Let Me Explain
During my self-imposed sabbatical in 2015, I was fortunate to receive a four-week Residency at Vermont Studio Center. During that time, I met with the Visiting Writer for a critique. I was lucky that the writer during that month was the gracious and generous Aimee Nezhukumatathil. I had never received any feedback on the poems I sent her, yet they were, at that time, one of the anchoring thematic sections of my manuscript in progress, describing scenes from my childhood. The poems were short, and often involved faith, my father, and parishes. They were framed as dictionary definitions.
In 1862, Emily Dickinson wrote:
“MR. HIGGINSON, — Are you too deeply occupied to say if my verse is alive?
The mind is so near itself it cannot see distinctly, and I have none to ask.
Should you think it breathed, and had you the leisure to tell me, I should feel quick gratitude.”
Aimee Nezhukumatathil told me something I had sensed. She was very complementary, but also said that she didn’t know, well, what side the poems were on. What they wanted from the reader. There was too much distance; what was at stake? As my Residency work days went on I realized what had happened. A chaplain for ten years, a role I had only shaken off six months prior, I had spent so much time demystifying the tradition and practices of the Episcopal church, and of religion in general, that I was bringing the same impulse to the poems.
The poems were working too hard; they were suffocating.
Three months later I received feedback from another poet, Rusty Morrison. She told our group of poets to resist letting the poem tell the reader about the poem, or explain what it is trying to do. No matter how prettily you do it, don’t tell the reader what to think about what the poem is saying.
That injunction made me re-envision all of my work, and has hovered over me ever since. It requires a daring, and a trust of the reader, to give the poems enough air.
This poem was first published on a now inaccessible webpage, as part of Honey Pot Literary Miscellany, as “Hold the Word.” In it, I went to the source to ask how to explain the story from the inside.
Like what you read? Subscribe to Inward Digest for more Musings.
Follow us on Instagram @interfaithmuse
