Reading through Kelli Russell Agodon’s collection, Letters from the Emily Dickinson Room, I was moved again and again by the kinship evoked between speaker and the poets addressed throughout the poems, but also between poet and craft, and poet to poet. In this week’s poem, “Yakima Ferry at Sunset,” this idea of kinship is there for me from the first line’s declaration:
Tonight I could write a thousand poems
no one should have to read . . .
This line brings to mind a line from Pablo Neruda:
Puedo escribir los versos más tristes esta noche . . .
(Tonight I can write the saddest lines . . .)
This kind of lyric echo speaks to the poet in me, or, rather the poets in me. At times I am the poet of Neruda’s line, lost in reverie and sorrow; at other times, I am the poet of Agodon’s line, possessed by writing, the sheer event of it inspired by the immediacy of a given moment and place.
I often go with my wife to look at fabric or yarn for the projects she’s working on. Walking through the aisles of material, I imagine the possibilities closed to me, but open to anyone who knows how to sew or knit. I can only compare it to the surge of feeling I get when I walk around the woods or body of water in just the right mood, or sit by a window at a café that happens to be in the right light, a feeling of: Today I could write . . .
There’s no guarantee, only a glimpse. One can’t recreate this feeling, one can only acknowledge it for the call to words that it is, and get down what one can, “skimming the edges like every poet.”
Yakima Ferry at Sunset – Kelli Russell Agodon
Tonight I could write a thousand poems
no one should have to read.
All around me are hippie grandmothers
and grey-haired men with dreamcatchers
hanging from the rearview mirrors of their
Hondas. Everyone is irresistable tonight:
the man in his NRA t-shirt, the child
on the upper deck screaming about licorice,
the woman who cut in front of me to buy a latte.
I am skimming the edges like every poet
on this boat, starting my sentences
with the easiest words – I love, I love, I love
to travel home by ferry, the women
who smile at the men they don’t know,
how my tongue feels in my mouth,
a sort of heaviness that never leaves.
*
Happy ferrying!
José
Last Friday, I had the pleasure of talking at Foy H. Moody High School (Go Trojans!), the high school I graduated from in Corpus Christi, Texas. My talk was structured around the above quote from William Stafford and the idea of writing as performance. Along with reading poems about the moon, I provided students with index cards where they could try their hand at describing/creating the moon. Here’s one that a student, Ashley, was kind enough to allow me to share here:
The Influence 