How Writing Poetry Can Freeze Time by Heidi Seaborn (from Lit Hub)
The act of writing a poem stills time—freezing the action, emotion, meaning of a moment. Carrie Fountain wrote a beautiful poem, but it’s also the story of one February evening with her children who “are so young they cannot imagine a world/like the one they live in.” In the poem, she preserves a slice of their childhood, even as the poet is already looking ahead “I know they will someday soon/see everything and they will know about/everything and they will no longer take/never mind for an answer.” That time has no doubt already arrived for the poet and her children.
Witnessing even the dull dailiness of our lives through writing also leads to the kind of discovery Ada Limón, our recent U.S. Poet Laureate, describes in her poem “Not the Saddest Thing in the World.” On an ordinary day, she finds a dead bird and buries it, and goes “about [her] day” realizing that the ordinary has been transformed, that “Now something’s/breaking always on the skyline…” Limón’s poem urges us to lift our eyes, to see and record even the smallest events, for they each have significance.In preparation to celebrate my mother’s 90th birthday, I read through fifty years of her travel journals. I realize that even in the desert of Turkmenistan or in the Mekong Valley, it’s the ordinariness of breakfast, of meeting someone in a market or washing clothing in a bucket that make an experience extraordinary. It is the poetry of being in a place. In her journals, there is an intimacy in the daily details that allow our family to visualize my mother (and my father when he was alive) not only exploring the world but living in it. It’s a gift to her family....So, if you ask me. “Do I regret the years without poetry?” No, I don’t regret putting my dream of being a poet on hold for forty years, but yes, I keenly feel the loss of what is left out of my story. That I failed to witness a span of my life in writing. Poetry is of course much more than mere documentation. But a daily writing practice for a poet heightens observational skills, deepens emotional tentacles and alerts all our senses. These days after a walk with my husband, I return with souvenirs of all I’ve gathered: an overheard conversation, the suddenness of a dogwood tree in bloom, the wind’s bite. While he, on the other hand, went for a walk. I can’t wait to get to the page, to capture the fragments.It’s those fragments that I regret not scribbling in the margins. The lost conversations and observations that if chronicled, I could return to, once I was ready to recommit to poetry. That not writing for those decades, I missed discovering and documenting the deeper meaning of the life I was so busy living.But who wants to live with regrets? So let me phrase it differently, as advice. Right now open your Notes app or grab a pen and a scrap of paper and write something—an observation, a response, a list of no-regrets, a poem. Consider it a valentine to the future you. To those you love. Write in the margins of your busy life. Maybe it will be the opening line of your next chapter.
On This Day (09/19):
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