Finding the Form with Susan Haldane
It’s not always good for your sleep, this poetry habit. I write many prose forms for work at my day job, which draws me to the economy and alchemy of poetry for my own writing. I was at a writing retreat led by Lorna Crozier at beautiful Wintergreen Studios in eastern Ontario. Lorna would provide daily prompts and we’d go off and write, sharing our work around the big table the next morning. My notebook for that day just says “First person reinvented – only you know if the poem is true or not – fabricate but must be believable within context of the poem. Let the oracular enter.” That was the spark for my poem “Scattering my father’s ashes”.
Often the value of a prompt is that it offers a side door into a topic or idea that’s taken up residence in you. My dad died the previous summer and he’d obviously been in my thoughts. I wanted to write about the day my mom and sisters and I spread his ashes, but couldn’t find the way in. My sisters and I did try several locations before finding the ‘right’ place, and Lorna’s prompt was an invitation to play with the truth of that.
I went to bed that night in the loft of Wintergreen’s Forest House cabin. When the conscious checks out, the shift starts for the subconscious. I dozed and woke a little later with the core idea for the poem. When I’m writing, I’ll often work and rework lines in my head before committing anything to paper (the advantage of the compact genre compared to fiction or nonfiction!). By the time dawn knocked on the window and the poem turned up in my notebook, much of the language was there already. Writing it out, I experimented with longer somewhat end-stopped lines, then a version as a prose poem before landing on the enjambed lines and single running stanza which seemed to suit the tall-tale nature of the poem. Feedback from Lorna and the workshop participants helped refine the closing lines.
There was a fresh prompt for us to work on that day, but as I recall, not one that kept me up all night.