Writers and Wide Open Spaces

This is a photo of a stream in a natural area not far from our cottage. The stream goes on among the untrodden ways  year after year, sparkling and blushing, mostly unseen. Secret, exciting.Jerry Dennis, who’s written about Michigan in language that makes your mouth water and your eyes cry—he and I were driving up to Petoskey last week to be on a panel of Michigan writers at the International Hemingway Society Conference to talk about the influence of northern Michigan on writers. As we drove, we were talking about how important open space is to our work.I suppose I haven’t fully earned my official badge as a “Michigan Writer.” I grew up in Arkansas and then lived almost 30 years on the East Coast. When I was in Arkansas, it felt as if there was so-o-o-o much space to write in. I was young. I might conquer the world. Same here in Michigan at the other end of my life.Not so much in Delaware. I had an idea that Reunion would be poems from each of my three places, equally. But I couldn’t make it happen. It was mostly Michigan. This is silly, but in my mind the East Coast is full up already. Its history is full up and its present is a traffic jam of good work. It can and does go on without me. It has in the past made me feel a little frantic and competitive. God, I can never write like [fill in the blank]. I will never win the [fill in the blank] prize.That is really silly. Think of the Renaissance, all those poets and painters and playwrights and sculptors rubbing shoulders, making each other better from the proximity, the competition.But this discussion got Jerry and me  talking about Detroit and how the utter devastation of the city has opened up space for new things to happen. “All things fall and are built again, / And those that build them again are gay.” Once again, it’s possible there to play in the sandbox, the mind’s sandbox.Not that there aren’t wonderful poets in Michigan. Of course there are. But the ratio of trees and water to cities and poets up here where I live now is over-toppling enough to make it seem as if what I write is an expression of something that would not be said, if I, personally, didn’t say it.  I feel it tugging on me, a great need to find what’s here that’s inarticulate, that can’t speak for itself, and say what paltry thing can be said about it. To sit on the edge of the cliff of words and dangle my feet into the abyss.It isn’t emotional space. You can find—or make—that in the city. You can find it in a crowded party, if you want. I’m talking about actual, physical space. It is the sense that I could walk miles in any direction and not encounter anyone reciting poetry, or anyone wanting to edit my life or my poem. No adults allowed near the sandbox. Or the riverbed. Leave me to pick up stones, to make my own beaver dam for no reason except to hear the water louder.My good friend Anne-Marie Oomen and I decided over lunch yesterday, with a glass of chardonnay and a nod to Gregory Orr, that the issue is tenderness in the writing, tenderness toward the world. It’s what seems to happen when we confront the woods, or the road, or the big water, or a snowstorm: we’re in the middle of what hasn’t yet been labled, or graded, or analyzed:  we are, ourselves, a raw surface, utterly exposed to what comes and what will come, unbidden. We are the outsider, the traveler, in a vastness. Our eyes are wide open, intense and hopeful. And tender. We don’t know the answers. We may never know.