![]() ![]() She’d send a poem when she had one, and I’d send one when I had one. When the class ended and the pandemic hit, Carol Ann generously offered to continue a correspondence. I learned poets call such moves “turns,” and I worked to build nests for them. I thought of such moves as “bridges” like in music, a shift in key mid-song, or like on hiking trails, a way across a chasm. If there is a central idea or concept or plotline, the best thing you can do is swerve from it, take a leap. I’ve seen how having a theme-or, god forbid, a thesis-in mind ahead of time can tank a decent essay. The truth is I’d been doing something similar with creative nonfiction for a long time. Make a nest of language, she’d say, and see what hatches. Think about sound, image, music, rhythm, syntax … and see what comes. Carol Ann disabused me of that notion straight off the bat. I like thinking, on the page and off, and I assumed thinking would get in the way of making poems. I thought my problem would be too much thinking. The experience moved me-changed me-the same way reading a good poem could, and the way she shifted my perspective came as a surprise. The fact that I stumbled into Carol Ann Davis’s Fairfield MFA workshop “Poetry for Prose Writers” was less a stroke of luck than a revelation. ![]() I feared that once I starting making poems, I would understand how they worked, and the act of knowing how or why poems worked seemed not just wrong but dangerous. I wrote nonfiction and occasionally fiction, never poetry. So, I read poetry, yes, but I did not write it. After reading them, I’d step into the day right. The best poems shifted something in me, almost like a chiropractic move, an adjustment of the spirit. I often did not understand what the poems meant, but I felt them. I’d read it in the mornings as a kind of spiritual practice, the heart of which was always a kind of unknowable-ness. ![]()
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