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***This is the sixty-ninth in a never-ending series called BACKSTORY OF THE POEM where the Chris
Rice Cooper Blog (CRC) focuses on one specific poem and how the poet wrote
that specific poem. All BACKSTORY OF THE POEM links are at the end
of this piece.
#069
Backstory of the Poem
“Singing”
by
Andrew McFadyen-Ketchum
Can you go through the step-by-step
process of writing this poem from the moment the idea was first conceived in
your brain until final form? “Singing” went through thirty-two drafts to get to
the stage it is currently in, and I would revise it at least once more if I
could.
When I was working on the poem, I knew calling God a “he” was
disingenuous, if not plain ol’ inaccurate. I don’t see any reason to believe
God is a he. It makes more sense that God be a she or, even better, a she and a
he given that God created the universe, according to the myths I reference in
the poem, on God’s own.
I was fully aware of this problem at the time of its
writing and revision, but when I tried “she” or “it,” that didn't ring true
either. It didn't occur to me then to try “they,” but that doesn't feel quite
right even now. The solution is to eliminate the pronoun “he” in the second
line and replace it with “God,” but this did not occur to me until recently.
It’s a funny thing how the obvious so often alludes me, but I live and learn
and grow.
The poem itself was the last poem I wrote for Ghost Gear, and, in fact, might be the only poem I wrote for the
book. I wrote most of the poems in Ghost
Gear organically whereas I wrote “Singing” intentionally as a thesis that
declares what the book is essentially about. When I say “Singing” act as a
thesis, people often recoil in terror and indignation, but it wasn’t my idea!
It was Judy Jordan’s. https://www.judyjordanpoet.com/ She was my
primary MFA mentor and is still one of my greatest influences. I send her most
poems I am working on and listen to her criticism with great attention. Her
edits to my second book, Visiting Hours, which
has yet to get picked up but has gotten very
close, were essential to its making.
In our thesis hours at Southern Illinois University, she kept saying that
something was missing from Ghost Gear.
It took her some time to put her finger on it, but we eventually realized that
the book needed a short, lyrical opening that stated what the book was chiefly
about: beauty, survival, and transformation. We also needed a poem upfront that
sort of proved I could write efficient poetry. I’m laughing while I say this,
but she was right: Many of the poems in Ghost
Gear are long, or perhaps long-ish.
When you’re submitting a book, it’s a
good idea to help the reader along a bit, to prove to them what skills you have
as a capital-P Poet, which for whatever reason is synonymous to varying degree
with efficiency AKA shortness. So that
was the goal: to write an efficient and powerful lyrical poem to open the book to
act as an introduction to the meaning of the book and to allow for the longer,
lyric-narrative poems that followed.
I was also reading a
lot of Eric Pankey and Christianne Balk at the time, and it was winter, and,
well, outside my door was a burr oak wintered full of grackles. Much of my work
emerges from the natural world, and “Singing” is no different. Where were you when you started to actually write the poem? And please describe the place in great detail. I was in my one bedroom apartment on West Freeman Street in Carbondale, Illinois where I was working toward my MFA at Southern Illinois University Carbondale. The place was super small because my ex-wife and I were splitting time between Carbondale and Nashville where I am from and where she had a good gig at Vanderbilt University. Thus we had two rents; thus we had two super small apartments.
November 9, 2007.
How many drafts of this poem did you write before going to the final? (And can you share a photograph of your rough drafts with pen markings on it?) I have a practice of saving every typed draft of a poem I am working on, no matter how minute the revisions are from draft to draft. “Singing” is no different. The final version is draft 32. Here is the first:
Singing 1
What do I know of God but that each winter
I thank him for it? No spider webs snagged
Like lover’s hair lingering in the
breeze. No horseflies
Drinking up silver hums of water
Hammocked in purple blossoming cones of
henbit.
No slug trails penned across the cooled hoods
of cars,
Dissipating wakes of schooners at sea.
We are creatures all, stillborn to this
language.
The picket of split pine rails
reinterred. Ice glazed to bone
In every rut.
Each blade of grass sickled by ice
Sharpened dew. But we are not entirely alone
Between the mountain ranges. These hours
Condemned to darkness before the sun gyres
open
The face of January. Winter our time
To catch up with the earth’s egg-shaped
wobble.
Mars thrumming its red-jeweled scepter
In the north sky. The stealth tracks of sleepless jays
Hen-pecked in unmelted snow. This curved arm
Of the galaxy slung wide across the skyboard
Like a smear of light spread wide by a
windshield wiper,
And we gazing up into that black water.
I’ve poems to write. The bur oak outside my front door
Wintered full of grackles, hundreds of
coin-eyed scuttles
Ornamenting its branches. My breath plumes gray.
Brushfire.
The wind, if you listen,
Is an unstudied calligraphy. I, if you take me seriously,
Am in winter a weightlessness. The grackles
Rasping their flight plans limb to limb. The grackles
Are doors, some edged with light, others
black. I
Am riven.
Rising, my arms
Are open wide. Stepping through them,
I step through them. Singing.
I sing.
https://www.facebook.com/rodney.jones.5855594 to no end; God bless him for putting up with me.
In workshop, everyone kept asking me why I insisted on
using the simple present with the progressive present. I couldn’t answer the
question. I just knew it had to be
that way even though revising it to “I step across these thresholds. I sing.” sounded
good to me as well and was, of course, more
efficient, exactly what I was trying to do in my thesis poem for my first
book!
As I was writing the
poem, the poem was teaching me my basic philosophy: that humans are always
growing if they are open, that if they sing at all, they are constantly singing,
that if they cross a threshold, they are forever crossing that threshold and
other thresholds. Life is an act of song, of crossings.
Has this poem been
published before? And if so where? It was published in Ascent in 2012 then anthologized in What Matters, published in Ghost Gear, and featured in Chapter 16 in 2014.
Singing
What do I know of God but that each winter
I thank him for it? No spider webs
snagged in the bluestem, no horseflies at
rest
in blossoming cones of henbit, no slug trails
penned
to the cooled hoods of cars. We are creatures
all,
stillborn to the language of split pine rails
standing in their pickets, ice glazed to bone
in every rut, the stealth tracks of jays a
sleepless
ideography in the snow. But we are not
entirely alone between the mountain ranges,
in these hours condemned to darkness
before the sun gyres open the face of
February
and the red flare of Mars grows dim.
Just outside my door, the burr oak is
wintered
full of grackles— hundreds of coin-
eyed scuttles ornamenting its branches. Here,
my breath plumes gray. In the distance,
brush catches fire. The wind, if you watch,
is calligraphy; the stars in winter,
a weightlessness. The grackles are doors,
rasping their flight plans limb to limb.
The grackles are doors, some limned with
light,
others black. Rising, my arms have long
been open. Stepping across these thresholds,
I step across these thresholds. Singing, I
sing.
@themeanderingpoet
BACKSTORY OF THE POEM
LINKS
001 December 29, 2017
Margo
Berdeshevksy’s “12-24”
002 January 08, 2018
Alexis
Rhone Fancher’s “82 Miles From the Beach, We Order The Lobster At Clear Lake
Café”
003 January 12, 2018
Barbara
Crooker’s “Orange”
004 January 22, 2018
Sonia
Saikaley’s “Modern Matsushima”
005 January 29, 2018
Ellen
Foos’s “Side Yard”
006 February 03, 2018
Susan
Sundwall’s “The Ringmaster”
007 February 09, 2018
Leslea
Newman’s “That Night”
008 February 17, 2018
Alexis
Rhone Fancher “June Fairchild Isn’t Dead”
009 February 24, 2018
Charles
Clifford Brooks III “The Gift of the Year With Granny”
010 March 03, 2018
Scott
Thomas Outlar’s “The Natural Reflection of Your Palms”
011 March 10, 2018
Anya
Francesca Jenkins’s “After Diane Beatty’s Photograph “History Abandoned”
012 March 17, 2018
Angela
Narciso Torres’s “What I Learned This Week”
013 March 24, 2018
Jan
Steckel’s “Holiday On ICE”
014 March 31, 2018
Ibrahim
Honjo’s “Colors”
015 April 14, 2018
Marilyn
Kallett’s “Ode to Disappointment”
016 April 27, 2018
Beth
Copeland’s “Reliquary”
017 May 12, 2018
Marlon
L Fick’s “The Swallows of Barcelona”
018 May 25, 2018
Juliet
Cook’s “ARTERIAL DISCOMBOBULATION”
019 June 09, 2018
Alexis
Rhone Fancher’s “Stiletto Killer. . . A Surmise”
020 June 16, 2018
Charles
Rammelkamp’s “At Last I Can Start Suffering”
021 July 05, 2018
Marla
Shaw O’Neill’s “Wind Chimes”
022 July 13, 2018
Julia Gordon-Bramer’s
“Studying Ariel”
023 July 20, 2018
Bill Yarrow’s “Jesus
Zombie”
024 July 27, 2018
Telaina Eriksen’s “Brag
2016”
025 August 01, 2018
Seth Berg’s “It is only
Yourself that Bends – so Wake up!”
026 August 07, 2018
David Herrle’s “Devil In
the Details”
027 August 13, 2018
Gloria Mindock’s “Carmen
Polo, Lady Necklaces, 2017”
028 August 21, 2018
Connie Post’s “Two
Deaths”
029 August 30, 2018
Mary Harwell Sayler’s
“Faces in a Crowd”
030 September 16, 2018
Larry Jaffe’s “The
Risking Point”
031 September 24,
2018
Mark Lee Webb’s “After
We Drove”
032 October 04, 2018
Melissa Studdard’s “Astral”
033 October 13, 2018
Robert Craven’s “I Have
A Bass Guitar Called Vanessa”
034 October 17, 2018
David Sullivan’s “Paper
Mache Peaches of Heaven”
035 October 23, 2018
Timothy Gager’s
“Sobriety”
036 October 30, 2018
Gary Glauber’s “The
Second Breakfast”
037 November 04, 2018
Heather Forbes-McKeon’s
“Melania’s Deaf Tone Jacket”
038 November 11, 2018
Andrena Zawinski’s
“Women of the Fields”
039 November 00, 2018
Gordon Hilger’s “Poe”
040 November 16, 2018
Rita Quillen’s “My
Children Question Me About Poetry” and “Deathbed Dreams”
041 November 20, 2018
Jonathan Kevin Rice’s
“Dog Sitting”
042 November 22, 2018
Haroldo Barbosa Filho’s
“Mountain”
043 November 27, 2018
Megan Merchant’s “Grief
Flowers”
044 November 30, 2018
Jonathan P Taylor’s
“This poem is too neat”
045 December 03, 2018
Ian Haight’s “Sungmyo
for our Dead Father-in-Law”
046 December 06, 2018
Nancy Dafoe’s “Poem in
the Throat”
047 December 11, 2018
Jeffrey Pearson’s
“Memorial Day”
048 December 14, 2018
Frank Paino’s “Laika”
049 December 15, 2018
Jennifer Martelli’s
“Anniversary”
O50 December 19, 2018
Joseph Ross’s “For Gilberto Ramos, 15, Who Died in
the Texas Desert, June 2014”
051 December 23, 2018
“The Persistence of
Music”
by Anatoly Molotkov
052 December 27, 2018
“Under Surveillance”
by Michael Farry
053 December 28, 2018
“Grand Finale”
by Renuka Raghavan
054 December 29, 2018
“Aftermath”
by Gene Barry
055 January 2, 2019
“&”
by Larissa Shmailo
056 January 7, 2019
“The Seamstress:
by Len Kuntz
057 January 10, 2019
"Natural History"
by Camille T Dungy
058 January 11, 2019
“BLOCKADE”
by Brian Burmeister
059 January 12, 2019
“Lost”
by Clint Margrave
060 January 14, 2019
“Menopause”
by Pat Durmon
061 January 19, 2019
“Neptune’s Choir”
by Linda Imbler
062 January 22, 2019
“Views From the
Driveway”
by Amy Barone
063 January 25, 2019
“The heron leaves her
haunts in the marsh”
by Gail Wronsky
064 January 30, 2019
“Shiprock”
by Terry Lucas
065 February 02, 2019
“Summer 1970, The
University of Virginia Opens to Women in the Fall”
by Alarie Tennille
066 February 05, 2019
“At School They Learn
Nouns”
by Patrick Bizzaro
067 February 06, 2019
“I Must Not Breathe”
by Angela Jackson-Brown
068 February 11, 2019
“Lunch on City Island,
Early June”
by Christine Potter
069 February 12, 2019
“Singing”
by Andrew McFadyen-Ketchum
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