My mother has decided that thirteen years of my stuff cluttering her house is enough. She’s sent me several boxes of my old things. Mostly, they’re full of junk. A few things are worth keeping though, such as the “Poetry Portfolio” that I submitted as my final project in a poetry class that I took in the Spring of 1998. That class was my only formal education in creative writing, and what it mostly taught me is that I suck at writing poetry. The poems are quite embarrassing. Many of them are worthy of Cringe, except that they were written when I was twenty and I think that Cringe is supposed to be for stuff that you wrote when you were eight.
My professor hated the one below. In general, she thought my writing was “not visceral” and “lacked images.” I tried to respond to that criticism by writing a poem about a dead rat. I’ll post that one later. For now though, North.
This poem was born out of a fascination that I developed with the North, thanks to Glenn Gould. At the time that I wrote it, I was living in Florida. I’ve moved considerably North since then, but I still wonder what it would be like to take the Muskeg Express from Winnipeg to Churchill, watch the land blur by and, finally, to stand on the bank of the Hudson Bay with no sound but the wind. With the cold. With thoughts.
That train ride is about three days, by the way. I’ve also thought about what I would bring to read. What would you bring? Maybe we could go together and just hang out in the dining car and have coffee and talk and stare out the windows.
Anyway, the text for the class was Kim Addonizio’s (Unlike Mariya Strauss, I enjoyed Little Beauties) and Dorianne Laux’s The Poet’s Companion, which is a book that I still leaf through. It has several great poems. It also says one of my favorite things about writer’s block: “your life will fill you up with all that you can’t control: the death of a friend, unexpected moments of intense joy, car accidents, births, natural disasters, spring, war, dental surgery, phone calls from old lovers. Once you have enough of those under your belt you can write again.”
NORTH
I think that I shall
go North. I shall
answer the magnet
that tugs my blood. I
shall walk until the air
is pointed, pouring
through me sharp
and cold, like fresh
snow-melt sliding
down chilled mountains.
I shall look through
leaking eyes at herds
of frost buffalo silently
thundering over still, blue,
lakes. I shall watch them
tumble across the tundra
until they dissolve into
the ice-scape that whirls
out from under my feet
like a patiently waiting
sheet of paper. I shall
stand in this terrain
that reflects the country
inside me, and the Earth
will flow through me,
saying “ice, mountain,
sky, man, ice” in a single
clean breath. I shall spin
my footprints across
the paper, and squint back
at where I came from,
wondering “what rude
manner of creature was I
before I made this journey
to the snow, and drank from
streams pure as liquid air?”
