Farming the Wind
a partial timeline of a poetic obsession and some thoughts on poetic process
a poem farm?
Lily Tobias’s Poem Farm project intrigued me. She’s asking readers to submit questions to act as seeds for poems. She’s asking poets to volunteer to nurture these seeds into full-grown poems. (It’s not too late to either contribute questions to act as poem seeds or to sign up to be a volunteer poet-farmer: Poem Farm rules and sign-up.)
Sign up and pick a week. At the beginning of the week when your poem is due, you will be sent the list of questions. Then you have a week to write your poem.
A challenge.
I’m usually not too bad at writing poems quickly. So that only made me a little nervous.
planting seeds
What I didn’t expect was how hard it would be to pick just one of the prompts to write on. It was so hard! I wanted to write on ALL the prompts. Or to try to combine multiple prompts into one poem.
Since I couldn’t make myself choose one prompt, I just started writing deliberate fragments, letting myself explore and make a mess. In the end I had a few lines scribbled down for each of five different prompts. That happened the day I got the prompts. I decided the best next step was to wait a few days and come back to look at those fragment with fresh eyes to see which of my fragments seemed most promising.
In other words, I planted the seeds, poking them into the ground, then covered them up with dirt, and stepped back to see what would spring up while my attention was elsewhere.
And then we had a crazy week. There was a lot of drama that blew up with my daughters’ scout troop. In short, we now have a new scoutmaster and a new direction. I think it will be a positive change. But it was drama.
And then there was the papal conclave. On Thursday we started doing schoolwork as usual and then in the middle of the morning my husband came in yelling “white smoke”. So the rest of the day was taken up with the drama and excitement of the announcement. Such joy. It was hard to get back to work after that.
I didn’t even think about my poem until late Thursday night as I was about to fall asleep. Oh well, I have some fragments. I’ll have to look at them in the morning to see if anything feels promising. I can always try for a very short poem. Maybe it will be a haiku. (The poem I submitted for my first Lily Tobias collaboration, Start Light, was quite short. Maybe that’s a theme.)
how does my garden grow?
So on Friday morning I opened up my laptop and pulled up the file. I read through all the fragments of the previous Friday. Some of them were from Poem Farm prompts, and there were also other bits and pieces that I’d jotted down from other sources. I tend to be a packrat, hoarding word scraps in daily files—which hoard can be hard to find things in at times.
The fragments of the wind poem felt like they had the most potential to become a full poem. “Which way is the wind blowing today?” was the prompt.
This was what I found in my notebook:
Which way is the wind blowing today?
Today the wind
whistles round the window
frames, billows
the curtains into the room.
Tonight the wind herds
clouds to cover
the moon and stars.
The wind is rainbearer
delivering mud puddles
from somewhere
far to the west
a poem blooms: the finished product
As you can see this first draft is much shorter than the final poem, but the bones are there. I started breaking it up into stanzas, playing with line breaks, adding a bit more here and a bit more there and gradually something took shape that started to feel like a real, breathing poem.
preparing the soil
My plan had been to avoid writing on one of my own questions because that felt like it would be cheating, but in the end my memory was fuzzy so I don’t know for sure which of the questions I’d submitted. This might have been one of mine. I can’t remember any more if I did or didn’t write it. But in the end I suppose it doesn’t really matter.
Except perhaps it does. Perhaps I was able to write a poem so quickly because of all the work that had been going on in the dark underground of my mind. Maybe I’d been preparing the soil for that particular poem for a long time?
Because I’d been thinking about the wind, obsessing about the wind, all winter long.
If the Poem Farm question was a seed, then how had I been preparing the soil in which it grew? I wondered what kinds of scraps had gone into the compost. What other bits and pieces had I jotted down and then forgotten that had been fermenting in the dark for the past six months? I remembered that I’d been writing all kinds of things, especially worrying at trying to put the sounds of the winter wind blowing strongly around the house into words. I decided to do some digging to see what I could uncover.
the compost pile
Long before it’s time to prepare the garden beds for seed planting, a gardener or a farmer first grows a compost pile. Compost is where you throw all the odds and ends and scraps, the bits and pieces that don’t really seem to amount to much. I’m not a great gardener and I’m not very good at composting, but I’ve tried a bit and I’m fascinated by the process.
A good writer is always making compost, always collecting scraps of thought, images and ideas, and stowing them in a dark hole where they can be broken down and become something rich and strange: soil where poems can grow.
And sometimes when you aren’t even paying attention a good compost pile produces volunteer plants where you didn’t deliberately sow anything. One year our compost produced a dozen tomato plants when I hadn’t got around to planting tomatoes at all.
These are some of the fragments that I found, flipping through my virtual notebook, looking for any scraps that had to do with wind.
December 5
road rutted, they stumble wind breathes cold through bare trees home a distant hope
wind roars the rushing world stills fear not
January 29
Loud gusts of wind this morning. But what I'm hearing now is an airplane. And the buzzing in my ears. More wind blowing like an animal presence. No, wait, it’s a plane after all. Or was it both? Disappointing. now that is definitely the wind in the trees.
January 30
windy day the mighty wind rushes round the house and through the trees-- not quite howling or moaning or wailing-- but stirring things up causing a commotion rush and whoosh
February 1
Then outside, the wind gives a whistle it's moaning and howling and shrieking trying to get in
February 6
It doesn't roar or howl or shriek, this wind that blows so fiercely through the winter-barren trees and rushes and gusts round and round the house like a river in flood, shaking the rattling eaves and shivering the siding. I grope for swirling words to tame it to my poem-- but who can catch the wind? It's like an engine, I'm tempted to claim. Like a plane or a train-- but I reject the simile as too trite and tending to diminish the power. The wind lifts the jet and carries it on its back. It brings the rumbles of the distant train to my ears. It is mightier than either. The Holy Spirit came at Pentecost like the sound of a great wind. a noise like a strong driving wind, strong violent blast But what is that sound? The very breath of God. In Hebrew, Ruah, meaning spirit, breath, life. An onomotopoeia, the very word sounds like a sigh, like a benediction, like longing and inhalation. *** rush gust blast strong violent forceful powerful mighty
February 14
the wind swells the house twitches like an animal in its sleep rustle, crackle, pop and tap, creak and settle the trees sigh and sway the wind rushes like a mighty river flowing over and between and among the windchimes tinkle and toll Give me back the night she sings
February 15
All night the wind exhales forceful sighs that rattle the roof. It circles round and round the house, brushing its back through the trees making them wave like river weeds. It roars like a passing train through the dark full of pale passengers hurrying to undisclosed destinations.
March 16
grey March winds blowing bare trees pushing clouds
March 17
maple trees laugh bowing bare braches in the rushing wind
March 26
and the wind blows wild the wind blows free the wind flows through the river of stars the wind howls over rooftops and cars the wind moves through the vastness of space the wind blows through my hair, on my face and the wind blows wild the wind blows free
May 5
curtains billow in the breeze outside birdsong and cloudy skies and somewhere a lawn mower
poeming across the seasons and through the years
But the process of growing a poem isn’t just about the fragments and fermentation of compost. It’s not strictly linear with one idea being toyed with until suddenly it takes shape. It’s also about the long practice of years, many seasons of planting and harvest, (and fallow years as well). Most poets have recurring images, ideas, and themes that haunt them and that need to be wrestled with into poem not just once but again and again and again.
Georgia O’Keefe painted the same mountain over and over again. She’d paint the same collection of shells and shingles and bones. Not just seeing them from different angles. Sometimes she would paint series of painting all of the same subject from the same angle. Each time, though, she would see something different, do something different, frame her picture a different way. You get the sense that she was wrestling to get something in her mind to appear on the canvas. Or trying to see more clearly. And maybe she never quite got it. But also I believe that each individual attempt is a worthy picture that stands on its own. It’s fascinating to see them in a series, but you don’t have to see the series to appreciate any one of the pictures.
I’m fascinated by the haunting image, the recurring image, by the way some things just need to be done over and over again. For me it’s the moon, bare branches, birdsong, maple seed helicopters, and wind. For me there are certain words I find creeping in or popping up over and over again. And I think this isn’t a bad thing. It’s just who I am as an artist. It’s the stuff I wrestle with, it’s the stuff of the way I see the world.
So I thought it would be fun to end with a look at a couple of my older poems that have each tried in some way to catch the wind.
These poems have different triggers and so feel like they are answering different questions. And yet I can see how they also hit some similar notes.
homeward
Delving deeper into my archives, I found this untitled draft of an ekphrastic poem from October 2022 that I had completely forgotten (you can see the artwork that inspired it here):
The wind, the wind is blowing, making all the land flow. Lowly yellow bushes bend and feathery grasses breathe, breaking. Tall trees toss haughty golden heads. Wind pushes emerald hills into rough ripples. Greenly they heave themselves olive, lime, bottle, sage furrowing, fretting, mounding highly up and up until they become blue range mountainous indigo, violet, navy. The wind sucks the curtains out the window, a fine white veil. The wind shivers, shakes, makes the houses themselves hump, sigh and flow in liquid lines and even the ruby truck takes on a rounded form heights sierras ridges fells pinnacles alps Wind piles clouds into sky peaks that hover like breakers set to pound upon a beach Wind moulds sierras, atmospheric echoes of the mounding hills and ridges below which are themslves mounting up to reach until the heaving land and hilly clouds are one continuous surge, one rippling tide threatening to flood, to swarm the nestled towns in the storm surge of their wild ride And there hidden in a pocket between the hills and the sky the world's glow, the forge, lies up from the deep core of the earth or the sun's furnace the red hearth warming the heart of things. Blow, wind, flow, world, heave my heavy heart and flame into song Here, now, in this place is all creation met in one symphony of praise. an ekphrastic poem, after Homeward 2 by William Haskell
nor’easter
And there was also this poem, which I think is mostly complete, though I’m still fiddling with it occasionally because I’m not quite satisfied it’s found its final form. I wrote it in October 2021 when we were living in a rental house near the beach in the Manomet neighborhood of Plymouth. We experienced a fierce nor-easter that swept in overnight, a storm with hurricane force winds that shook the house so that I couldn’t sleep, knocked out the power, and left us huddling in the dark living room like people under siege.
A Stop Sign in Mahomet As a wet dog bounds joyfully from the surf, shakes himself vigorously, spraying water everywhere, so the whole house shook and shook but couldn't free herself from the water whose smothering buffets battered her from every side. While the storm stalked like a roaring lion looking for something to devour, we floundered in our fretful beds like landed fish. The shaking overran my dreams and tumbled me down the stairs to join in a midnight vigil. We all tossed, sleepless on couches, eyes fixed on the rain-slashed picture window. wondering if the frame would hold it as the wind plastered it with tiny shreds of tarp torn from the roof of a neighboring house. Our ears flooded by the overflowing immensity of fearful wind and pummeling waves. Howling creatures shrouded in screaming night toppled trees and tore branches, pulled down power lines, stranding us in blackness, sloshed the water in the toilets, shredded shingles and strewed them recklessly on the lawn. While, far below at the unseen bottom of the hill, the hungry sea tore slats, posts, and wire off shielding sandbreaks, crammed them down the accessway's narrow throat, then ripped away the proud dunes they had sheltered washing them down to form new sand bars. Through the terrorized night and the long dreary day the relentless wind, more angry boy than playful kitten, batted the red-faced sign again and again. It vacillated like an aspen leaf, like a bright butterfly longing to take flight. Fluttering back and forth, seeking escape from its torment Until the fatigued metal yielded, wrenched one time too many. Then it toppled. We discovered it after the storm's fury faded, face-down on the lawn, passed out. Helpless victim of the nor'easter's hurricane force. The beach houses had battened their shutters claws retracted like cautious hermit crabs; but no one thought to take in this watchman standing faithful at his corner post, shouting his useless STOP to the unheeding storm.
Do you have ideas, words, images, that you’re haunted by? Are there things that you find you keep wresting with over and over again?
I like this idea of poems like seeds and farming. Really interesting and fitting description of the poetry process.
In your poem, "Which way is the wind blowing today?" I like that description of:
"Tonight the wind hers
clouds to cover
the moon and stars."
To answer your questions, I do have some ideas and images I'm haunted by. Oddly, they're a family of local crows that often follow me on my hikes. I leave peanuts and snacks for them along my walks. What is odd though, is I rarely take any photos of them as it doesn't feel right to do. Hard to explain.
The compost pile is an apt metaphor. I love seeing the progression of the poem in your fertile brain. The completed poem is gorgeous, and the way it gathers power from the many, many moments of attention and wonder is stirring. It makes me feel that the fragments of lines I hoard in journals and word documents are all part of the finished poems after all. I could see a collection of essays like this turning into a book. If I end up teaching a creative writing class again, I want to direct students to this essay as an example of why I encourage them to journal, to pay attention, to listen to the musicality of words, to let ideas link themselves together organically as they figure out what you want to say. It's hard to express that to students when all they see is the finished poem on the printed page, but this essay would take them by the hand and lead them through the process.