Hi party people,
Steph here. What a few weeks it’s been! Our last prompt was about storing emotions in parts of your body; Catherine shared a piece about the way dreaming feels like sight-reading, like “trying to scoop up as much approximate accuracy as I can.” As someone who’s been attempting to dream journal daily, I can attest that this is a great way to describe the feeling. Her piece included beautiful lines like “Pink jelly boats float across the glowing.”
As always, feel free to share responses to prompts current or past in the comments, and let us know (or respond to this email) if you’d like to share but prefer we don’t discuss the piece in the next newsletter. :)
Onto the prompt!
A few weeks ago, I was greeted by this panicked message from Catherine.
I love nothing more than an urgent declaration of the need to churn out poems. But the particular challenge here was how her class defined “environmental”; students are supposed to “de-center the human experience,” where something non-human (and therefore environmental) is the focus. Instead of writing into human feeling, the class challenged, write into the perspective of the surrounding environment. For Catherine, this felt like an ultimatum to either become a microbiologist and write about specific scientific terms, learn the entire political history of climate change, or quit the class. (For the record, she got it done and her poems are quite beautiful.)
It’s an important question though: how can the natural world reflect emotional state? How might fact betray feeling? I’ve been thinking about this a lot after a week with some particularly analytical, scientific-minded friends (hi park city crew!). But whether you consider yourself scientific-minded or not, I do believe there is part of us that longs for the certainty of fact, of a logical way to pull the outside world apart. Fact and feeling are often portrayed as opposites; in the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator, thinking (T) and feeling (F) oppose each other in the third letter. How, then, can we make room for both fact and feeling? If we commit ourselves to observe and record the world with a scientists’ eye, will feeling emerge on its own?
In the poems that do this best, the careful selection of facts leads us to the speaker’s heart, without them having to spell out how they feel. The choice of facts tells us everything we need to know. In Aracelis Girmay’s “I Am Not Ready to Die Yet,” each fact clarifies what the speaker means:
I am not ready to die yet.
I want to live longer knowing that wind
still moves a dead bird’s feathers.
Of course wind can still move a dead bird’s feathers! The fact on its own is inconsequential. But we also know the speaker is not ready to die. In what sense? In the sense that a world where wind moves through the dead, makes the dead matter, is a world worth living in. In a gorgeous example of de-centering a strictly human experience, she goes on to say later in the poem:
If I am a cactus, be the cactus
I grow next to, arms up,
every day, let me face you,
every day of my cactus life.
Why say “I love you” or “I want to stay with you” when you can say this, something far more alive with what you might actually mean? Perhaps a description of feeling (“I want to stand next to you forever”) can get nowhere near the vividness, the portrayal of actual experience, that a description of imaginative fact can. The speaker doesn’t just feel love, or devotion. The speaker feels what you feel when you want to be a cactus facing another cactus in your beautiful cactus life. Aracelis Girmay is a f*cking genius.
The types of facts that betray feelings aren’t just environmental or scientific ones. As a craft, poetry also gives us the fact of the work itself. The form, the line breaks, the sounds- all these are facts that lie sleeping outside the explicit meaning of the poem.
Take, for example, Dana Levin’s “The Beautiful Names.”
calyx, lepidoptera, labia, clitoris- in this poem, anatomy is music. The boy’s eyes are a tracing finger guiding our own eyes down the staggered indentations of each line. We imagine the boys’ tracing finger, and eyes become finger become ears because we hear the music of the scientific terms, even read by the silent voice in our heads. This poem makes us aware of our physical body (eyes tracing S-shaped lines, internal voice repeating the names) just as the boy is discovering the abstraction of a body with its “beautiful names.”
When I talk about fact and feeling, Katherine Larson (molecular biologist, field ecologist, and award-winning poet) is perhaps my favorite example. In “Love at Thirty-Two Degrees,” the speaker tries to reject science outright:
But does she? Earlier, the speaker is thinking of fingers:
Be careful
not to cut your finger, he says. But I’m thinking
of fingertips on my lover’s neck
last June. Amazing, hearts.
This brachial heart. After class,
I stole one from the formaldehyde
& watched it bloom in my bathroom sink
between cubes of ice.
The speaker gives us the fact of “this brachial heart” alongside the awe she feels. Why watch a heart bloom into ice if not out of love? The very next thing she tells us is:
Last night I threw my lab coat in the fire
& drove all night through the Arizona desert
with a thermos full of silver tequila.
But she cannot fully outrun her scientist’s mind, even as she is physically escaping in
your mother’s
beat-up Honda, agaves
twisting up from the soil
like the limbs of cephalopods
Even in escape, she sees the world with a scientist’s eye. In the end, it is form that lets us in. The four sections of the poem take on increasingly poetry form, going from a single block of text (section one) to uneven, natural stanzas (section two), to couplets (section three- stanzas of two lines each, which draw attention to the text as a poem instead of just text), to the fourth and final section, which is spare in text and generously broken. By the end of the poem, the speaker has decided to “betray” science. But the end of the poem is also where the text feels most like a poem; despite the speaker’s best intentions, she has leaned into the feeling using the quiet fact of the form itself.
I think the deep appeal of these poems that they mirror the relationship of fact and feeling in life. Facts are accessible, a currency of information. Feelings are harder to communicate and portray, especially with accuracy. But often, the fact of an experience just is the feeling. You don’t even need to say how you feel. The fact of what happened, and how you choose to tell it, can let us in to everything we need to know.
Prompt: this week, write a poem that uses fact (a truth about something external to the speaker) to reveal feeling without naming the feeling explicitly. Bonus points for facts about scientific detail or the natural world.
Let fact do the work of feeling.
Much factual love,
Steph
Here's a response! Mini existential crisis at Walgreens led to this:
"Metronome"
All the facts of aging.
Declining functions start
from ages 20 on, 30 on, 40 on, 60 on.
At some point the eyes will cataract.
Linda writing from beyond death
about the faint counting she had felt
inside her being, the ticking sound.
Standing in Walgreens waiting
for a shot of vaccine to send me
into asphyxiations or not. If not,
walking out the door into the blinding
of 4:31pm. My body knowing
what to do and when and me glancing
at the clock it doesn’t use, wondering how.
My body like the tides and the agave.
Like the pewter dusted succulents sending up
tall scraggly stems down the block.
Can this timing exist without knowledge?
Can safety exist without stillness?
This and this body and that one, moving
to the same invisibility: powerful,
elegant, holding. Keeping time.