side note, a misspelling on an ancestry chart.” Daughters are named but their histories are not recorded the way those of the sons are. She recounts being told not to write “breast” in the Bible, even though an aunt died of breast cancer. “There are certain facts we don’t need to document. / Women ailed of stomach cancer, not ovarian.“ The word slaves is crossed out and the word workers is penciled in. Untold stories, untruths, are a blank wall, “stairs leading up to, then falling off the edge of this home.”

Kelli Agodon is definite in writing about who she is. After the birth of her child, her hips are different. She will not “send them back” or “try to repair their shape.” They will “pull the moon a little closer, reconnect / the constellations… .

Thinking about being a writer in “It’s easy to wake up in someone’s poem,” she muses:

using head and eye gestures
to tell my daughter not to slide pennies

into the CD player, to take
the Venetian beads off the cat.

These are my daily poems, life falling
around me on scrap paper–my sister cries

because her new English cottage is without
its antique lightening rod, my other sister

gleeful her doublewide came furnished.
God sets us in boats and pushes us onto the lake

of perspective.

She is dedicated to the recording of family moments. She has the memory of her father the in the last days before his death, the way he nodded to the window, as if he could see “the ocean / over his reading glasses.” She remembers a waitress telling her that all water tries to speak to us, even the coffee brewing behind the counter, and very moving to me, she describes what I think of as the contrast between time and lyric poetry in “Every day the alarm sounds” when she speaks of commuting to work by ferry:

every day arrives earlier than expected.
It’s more about love than philosophy,
more about minutes than disappearing.
God is on the other side, the return trip,
the white-haired angels who wave back,
the mirror through which we all fly.

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When I immerse myself in poetry and allow the images to sweep into me and carry me to reflection, I am inspired to write. After reading Meg Files, Holly J. Hughes and Kelli Russell Agodon, I set my pen to paper. I decide to ask questions inspired by reading poetry and answer them with whatever enters my mind. Since I am under the influence of so much poetry, I know that I will infuse the answers with lyric sound.

What life event do I write from today?
Since I have just gone to my second grandchild’s second birthday party this past weekend, I believe I write from the life of a woman who birthed two children and sees herself now in her daughter raising two boys.

Where is the pain?
My life has flowed by; only moments ago, I was the young woman taking my babies to daycare and leaving for the work of school and teaching others, as my daughter does now.

Where is the joy?
My grandson’s are happy, enchanted and handsome. One looks like his daddy and one who looks like his mommy. “I’m two,” says the little one when asked and goes around the circle of his grandparents, bringing his new toy bongo drum in turn to each of the elders and leading them in a round of “Happy birthday to Rafe.”

“I climb up the fence at school during recess,” Toby, the older one, who has just now started Kindergarten, tells us. “And I can see my old school.” He means the day care where his little brother will be for two more years before he comes to the grade school. It is not possible, the adults think, to see the one place from the other. But it is necessary, and my grandson knows this.

Where is the poem?
Somewhere in the two miles between the old school and the new one, I think. Somewhere between the hand’s rising up and coming down on the bongo drum. Somewhere between the moments the heart beats in joy and the moments when tears come–life falling around me on scrap paper, the thorn in the air, a horizon folded under every wave.

It isn’t long before I am ready to write as consequence of these passages. To “glue” my poem together, I decide to use phrases from the lines of poetry I have just read:

At My Grandson’s Second Birthday Party

with thanks for poems by Meg Files, Holly J. Hughes and Kelli Russell Agodon

Life falling around me
in candles and cupcakes,
juice and the tearing of wrapping
paper to reveal giant-pieced jigsaw
puzzles and alphabet placemats.

The thorn in the air
because of blended families,
seven grandparents pose in a crescent
behind the two-year-old
in his red wooden youth chair.

A horizon folded under every wave:
When we drift like a toddler’s toys
to the living room, our boy arrives
with his new drum, singing his birthday
song before each one of us by turn.

The other grandson builds a house,
asks his daddy to lie on the floor
and be measured to see if he can fit
under the piano bench draped
with interlocking squares to make a door.

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And now it is your turn: take three phrases from the poets I have quoted or find three phrases from among poets you have read closely. Ask yourself questions like I asked myself before you begin to write. Your questions will be inspired in some way by the impressions of certain poems and phrases upon you. Don’t work hard to make a strong connection. Instead, write the questions down as if you are having a conversation with the poems or the discussion of poetry and want to keep talking. Let yourself free associate in your answers.

Then, your answers will lead you to a topic, an occasion for speaking just now. To write on this topic, use each of the three phrases you’ve selected as the openings to stanzas or sections of a poem.

Believe in the lines you write. Remember that as Holly Hughes says, “…only these lines to catch the world.”