Serendipity: The Metaphor of Encounter
Sojourner K. Rolle -- December 14, 2005
Well, talk about journeys. I've just gotten back from a fairly fast leisurely journey around the Caribbean world. Six island nations and the U. S. Virgin Islands in 12 days. I had a host of encounters and new experiemces. I was struck by the music so I wrote about traveling.
I wrote a song about traveling from island to island and one poem about viewing a landscape from the cruise ship library window. Not the magnum opus I envisioned with so much leisure time. In fact, I was in a social swirl the entire trip. Not to worry. As time passes, I know all the colors and flavors of the voyage will surface and I will write many new things. I am thankful for the experience. Memory fuels our writing. We just have to open up the repository and let the good stuff flow out. That's why freewriting is such a marvelous tool for letting our memories surface. In my first column several weeks ago, I suggested a freewite to see what came up . (You can check out the Inkbyte archive if you missed the first one). Its been awhile and you may have already taken that freewrite and parsed its essence into a poem. ( I take creative liberty with the definition of parse but I carry a poetic license).
First, Reach Out And Grasp A Thread!
Dig out that writing or any writing from before. Sometimes I come across a journal entry months after I wrote it and that's when the "gold" hits me upside the head. No matter what or how much you wrote, look back over your freewrite and see what grabs your heart when you read it again. Sometimes a reference will cause one to pause and go off on a little mental excursion triggered by the reference. So try to sense what makes you pause or tingle or get teary or have any emotional response that you recognize as being different than what you feel about the rest of the writing? In other words, what word or phrase or line or stanza or sentence or idea stands out emotionally. This is where you pick up the thread. Seize that thought -- that emotional nugget, that golden thread. Name the thing that intrigues you about the thread, What caught your attention about it. "It was blue." "I have always loved the color blue." "I remember the blue scarf my mother always wore to whenever she went outside the house." Or was it a sound, or a food, or a person's name. Isolate that thread from the rest of the entwined writing.
Next, Locate The Moment.
Writer Richard Hugo in The Triggering Town posited that every poem begins or takes place or happens somewhere. In his words, "if you don't begin somewhere, you have nowhere to go." Begin by placing the event. Whatever thread we are picking to follow has some context. Where did it happen? What time of year or day? Such as "On Georgia Avenue, summer was a time to catch fireflies at twilight" We would race up and down the gravel road with our jelly jars and then, breathless, wallow, laughing in the clover." Following my second visit to Montano de Oro State Park near Morro Bay, CA, I began a poem as follows:
Here again at Montano
where brown striated earth
nestles, close to the sea
obliterating demarcation
embracing the littoral,
a poet perches
on a rounded rock...
Now tell us what is important. What happened here. What is it about this place and what happened there that holds emotional gold for you. For me, Montano de Oro represents my great encounter with the Pacific Ocean a physical and emotional interplay with an iconographic reality. The poem continues as follows,
... a poet perches
on a rounded rock
her legs awash in secrets
gathered from a thousand shores"
"How great thou art"
said the poet to the sea.
"Yes," responded the Ocean,
"and you are borne of me."
The poet lay back,
her wind-pricked body
accepting at every pore.
"Take me in ," said the poet.
"We are one," said the sea.
Slowly, through the ages,
Through the roar and fire of time,
Through generations bearing kind
and the pact of eternal promise --
The Covenant, Infinity,
Mother Earth, the Poet,
transformed to Mother Sea.
This poem is only one of several written during my several days at Morro Bay but for me it holds much emotion. It represents a moment in time and in a place where I felt both situated and transformed as a poet. See what comes of your moment.
Tell me what you feel. My hope is that things written here will engender response. See the Ink Byte Feedback page if you want to share your opinions and questions with other readers, or, to contact me privately, send email to Serendipity@InkByte.com.