I’ve spent much of this summer thinking about infrastructure.
I moved the rest of my dad’s stuff out of his duplex, which included my dad’s lifetime tool collection. Carfuls: a dozen wooden levels, a cold green lathe purchased in the 1980s, one-hundred mismatched screwdrivers assembled in a blue wash bin like a crazy quilt. Meanwhile, my partner and I have tried to get our own house projects done before the fall semester. We’re putting down a stone patio ourselves in our backyard and learning about ground grading, stone and sand, and the geometry required for such a task.
I’m thinking about infrastructure in writing as well. What joins a collection of poems together? How does one develop and maintain the book’s framework as the poems are built and assembled? What tools do I need in order to see what I’m doing? How do I build a patio? How do I build a book?
The metaphor of writing as construction or carpentry is, perhaps, played out (after all, most of us writers have moonlighted as would-be builders in something called “workshop”). I think carpentry is one of the most predominant metaphors for our work because writing is all about connection, the joints of what we’re building. And, the satisfaction of using a tactile metaphor for an elusively intangible practice cannot be denied.
Aldo Leopold wrote (I’m paraphrasing) that all tools come from two originals, the axe and the shovel. This is an idea I hate but am also compelled by. It feels destructive and incomplete; what about the tools of observation and listening—conceptual tools to use before action?
But I also feel implicated in Leopold’s metaphor as I dig into the earth and disturb larvae, underground cicadas, ant colonies, and living things too small to see with the naked eye. I dig because I want to build something I will enjoy, another shady place to sit. Same thing when writing a poem that deals with material as delicate as topsoil, as almost everything we write does. Sometimes, when I build with shovel and axe, I forget the fallout. Sometimes, I actually destroy when I think I’m simply building, though maybe one can’t be done without the other.
The city knocked down a house two doors down from us that had trees of heaven growing right through it. In the other direction live several neighbors, and then two houses mysteriously devoid of people. One’s yard gets mowed, but we’ve never seen anyone come or go, and no one lives there. Across the street, the maintained hedges around an ornate Victorian reminds me of the rose gardens in Alice in Wonderland.
When we moved here, my partner said that this is just how small towns are; there is a certain amount of entropy, and fancy and regular and decrepit houses are all mixed together. It makes me think about infrastructure and what happens when infrastructures are maintained and when they are not. An infrastructure can be abandoned or sabotaged on purpose (for instance, erasure poetry or a non-chronological timeline in a narrative). This can be a good thing, a revolution. People can also get too busy, under-resourced, overwhelmed, distracted, conflicted, agonized, or greedy, leading to an infrastructure’s non-intentional crumbling. In poetry, this can lead to an unsuccessful or never-finished manuscript, and that bad feeling we have when we remember what we planned on but haven’t done.
My preservative instinct and ethics pull me between hyper-intrusion and inaction bordering on inefficacy. I overdo the project or start so many that I cannot finish one. I want “my” yard to be “perfect” (which, when I sit and think on it honestly, just means a belief that the amount—and visibility—of work we’ve done would impress other people), but I want every insect to build a nest undisturbed. I want to keep writing poems, but I wonder how to do it without a shovel or an axe.
Readings this Month
I’m doing two poetry readings this month:
Uncloistered Poetry Online ft. JR Turek, Erin Elizabeth Smith, Doc Janning and Freesia McKee, Sunday, August 14th, 2022, 5:00-7:30 pm CST (virtual).
“Another incredible evening of poetry coming to you from wherever you are!” Streaming link will be posted to the Facebook event. There will also be a virtual open mic; you’re welcome to sign up.
Walking Poems: A Reading and Q&A with Sue Blaustein and Freesia McKee, Wednesday, August 31st, 2022, 6:30-8:00 pm CST (in-person at WordHaven BookHouse in Sheboygan, Wisconsin).
Two Milwaukee poets, Sue Blaustein and Freesia McKee, see, hear, and observe poetry while walking in the city. What surprises does a city offer up to someone ambulating through it? What memories, injustices, contradictions, and secrets can you learn about a place on foot? These writers will read their poems with a Q&A following the reading.