In January 1989, I attended the Atlantic Center for the Arts Master-in-Residence program, where Carolyn Forché was teaching a three-week workshop in New Smyrna Beach, Florida. I was not a young person nor a young poet, I had been writing and publishing since high school, but I needed a fresh start. On the first day of the workshop, Carolyn asked us – I think there were about 12 of us participants – what we hoped to get out of our experience. I don’t know what I said, but I knew why I was there: I was bored with my own writing. The lyric form had gone stale for me. I didn’t know what to do next.
It was a momentous experience. I know that, even though I have almost no specific memories of the workshop itself. We must have read and discussed our work. Did we write new poems? Did Carolyn give us assignments? I have no surviving poems from that period. I do remember that Carolyn took notes in a large bound notebook. I know we talked and talked, with her and among ourselves. We walked on the beach. Musicians set some of our poems to music. We built confidence. We made friends. We got to know each other honestly. At the end of the three weeks, Carolyn said to me, “I think you’re going to write a lot.”
I didn’t know what on earth she might mean. Lacking any further direction, I went back to February in New York City and began, without much hope, to keep a daily journal. I was in psychoanalysis at the time, so much of what I wrote went deeply into my childhood and a failed marriage. It got pretty emotional, which turned out to be important for the purposes of the poem; some of those passages became the strongest in the book. I kept the journal for a year. I set it aside. I went on an “expedition” to the North Pole. I kept a journal. I also took notes, in addition: things I saw, how I felt, what other people said and did. I came back to New York. At some point, in thinking about how to use the North Pole journal, it occurred to me that I could structure the book around it, the demarcations of the earth, making the Poles the end points, and organizing the journals into sections corresponding to the Arctic and Antarctic, the temperate zones, the tropics, the Poles. Bingo! That idea was the first big step in making the manuscript eventually cohere. Fascinated by the Ice, I read a lot of books about continental drift, the 20th century Polar explorers, tectonic plates, the history of maps and ancient myths about unknown regions of the world. I took notes: I added them in. Thinking I needed first-hand experience in order to finish the manuscript, I went to Antarctica and then to the South Pole. I kept journals. I could never have imagined what Antarctica would be like if I hadn’t gone there. I added it all in. (Virginia Woolf usefully said something like: put it all in, you can always take it out.) I sent the sprawling manuscript to Martha Rhodes at Four Way Books. She said she loved it, that the poem was in there somewhere, and sent it back to me to revise.
I didn’t know what on earth she might mean! I tried to put the sentences into verse, but they didn’t want to go there. Looking back on it now, I realize I made a sort of decision to make the sentence and the line co-terminus, but it was completely intuitive at the time. I followed my instincts. I used degree marks and ample white space to make divisions between the sentences (or paragraphs in some cases). I had learned along the way that a lyric poem often begins in the second stanza (or beyond), so cutting held (only a) little terror for me. My rule was to save any language that felt alive, that sparked, and to ditch everything else, no matter how much it meant to me. I started with obvious passages, quotes, for instance, and quotidian journal entries. In the course of ridding the poem of its flotsam and jetsam, I realized that I was creating a narrative prose poem. I’m slow, I’ve always been slow. I had doubts, I got discouraged. There were months and months I turned to other things, other projects. On my computer I taped a fortune cookie message: Give yourself time – you will reach success. Gradually, cut by cut by cut, identifying and removing everything that wasn’t relevant to the core personal story the poem was telling, everything that didn’t “speak,” slowly, slowly I began to see where each journal passage might fit in the larger scheme: for instance, a short section that contains the lines devoted to the father comes at the very center of the book, “The Equator;” a section on love and alcoholism is called “The Intemperate Zone.”
After deleting the unnecessary passages and organizing the sections as best I could, I began to weave the narrative across the whole, moving sentences around within each section, refining the language, finding places to repeat phrases, ideas and words that would tie the manuscript together. For instance, “I love that” became a recurring phrase, the ideas of cold and glare functioned as recurring themes, and “Nevertheless” worked as a recurring and funny tagline. I searched for ways to use other poetic devices: alliteration (“White (why) space”), assonance (“a flat blank map”), sentence fragments (“Humankind at the crack, the crack of”), other forms of fractured syntax (I followed one suggestion spoken by a character in the poem: “My advice? said Aunt Phoebe, “Take out the becauses”), metaphors (“Ice so blue it’s frozen sky”), similes (“Like bats, avoiding each other by radar”), etc. I didn’t know how I would know when I was finished; that was intuitive too, but I did know. The poem clicked in, like the last jigsaw puzzle pieces. When I finally sent the revision to Martha, she blessedly said, “You did it!” She published the book as Degrees of Latitude: A Poem, in 2007, eighteen years after Carolyn’s workshop. Carolyn wrote a blurb. Calling it “almost a lyric novel,” she said, “I’ve been waiting a long time to read this book, and it is very much worth the wait.” I had found a new voice. I am forever grateful.
My advice? as Aunt Phoebe would say: follow your instincts. Follow the language that sparkles. One thing leads to another. Let the poem take its own sweet time. Let it tell you where it wants to go. Don’t be afraid to let go of the parts you love that don’t serve the needs of the poem. Don’t be afraid to leave in the parts that scare you. Have fun. Enjoy the process. The results will take care of themselves. You will reach success.
Laurel Blossom is the author of four books of lyric verse, two book-length narrative prose poems from Four Way Books (Degrees of Latitude and Longevity), and a prose poem chapbook, Un-, from Finishing Line Press (2020). She has received fellowships from the Ohio Arts Council, the New York Foundation for the Arts (NYFA), the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA), and Harris Manchester College (Oxford University). She co-founded the esteemed writer-in-residence and workshop program, The Writers Community, in New York City (1976-2008) and served for a dozen years as one of the editors of Heliotrope, a journal of poetry, along with Barbara Elovic, Victoria Hallerman and Susan Sindall. In 2004, after 30 years of life in New York City, she and her husband, writer Leonard Todd, moved to Edgefield, South Carolina, where she served as the town’s first Poet Laureate (2015-17). Currently, she lives in Los Angeles.