from A river runs through it: a writing diary

, collaborating with Julie Carr

Winter, 2019: I spent six weeks working on a sequence of prose poems, prompted by publishing Brooklyn poet Anna Gurton-Wachter’s MOTHER OF ALL (2018), a chapbook-length work that eventually landed in her full-length debut, Utopia Pipe Dream Memory. I appreciate the communal aspect of her prose, the weaving in of other writers, other interactions, although it would be another two years before I began to realize, and explore, the influence American poet Bernadette Mayer’s work has directly had upon hers. As Gurton-Wachter’s poem includes:

Bhanu Kapil takes my hand. She leads me to the closed off land. “You can shoot here if you want.” She says.

“A stork is a horse of an earlier event.” She says.

We see the impulse as an entity. We say the scene with the lion is a fortunate transmission. The lion moves easily through the war torn landscape, passing us by with gentle disregard. Carla Harryman laughs heartily behind me. I can feel her laughter on my neck, like looking at a painting being painted over. No, even gentler than that.

I patter, pattern. From January 11 to March 14, I work on little other than this, a prose sequence titled “Snow day.” After putting “the book of smaller” to bed the prior October, the idea of what might come next had yet to solidify.

According to my notes, on January 11, 2019 I was prompted by the fact that freezing rain caused cancellation of school buses but not school itself. When I was young, given I was raised on a farm in Glengarry County in eastern Ontario, the cancellation of buses meant I didn’t have to go to school at all. My mother and I sat by the kitchen radio and listened for our specifics. Or even if our dirt road was too icy: I could watch in the distance as the bus driver continued north along Fraser Road, deciding that a turn down our particular concession wasn’t worth the potential risk. The days I would see the bus, a mile or so distant, continue along at the right time, leaving me free to walk back to the house.

The poem that became “Snow day” felt the opening of an entirely different manuscript, unlike the shape or tone of anything else in-progress. After a week or two, I began to aim for mid-March as an arbitrary publication date for the chapbook, to provide something as my annual birthday party handout. The poem wove all sorts of threads, from my reading and social media to the daily offerings of snow, snow days and domestic patterns.

That particular January morning, walking the two blocks with a bundled, unhappy toddler Aoife to deliver Rose to her usual morning of junior kindergarten drop-off. The first section of “Snow day” reads:

First thing this morning, Christine and I each receive an email regarding the cancellation of buses across the school board. The warmer temperatures bring freezing rain. We live too close to the school for the cancellations to affect us. I still bundle both children for Rose’s drop-off, for her to begin another full day of junior kindergarten. Neither cancelled, nor snow: what kind of snow day is that?

Anna Gurton-Wachter responds to my email. Monty Reid responds to my email. Nikki Sheppy responds to my email. Stephen Brockwell responds to my email. Neil Flowers responds to my email. Pearl Pirie responds to my email. David O’Meara responds to my email. Annick MacAskill responds to my email. Christine McNair responds to my email. Sarah Burgoyne responds to my email. Shazia Hafiz Ramji responds to my email. Christine McNair responds to my email. natalie hanna responds to my email. Christine McNair responds to my email. Christine McNair responds to my email. Christine McNair responds to my email. Christine McNair responds to my email.

Ian Williams responds to a photograph of my home office: “Don’t you feel perpetually overwhelmed?”

“I saw the photo of your writing desk and wanted to close the door.”