from A river runs through it: a writing diary

, collaborating with Julie Carr

December 2020: I am working on a pandemic-era project with Denver poet Julie Carr. On November 21, she sent an email suggesting we send poems to each other as prompts. We were already sending short emails, tweets and snail mail across the pandemic; the boundaries between Denver and Ottawa: poems, sentences, the occasional letter. She suggested we use each co-prompt as a way to generate writing, incorporating a certain amount of words and phrases by the other in our new pieces. “I want to write a long-ish poem for this book I’m writing,” she wrote in her email. “I know what I want it to look and feel like but I don’t know anything else about it yet. Maybe we could do some sort of regular exchange of lines? Like 12 lines a week or something? With some sort of project rolled into it – like the week after you receive the 12 lines you have to weave six of the other person’s words into. your next 12 lines plus answer one question that person poses?” Of course, I said yes.

Two days later, she emailed “River,” a poem sitting roughly at the space of one and a third pages. Composed as small bundles of lyric fragments, each separated by an asterisks, the first section of which reads:

roots scroll a rockface, a bit of blue above the ledge

like a bit of a roof above a man

or a bit of news keeps coming on

half-way to        a hard time

                        wracked with what might have been

a country

Within a day or so, I responded with “estuaries : one,” aiming for roughly the same length of her “River.” I appreciated the way her shapes sat on the page, and aimed to incorporate elements of her patterns and rhythms, although my narrative threads are a bit more disjointed, a bit more imagistic. The title I chose seemed a logical next-step: what else might emerge from the river?

the assumption of the rockface

splice of prosodic regulation                across this border,

of nations, an inheritance

                                    , of sustained thievery;

                        *

rockface, tether—                    apace, and white space,

where the water runs, a fall

                        of legion,

I am from the Ottawa Valley, after all. The strains and threads of the Ottawa Valley Watershed, and the lengthy history of the Algonquin Nation.

Perhaps I should have named it “creeks.” The lines that run through the fields of my childhood.