Poems,Routes

Few Notes on Poetic Emergence

In March 2020 when the pandemic closed the world, artists, academics, and writers from around the world began curating the human and nonhuman experiences of the global lockdown. There seemed to be an immediate need to document what we were collectively, albeit unevenly, going through. Almost 16 months later with the pandemic not yet over, this need persists, and miscellaneous documentations of the ongoing moment continue.

I am a middle-aged female academic, a south Asian immigrant, who lives and works in a state-funded school in a picturesque college town located in the southeast mountains of Appalachian Ohio. As a compulsive lifelong walker, I have walked this terrain for 17 years. When the pandemic hit, these walks became a sort of elixir. I didn’t just want to walk; I needed to. I also found myself searching for newer and longer routes to wander. With the campus and the town emptied of its inhabitants, many parts of the college town were more accessible and visible. I started walking further and further away from home, into the country, into backroads, and into parts of campus that I’ve never seen. Searching for novelty, I changed my route every day. Some days, I took the same route, but walked on the opposite side of the road. Other days, I walked the same route, but in the opposite direction, starting where I ended the day before. For the ethnographer in me, this felt like my desire to both create a home-field and take part in a whimsical experiment—What did I see when I changed locations? What did I not see when my visual perspective shifted? Where did my eyes go? Perhaps I was experimenting with boredom or studying it—How long did it take for me to get tired of walking in one direction? What was my threshold? Could I do this over and over again, everyday?

What was also going on during these walks was that in a very long time, in the absence of human presence, the landscape, the seasons, the roads, and even small shifts in the wind were bearing relief. I found myself writing cryptic notes in a small pocket-sized notebook that I always carry, what is both an appendage and a habit. I scribbled about the color of the morning sky, the different shades of green on the leaves during different weeks in the Spring, the odd shapes of bolted fences, the surprising beauty of rusted pipes behind buildings, the way that a bush sprouted sudden green leaves, almost overnight, the gentle way that a bud unfurled between yesterday and today, or how entire families of deer passed ahead of me into hillsides, with no fear of human encroachment.

I was also writing small notes about things at home that I was rediscovering—how the sun comes in slowly through the side window in my study and, by 8:30 a.m., envelopes the entire table, and how the kitchen floor creaks in a certain spot; it probably always has, but I have not spent so much concentrated time in the house to attune to its aging sounds. I noticed that the walnut tree in the backyard takes almost 4 weeks to grow all its leaves. In fact, it is the last tree in the block to adorn itself, but the first to shed its leaves in autumn. Or that on the central green courtyard on campus, the last trees to get their leaves are the majestic silver oaks, trees that I had never noticed before because the courtyard was just a space to walk over from building to building in my everyday life as a professor. During an evening walk I remember asking my husband whether there were silver oaks in India and he named a few Indian cities where he saw them as a child. To which I remarked, “Imagine this is the first time I have noticed them, how could I have overlooked their majestic presence?”

Every few weeks, I found that my notes would coalesce into longer sentences that were shaping themselves into something, but I did not know what. The form itself was a question because for the first time instead of paying attention to human life, I was focusing exclusively on the nonhuman life around me. Perhaps this focus was therapeutic, reminding me that the world went on and would go on, despite this catastrophic moment. Eventually, I started typing out the notes in a sort of disorder because I was curious about them. I was persistently asking myself, “Did I want to write an essay?” “Did I want to create a set of walking field notes of the pandemic?” and “Did I need to do anything?”

I kept scribbling. Mr. George Floyd was murdered in broad daylight in Minneapolis, anti-racist riots overtook the world for many weeks in June 2020, the police officers who killed Mr. Floyd were arrested, the legal case began, continued. Black people have been murdered for being black in this country for 400 years. The world felt both small and large, both connected and disconnected. I kept scribbling.

I felt guilt about the scribbling. I wished I was writing something profound about race, racism, life, and death. As someone who researches and writes extensively about the experiences of brown people, both here and in the global south, I was a bit embarrassed about the pastoral nature of my notetaking. To write about nature, to admire it, and to have access to it felt and feels both luxurious and indulgent. What do I know about nature, objects, the trees, and the leaves? Other people, mostly White people, go surfing, snorkeling, hiking, walking trails, foraging, or camping in the woods. They seem to feel free to roam anywhere. People like me, brown white-collar immigrants (albeit with resources), are more comfortable in urban settings. Rural landscapes in the United States, especially in Appalachia, make some of us nervous. Our bodies feel like an interference in a terrain not initially created for us. But in this past year, with fewer human beings around, I felt braver walking further away from home than I ever had. And I kept scribbling.

On occasion, I confided in my husband that it felt oddly obsessive to focus on the minutiae of a landscape and of home because I have spent the last 24 years studying patterns of human identity in north Indian families. He simply said, “Yes, but it is about life as it is, right now.” And then over the months, the notes kept merging and submerging into each other and began taking poetic form. I decided to walk with the flow. I am at best an occasional poet. Once every few years, something inspires me and a poem or two emerges. Sometimes I share the poetry; sometimes I just let it rest in my notebooks. The act of poetic emergence feels enough. Contemplating this subdued power of poetry, in his essay, “Why Poetry Matters,” Jay Parini (2008) describes poetry as follows:

. . . a language adequate to our experience—to our full experience, taking into account the interior valleys, the peaks, the broad plains. It gives voice to tiny thoughts, to what the Scottish poet and scholar Alastair Reid, in a lovely poem, calls “Oddments Inklings Omens Moments.” One does not hope for poetry to change the world. Auden noted when he wrote his elegy for Yates that “poetry makes nothing happen.” That is, it doesn’t shift the stock market or persuade dictators to stand down. It usually does not send masses onto the street to protest a war or petition for economic justice. It works in quieter ways, shaping the interior spaces of readers, adding a range of subtlety to their thoughts, complicating the world for them.(B16)

The pandemic has shrunk and enlarged—permanently and temporarily—our everyday worlds. The poems that emerged from my experience of these transformations indeed provide a voice for the “tiny thoughts” that can occur around profound change or simply in the every day. Instead of leaving them in the notebooks, I am choosing to share them as my “tiny” experience of long and short pandemic days, weeks, and months. The four poems that I share here are not the only ones that emerged in the year, but I find that they cohere well together. I have borrowed on a seasonal (perhaps clichéd) theme and placed them roughly in the order of seasons. But if memory serves me well, they did indeed emerge in the order in which I was scribbling the notes.

The pandemic is not yet over, but for now we have survived or are surviving it. The brevity of the forms these poems take is a reminder that sometimes traces of adjacent aesthetic experience tell a story. Poetic scribbling of my pandemic walking world is both my experience and my observation of that experience. In writing about art and aesthetic, the novelist Sigrid Nunez (1995) intones that art allows us “. . . to be part of the world and to be removed from the world at the same time” (p. 101). Perhaps that is the purpose these poems serve for this pandemic moment—to be simultaneously of it and outside of it.

I

(March)

Cusp

March and April,

the months of entangled seasons.

In the northern hemisphere

winter is on her last breath and

spring draws her first.

We know the end of this story.

We know who will survive this

enmeshed,

in-between time

when one season dies

so the other may live.

Every year

at this time

everything feels as if

on a cusp.

Like us,

now.

II

(June)

Shades

I like spring.

But I prefer the indecisiveness of flora

in the months and weeks

just before the world turns green.

In that time,

every day

the same plant displays

so many verdant hues.

Begging the question,

how many shades of green

must exist?

Leaves become

so many

tones, colors, moods,

before they are

leaves.

Just like us,

before we

become

fully

human.

But

for us

it’s a

question of choice.

III

(October)

Decay

I find that

I want to write an essay

about decay.

Mostly because I like the way

the word

rolls

off

my

tongue.

And as soon

as it does

roll

off

my

tongue

it’s as if

sounding

those two syllables

makes it real.

They nudge me

to look around,

to search for it.

These days

it does not take long

to find it

because

time

herself

is

decaying

even before the

word

rolls

off

my

tongue.

IV

(May)

Light, Things.

Sometimes I will walk into a room

in my house,

where I have lived

for 16 years,

and the room

feels unrecognizable.

Like last week,

there was a soft,

almost pious

late evening summer light

reflecting on the surface

of the Vietnamese dining table.

Or so the label said when we bought it

in 2005.

Heavy is what I remember it being

because we put it together ourselves.

The sun makes it buoyant,

almost.

The peonies

from last Wednesday

have aged well, and now

are slowly crumbling around

their vase.

Light gives life

and

takes it.

But for that one moment

the table, the flowers, and I

are held in

symphonic

weightlessness.

That is to say

that sometimes

in the stretch of a

luminous glance,

things are perfect.