![]() ![]() Does seeing a photo of obliterated Aleppo on my cell phone miniaturize my concern? If I watch a video of a police officer shooting an unarmed black man on a Facebook thread, does the medium in any way lessen or diminish my capacity for empathy and witness? These questions have also led me to interrogate whether “staying informed” can sometimes become an act of consumption how one can not only watch but witness and how a poem can approach its subject matter without diminishing its importance through the scale of its art. For me, at least, the composition medium holds great sway over the content’s scale and scope.įor years now, I’ve been obsessed and concerned with the medium of my engagement with the news, with tragic events. When I composed on a large poster board, my poem zoomed out, used its wide angle lens, lost its gravitational orbit on the literal. When I compose aloud, as I often do when I’m on long car trips or walking the dog in our local arboretum, my poems become much more rhetorical and musical. They connect to the tactile, the minutiae of the subject matter as my hands connect to the page or the keyboard. When I’m writing in my little leather-bound writing journal or on a word processor, my poems tend toward more concrete details and language. The poem that resulted, called “Scar,” takes on the very literal and tangible scar on my right cheek and allows it to be more-meaningful, abstract, figurative-than it is: “Sometimes it’s / bigger than my / body…as if I’m // a frame for / it, as if it / continues beyond // my end.” I found myself writing more abstractly, like an aerial view that allows one to see the crop circles. As I wrote, the page seemed like an avalanche I had to dig the poem out of. All participants, including myself, found that they wrote differently when they wrote in large handwriting, on a larger space. Once, at a writers’ conference, I asked my workshop to draft a poem on a poster board instead of using their usual drafting medium. Less frequently, I’ve heard the act of formatting the poem called “landscaping,” which sounds to me more like planting pollinator-friendly perennials than moving mountains, the latter of which is more akin to my feeling of finding the right form of a poem. Many poets talk about the “architecture” of a poem, that is its shape, how its been built on the page-what it looks like. I knew there was a deeper connection between the tree trunks in the snow and poetry than just their analogous shape, something related to poetry’s capabilities for scale and scope. I interrogated this impression for some time, rolling it over and over like a sphere eddied under a waterfall. For an instant, as I drove the empty black road looking out the driver’s side window, it felt like I was “reading” the shape of a poem, line by line. My eyes struggled to focus, and I saw what looked, through a sun-spurred squint, like a poem laid out horizontally: wet, black trunks against snow. Last year, driving to work one morning, I looked up at the roadside embankment, a forested hill, the background and foreground tangled, confused with tree branches. Gaston Bachelard called winter “the oldest of seasons,” and my instincts for warmth, for meat and cream, and for the soul-spinning reflection my doctor charted as SAD feel like they belong to pre-history, witnessed ever by the winter-thriving black-green conifers, the mosses, and the lichen, some of our planet’s oldest flora. Even as the world seems smaller, it enlarges into a horizon-swallowing plain, connected through its erasure, and the white-out re-founds my imagination on mysteries, the world’s unknowns, a bewildering unfamiliarity, excluding particulars and the contemporary moment. In the distance, the mountain is a white whisper in a loud room. The sky and ground reflect one another, white-gray, and the space between the two becomes more tangible, more intimate in the precipitation’s revelation of how far it has to go. It’s snowing again, and the world contracts, like my heel’s screws in the cold. ![]()
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