Voice of the Ridge By C.D. Wright

I was devastated to hear of the death yesterday of my favourite poet C.D. Wright. What a loss to world poetry. My favourite poem of hers is not online so I will post it here as a tribute.

Voice of the Ridge

By C.D. Wright

Something about a hazy afternoon−a long drive

          about cedars spearing the sky

Something about a body at a crossing

          about a dog missing a paw

          about buying a freshly dressed hen

Something about the locus of the dead

Something about a strange town on a weekend

          about large white panties on a line

About a table in a family-owned café

          an old morsel on the tines

Something about the owner dragging one foot

Something about wine from a jelly glass

Something about a hazy afternoon−a long drive

          about no purse no stockings

Something about unfolding the map

          about a cemetery that isn’t kept up

          about grasshoppers−their knack for surprise

Something about finding a full set of clothes in the weed

Something about a hazy afternoon−a long drive

          about hills of goldenrod

Something about filling-station attendants

          the one blue hole in the clouds

Something about birds of prey−the locus of the dead

Something about the long drive home−a slow sundowning

           about the din of insects

Something about straight gold hair on a pillow

Something about writing by the kingly light

           in the quick minutes left before lips

           suction a nipple from wrinkled linen

Finding the point and letting go of order

The worries that I had been having about losing the heart of my poems when the more personal element was taken out somehow don't seem to be so important now. After all one of our poetry tutors said a poem is not a story or an atmosphere - it is about making a particular point - and I realise now that my journey poems are making a spiritual point.

When I started writing this series of poems I thought that they were simply poems about walking and connecting with location and nature. But of course in poetry (and life!) nothing is ever as simple as that, and as I discussed the poems with my tutor today I had one of those "Eureka" moments where it suddenly became clear to me that the poems were about far more than simply going for a walk. Footslog (which was previously called Unfurling Spring) is a poem that uses highly descriptive language to chart a physical journey through a real landscape. The poem is about nature but the underlying theme of the poem is how man affects (and is affected by) the landscape.

The poet Charles Wright makes this distinction between nature and landscape:

"Landscape is something you determine and dominate. Nature is something that determines

and dominates you."

(Wright, Charles, Quarter Notes: Improvisations and Interviews, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1995)

There is an antithesis within the poem between the happy compromise between man and nature and the more destructive ways that man affects the landscape.

The second poem in the series is about Thetford Forest. The poem describes a physical journey through the forest, beginning amidst densely planted conifers and progressing into lighter natural woodland. It also describes arriving at a place where a lot of the trees are marked with yellow crosses, earmarking them for felling. As well as being about passing from one landscape to another the poem has deeper underlying themes of death and loss: death of the trees - trees being the lungs of the planet and what keeps us alive, loss of forest, loss of history and loss in general.

I had a sudden realisation when the tutor and I were discussing these larger themes that both poems could also be seen as a metaphor for the death of my mother - even though I had no conscious intention of writing about her death when I began them.

A good point that my tutor made today was that I should not get too hung up on keeping the chronological order of events intact - this order after all is only important to me, the writer. The reader won't know what order things were in on a particular walk, and the point is not to recreate the exact journey but to convey the feeling that I got from the walk that was the driving force behind writing the poem. It seems an obvious point but it is all too easy to forget.

Today's poetry tutorial was really helpful, it left me feeling excited and hopeful but it has also left me with a lot of editing to do and a lot to think about.

Losing the "heart" in my poems...

I have been thinking a lot over the past few days about the way in which my writing is changing. It is hard to pinpoint whether it is being on the Creative Writing MA that has brought about the change or whether it is the fact that my mother died earlier this year - or if one event feeds off of the other bringing about a more dramatic change than either factor would necessarily bring about on its own.

What I have noticed of late is that I seem to have finally moved beyond the need to always always be writing intensely personal poems about my dysfunctional family and my childhood. I guess that these are subjects that I will naturally keep coming back to as they are my history, so of course have played a big part in making me who I am as a writer (and a person), but it feels good for my writing to not be so interminably bound up with the past. Maybe my mother's death was the catalyst that I needed to finally be able to let go of any remaining residual anger and bitterness, or maybe I have just written enough about all that stuff for now.

My worry now though is that without this intensely personal element that my writing won't be so strong. When I showed my partner the second draft of my first journey poem his initial comment was "very descriptive". Whilst this was not a criticism I am beginning to worry about whether description is all there is, and if so is this a bad thing? Description does not necessarily engage the reader in the same way as something containing more of an element of human experience. I suppose what I am really getting at is that I have a fear that the "heart" might go out of my poems. There has to be something in a poem that speaks to the reader, that touches them in some way and I am worried that my new journey poems might not do that. I shall be very interested to hear what my tutor has to say on Tuesday.

I have an interesting mix of poems for my submission this semester: a series of poems about sorting out my mother's house after her death, the new journey poems and then there are also some slightly odd poems like the one about chopping off my own head.