Writing is always a fraught process. It can be especially so during a pandemic. In 2020 and early 2021, when I was completing revisions to my book, I found I needed something to bring structure to my days and weeks. But I also needed liberation from the four walls of my house and the seemingly endless rinse-and-repeat cycle of pandemic life. I needed fresh perspective on material I'd been working on for years; I needed to be inspired.
I started to begin each day by reading poetry. Theodore Roethke reminded me to pay attention to the living things outside my window, and thereby rooted me in time and in the seasons. Thus I noticed when I heard the first mourning dove of the year (in 2021, March 3rd; this year, March 10th). As Adrienne Rich writes in "A Walk by the Charles," "What lends us anchor but the mutable?" Her words were often on my mind as I worked to draw out the larger themes of my argument, without losing sight of the details specific to eighteenth-century Massachusetts.
Some verse was a little too evocative of the here and now. Although originally written about a different time and place, Kipling's lines about "the men who edged their agonies and chid them in their pain" and "the idle-minded overlings who quibbled while they died" were a little too on the nose in early 2020 ("Mesopotamia 1917"). This kind of orientation to daily life did not encourage constructive reflection.
Others, though, invited me to slow down, pay attention, and absorb their offerings. Poets such as e.e. cummings and W.S. Graham and Derek Walcott demanded attention to their neologisms: "mud-luscious," "puddle-wonderful," and "outfloats"; "saltcut," "strewn-silver," and "sparse-powdered." Walcott justly asserted that "when I write/this poem, each phrase go be soaked in salt." When powering through thousands of prosecutions, sometimes it's easy to skim for keywords and dismiss entire phrases as mere legal boilerplate. The practice of reading poetry helped me return to the sources with my ears newly primed for those phrases soaked in salt.
And what of writing? Did the poetry inspire better prose? My colleague Bob Vivian, a poet and writer, thinks it can; he has described reading poetry before writing "like taking a flame from another person and coaxing into one's own." Bob's beautiful metaphor obscures the fact that igniting the first person's flame might have required several frustrating hours of rubbing sticks together. But over the long pandemic winter, I took heart from cummings, who assures us, "--whose hearts are mountains, roots are trees,/it's they shall cry hello to the spring." And, also, from Scottish poet Edwin Morgan's rollicking tribute to "Sir James Murray" (creator of the Oxford English Dictionary), so stuffed with Scots words you'd swear it was a Robbie Burns poem, a reminder that language is supposed to be fun: "To work, to work! To words!"
--Kristin A. Olbertson
