On Vicinity: A reflection

Statement or Question

A new side of Poetry & Process was just announced, entitled Memory. This will be built around a community that desires to live with poetry as a companion in their everyday life, developing this companionship by memorizing poetry together. You can read about this launch in the recent post, Announcing: Memory. Memory begins tomorrow, Sunday, November 12. It is a new benefit for paid Poetry & Process subscribers and I am offering 20% off through the launch!

Now for today’s Reflection on On Vicinity!

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Spoken rendition of “On Vicinity”.

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Process

Photo by Nicolas Wurzer on Unsplash

I love to walk outside. Spring and fall are my favorite walking seasons, but all times of year I need to be moving my body outside for a portion of the day. I would love to say that I typically just walk in silence and spend the time in a mindful state or let my mind wander to the corners of creativity. However, I usually have a podcast in my ear, for better or worse.

On a walk this past spring, I decided to turn off the noise to conduct the final mile in silence and to place more attention on the budding trees and bird song. The word vicinity popped into my mind, and it felt like it carried a slight whiff of inspiration, so I jotted it down in my “Poetry Concepts” file in Evernote. This file is where I keep little thoughts that I want to explore through poetry but may not have the ability to dive into in the moment. Here are a few examples of the types of thoughts that live in this file today.

• The space between the pen and the mind.

• Soil. Poetry collection processing what and where I came from.

• We spend our lives trying to change our mind.

• Poem on my last name, including the embarrassment from when I was young.

• The audible musician’s breath in a recording of quiet piano/cello music.

My small clip of my “Poetry Concepts” file in Evernote.

I returned to the word vicinity a few weeks later, though inspiration seemed to have fled and I did not know where to go with this word. I felt there was a story to tell, so I persisted with the word for a week to form this poem and watched something creative slowly emerge.

The polish on this piece was completed just a few days prior to publishing it on Substack. I deleted a handful of words from the original final version that had extra layers of descriptors that felt unnecessary. This is a common theme I am beginning to notice as I revisit poems that were written a while ago. A piece that I thought was complete often appears to be asking to be revisited in small ways that enrichen the beauty of the pictures, the flow of the cadence or the expansiveness of the message, often with the delete key.

Themes

I started out to tell a poetic story highlighting the specifics of what was in this person’s life as illustrated by objects in their living space, paired with a juxtaposition of what the person has and what they want. It was meant to be a look at desire and contentment.

Instead, a type of house tour emerged from basement to bedroom to kitchen to garden with very few specifics of what is contained in the space. Currently I find myself gravitating towards words that provide for a very open poem so the reader can place what comes to their mind into the writing. Threads emerged throughout the stanzas with a variety of possibilities, such as where someone finds themself in their current life, a look at abandoned futures, possible pains and possible joys, and what I think is the strongest theme, considering fixed paths one is expected to walk and an inkling that this person is going to take a different direction.

An idea an artist begins with that shifts throughout the creative process often creates an authentic outcome. I love this part of writing and often feel when this occurs that the writing is happening through me, not from me. I do question if I should make another attempt at the original theme (in this case, desire and contentment) as a way to pull that idea into the spotlight. Perhaps that is the thought I need to explore that scares me, therefore I do not allow myself the effort of diving into that topic, and instead allow the poem to morph into an area that I have spent more time with.

Punctuation

If you have been following my poetry, you may have noticed the lack of punctuation to be unusual. My poetic voice typically makes use of commas and periods in some sort of standard sentence structure. An early draft of this poem had a period at the end of each stanza which I removed when I realized many of these sentences carried not just a statement but a question within them.

I encourage you to reread On Vicinity a few times, first by reading it with an internal stance of statements, followed by the stance of questions. I’m curious if that changes the poem and its meaning for you. Let me know in the comments.

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As always, thank you for reading! I hope you’ll take everything I wrote about the themes in On Vicinity and entirely throw them out to replace it with what you feel when you read it. This is the intent of the Poetry & Process newsletter, designed to allow you to have space to let the poem do its work in you, by publishing the poem first with the reflection published days later. Poetry is alive and can inspire many different things and I honor that. There is no wrong way to feel or interpret.

May we honor that which surrounds us.

Brian

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If you missed the “A Poem” post of On Vicinity, I hope you will read and enjoy! You can find it here.

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