Wouldn’t you know, the copyedited text of both my poetry and the prose manuscript arrived for me to go through line by line within a week of each other. Whew! I’ve now sent back the copy for the poetry— Flying Through a Hole in the Storm. Done. Reading it again, I was struck by how many prose poems there are. Two long sequences. I’ve never had that many in one book.
What the heck is a prose poem, you ask? (Unless you’re deep into this stuff). Me too. I ask that too. Something about the times, or my mood, seems to make me and a lot of poets lately want to keep moving, not break the lines. Poems a bit like bits of stream-of-consciousness. In what way are they poems, you ask? Well, listen to this one, the first in the sequence called “Treatises” I wrote after my father’s death:
On Butterflies
I have not seen a butterfly yet this spring. There are fewer and fewer, yet I can send you a text message with many little blue ones, in a row. King Midas in the Greek legend turned everything he touched to solid gold, which turned out to be not so good if you wanted a drink of water, or if you longed for a real butterfly’s airy flutter at the edge of your sight. If you longed for the spiritual world. It is good to remember that the spiritual world was first made out of chewed leaves, then suspended in a chrysalis like a dream for a great long while before it knew what it had become. That is like this grief since my father died. Who knows how long I will hang here, or if what comes next will be any improvement. Who said the butterfly is more spiritual than the worm, anyway? Is it better to fly than to crawl? I have so many questions, being stuck here, as I am. It feels as if my father is fluttering at the edge of my sight, but that’s the habit of my mind. No single butterfly completes a long migration, sometimes it takes six generations. He was lying there pale as a statue, which is the dying phase of living. Some people see a butterfly and think it is their beloved dead sending a message from beyond. When one phase is over, I think it is natural to start looking around to see what kind of outfit life is going to be wearing next.
[originally published in Plume. If you want to read a really good interview with me and also read the rest of the series, go to https://plumepoetry.com/ladder-facts-and-rungs-dancing-on-the-train-tracks-with-fleda-brown-interview-by-nancy-mitchell/ ]
This feels like a lyric poem because it happens beneath the surface. It is almost like a dream. It drifts through my mind, picking up flotsam, not adding up, like a sonnet, but putting a lot of disparate things inside its little bag and pulling the string tight, so you realize it’s all one moment, one thought.
Not me, of course, but you get the idea.
I wrote the sequence when I couldn’t write. Really. My father had died. That was one aspect of my not-writing. So I did what any pro does when all else fails—I depended on sheer discipline. I made myself write lines every day, no matter what they were like. No matter if they were worth keeping. Just get them down. That must have freed me from some constriction. I quit trying to write a “poem.”
There’s a delicate balance that has to happen between forcing the work out and waiting until it wants to reveal itself. I’m thinking that balance is disturbed by ego—that is, wanting to “get something written” to prove you’re still a writer, to get another poem published, or whatever.
The balance is also disturbed by feelings of inadequacy. But that’s ego, too, right?
Then some magical times, you’re able to just write. There’s plenty of material inside. It has to worm its way around the stubborn blockage of your ego, and sometimes it does.
At least this is my explanation.
March! This book will be out in March. That seems like tomorrow.
And by the way, I’m reading online with Grand Rapids poet Patricia Clark, for the Friends of Theodore Roethke Virtual Speakers’ Series, on December 1, 7:00. You can register here. Please do! https://friendsofroethke.org/event-registration/december-1-patricia-clark-and-fleda-brown