I had a few alternative subtitles to this post: “How To Build a Poem Out of Repetitions” and “Writing in Fragments.” But I settled for “Asking Questions Without Answers” because, as I said to someone recently about the evolution of this poetry practice, I’ve been trying on the option of not coming up with solutions in my work. Instead, I said, I was looking at poetry as a way of introducing a question, and that in reading the poem, someone might feel invited to explore and reflect on some possible answers.
Perhaps this shift in my writing is happening because it feels like we are facing one uncertainty after another lately. How do we grab onto a life jacket when the water keeps churning around us? Where are the edges in an edgeless space? For me, poetry offers a place to tuck into, a kind of inlet, that—while still officially a body of water—offers some temporary protection against the elements.
The “how to” set-up in this poem was something I didn’t think I’d necessarily sustain until the end. But almost at the outset of that first line, I realized I was making a kind of list, and the prompt got me moving forward to the next idea. And I see, too, that in some ways I saw this list as a conversation opener, like “How would you admit how hard it is?” or “How would you ask for forgiveness?” This poem proposes there are many answers, as individual as the person responding to them.
Often, when I am writing these “10-line Tuesday” poems, I find myself collapsing, in my head, the audience receiving them into a sort of aggregate “you.” Perhaps because part of the commitment of this practice is the act of sending the poems out, I’ve created a mental avatar of a reader. This person is someone who understands me, on some cellular level, so I don’t have to go through the laborious process of explaining myself. This reader is also attuned to their inner landscapes to a fairly deep degree. They are able to take the risk of self-inquiry and self-reflection. They can hold the complexities and contradictions of who they are. They have a sense of matters to them, what they value. They accept change and conflict, but they can also admit they resist both. But they are unafraid of being wrong, or of making mistakes. They see these, in fact, as learning curves, as growth opportunities, as ways of shaping their identity.
I realize as I write this that writing these poems has been a way of shaping my own identity, too. Of clarifying who I am. Of getting closer to some kind of empirical truth that is alive in myself at any given moment.
Because the given moment is what meets us always, doesn’t it? I think this is what I mean by the wildflowers in the title. This whole poem, I suppose, is a kind of “what next.” It poses the implicit question of “What do we do now, knowing what we know?”
This feels like it’s happening everywhere. The uncertainty of this time demands a certain courage, to consider what might live on the other side of these questions, and to place one foot forward, however tentatively, to begin the task of meeting the answers.