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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.
#80 Backstory of the Poem “Of Water
and Echo” by Gillian Cummings
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?
The
poem was conceived when I was standing inside a tree, a hollow sycamore. I call
this tree “my tree,” and I go to the tree when I seek consolation. The tree is
up a bank to the side of the Pocantico River. I was standing in the tree,
hearing the river rushing nearby, and the poem began to form. I heard its
rhythms being spoken in my mind, as if being spoken by the tree, or as if the
tree and I—or maybe the tree and the river and I—were one breathing being. 
I
wrote the words down in a pocket notebook once I returned to my car. That was
the beginning. Then I transferred this poem, in its exact form, into my
journal. Sometimes I write longhand and sometimes directly onto the laptop, but
this was a longhand poem.
I showed the poem to various editors as I was working
on it. Its current form owes a debt, most especially, to Cynthia Cruz, who cut
it down the most drastically and had me retitle it. I’d written a collection of
sonnets, and she pruned them all, so that most of them couldn’t remain sonnets.
So this takes you from the tree to the book with its paper that means a killed
tree, which is sad. Maybe I dare not tell “my tree” about what came of the
voice it gave me.
Where
were you when you started to actually write the poem? And please describe the place in great
detail. The poem was written in the beginning of summer, and yet
there were already signs of autumn in the woods, a red leaf here or there, dead
wildflowers and ones just coming into bloom.
The woods were the woods of
Rockefeller State Park Preserve, a place that’s my haven here in Westchester
County. I live in the suburb of New York City just north of the Bronx, and we
have some beautiful parks here. This one is my favorite. 
When I was going
through my serious depression, I went to the park every day, or almost. I
didn’t always go to the tree, just sometimes, just in moments when I especially
needed to feel the immanence of the sacred. The sycamore is still living. It’s not a dead, hollow tree.
When I’m inside it in the summer and I look up, I see
green leaves on the branches above me. The inside of the tree has a wasp nest
and a lot of old spider webs.
Sometimes people walking down the trail see me in
the tree and give me funny looks. I don’t really care. It’s more important to
be with the tree. One time, when I was particularly suicidal, I went into the
tree crying. I prayed to the tree for help, and heard the words, “Tell Rich to
keep repeating to you to have patience, to have faith in him, and to have faith
in God.”
Rich is my husband. He repeated these sentences to me over and over
that day. That night, I got a phone call and an email. The phone call was from
Diane Goettel of Black Lawrence Press, telling me that my first book had won
the Hudson Prize.
The email was from Kristy Bowen of Dancing Girl Press, saying
that she wanted to publish my chapbook Ophelia. So you see, it’s a very lucky
tree. And it was important to my second book, The Owl Was a Baker’s Daughter, too.
What
month and year did you start writing this poem? The
first draft dates to June 4, 2013.
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?)
About
eight. Sometimes the changes were very minor, like line breaks. After Cynthia
Cruz went over it, it became quite a different poem—a quieter and cleaner poem.
I can show you the first draft that I wrote in my journal.
Because I edit on my
laptop and don’t make printouts of subsequent drafts, it would be hard to show
you more than this. I apologize.
Were
there any lines in any of your rough drafts of this poem that were not in the
final version? And can you share them
with us?
The original title was “Because Bark Is Neither
Boat nor a Hearkening.” The final title is “Of Water and Echo.”
Here are the phrases that were cut completely:
“off chipping, mulchy darkness,
water singing throats of wasps’ nests”
“off this closet”
“her (throat) opening to make sense
(of) the shrilly (bold call)”—the words in parentheses were kept.
What
do you want readers of this poem to take from this poem?
I
don’t ever assign meanings or morals to my poems. I just want them to be an
experience in themselves. I never have preconceived ideas of what I want a
reader to take away.
I guess I could say a feeling of sadness, combined with
the solace that is and was the tree—but even to say that is actually much more
than I would wish for. What I want is for readers to feel whatever the poem
evokes for them, separate from what it evoked or meant for me.
Which
part of the poem was the most emotional of you to write and why? The
hardest lines to write from an emotional standpoint were, “the coming of blade,
of the axe’s / edge opening the throat
of bold call…” I say this because what I sought was my own death, but what I
imagined was the death of the tree.
And the tree was innocent. The tree didn’t
deserve to die. It made and makes me immeasurably sad to think of that tree
encountering an axe. Perhaps that is why the poem has poignancy for me: to lose
what you most love, as I nearly lost the love of someone very dear to me—and
then I did lose, to death, so many friends and helpers, just not the person
whose loss I feared. 
Has
this poem been published before? And if
so where?
This poem was first published, under its original title, in
Luna Luna.
Anything
you would like to add? I would just like to add that when I
die, I would like my ashes to be scattered inside this tree. If it is still
alive. If it will continue breathing the air I once breathed, standing in the
place where I always visited, with the river burbling over rocks nearby, and
birds taking shelter in its branches.
Of Water and Echo
She is in the tree by the river
that sings in the tree, in the
mouth
of the tree waxing mournful on
water.
The hively shrilling of bees,
darker
than honey, more homely than
resinous gold.
It’s cold and damp in the song
of water
ringing of ripple, of rapid and
fade, of
day’s end and the coming of
blade, of the axe’s
edge opening the throat of bold
call. Of
what the moon won’t say in any
emergency,
any anxious fall, reds in the
greens of summer,
the lone hollow of tree by the
river
in which she sings, water in
her teeth.
http://www.gilliancummingspoet.com
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
070 February 14, 2019
“Daily Commute”
by Christopher P. Locke
071 February 18, 2019
“How Silent The Trees”
by Wyn Cooper
072 February 20, 2019
“A New Psalm
of Montreal”
by Sheenagh Pugh
073 February 23, 2019
“Make Me A
Butterfly”
by Amy Barbera
074 February 26, 2019
“Anthem”
by Sandy Coomer
075 March 4, 2019
“Shape of a Violin”
by Kelly Powell
076 March 5, 2019
“Inward Oracle”
by J.P. Dancing Bear
077 March 7, 2019
“I Broke
My Bust Of Jesus”
by Susan Sundwall
078 March 9, 2019
“My Mother
at 19”
by John Guzlowski
079 March 10, 2019
“Paddling”
by Chera Hammons Miller
080 March 12, 2019
“Of Water and
Echo”
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