Seed Banks & Perennial Poetics (II)

(read Part I here)

This next bit of this craft essay assumes a few of its readers have chosen, or at least heavily considered, making art and writing as their means to make a living. This is the decision I made, probably way before I understood that decision’s weight. 

It is not an easy path to monetize your art. It’s not easy in the logistical sense, but it’s also not easy emotionally. I want to be pragmatic about the weight, but I also want to share the ways I am still able to reignite my love of poetry when the clouds roll in. 

Growing up, I was very lucky to have a mother who refused to get rid of any of my “kid art.” Do you remember those big clear plastic comforter bags with zippers? My mom would fill those bags with, quite literally, anything I ever scribbled on.

I remember thinking, “You don’t have to save everything. I can always make more.” But I also remember digging into that kid art as a preteen and collaging it all together. The remix of it all, the upcycling—in essence, the reduction of creative waste. I feel now, so keenly, that my good ideas are finite. I am so, so, not an endless well of good ideas. I am painfully human, and beautifully limited for being so. Perhaps this sentiment feels familiar.

Because I am trying to make a living through my writing, I often feel the pressure to “produce.” The more I produce, the better I eat, the better my dog eats. These facts are impossible to ignore. And these facts are what motivate me to find ways to reduce my creative waste, to purpose all of my art.

Nonce forms have been indispensable in my writing life. I create forms specifically catered to the lines that linger in my scattered notepads. The disparate ideas that need a scaffolding to come alive. This constant need for new scaffolding is why I created a form called the Marble Run.¹

I named the Marble Run after the antique toy by the same name. With landscape-long lines, the latter half of the first line becomes the first half of the second line, and so on for 27 lines (split into three Spenserian stanzas). It’s meant to move most like switchbacks down the mountain.

In the 27^th and final line, the poem’s first line repeats. It collapses in on itself, much like we imagine a crown of sonnets to collapse, to circle, to orbit. The Marble Run is a form built to undo and redo, to truck somewhere unexpected, colloquially, and reflexively.

I joke that this form is just built to use the same ideas twice, but to sound cool and totally justified in doing so. A reduction of waste. A recycled line. For the three poems I’ve completed in this form, I took all my unsuccessful poems and wrestled them into the Marble Run’s scaffolding. A challenge to be sure, but also so helpful in my goal to reduce creative waste. You can read a Marble Run I’ve written titled “A Marble Run for Another End-of-Days” here, if you’d like.

Poetic forms, to me, are tools for world building. These formal parameters act like the outermost edge of the coded world in Zelda, or Super Mario, or Spryo. This isn’t an analogy I would have come to if not for my partner, who recently splurged on a PlayStation 4 with the sole purpose of playing Naughty Dog’s The Last of Us. I was a total naysayer and, ashamedly, at first, made fun of them for their newfound gaming.

But it’s best not to knock anything until you try it. The Last of Us and its very queer sequel are a total wonder: the zombie genre and the human imagination for world building and world crumbling at its finest.

Amid unending violence and threats, Ellie, the queer protagonist of The Last of Us, collects trading cards while searching abandoned homes for ammunition and isopropyl alcohol for Molotov cocktails.

What is more human than a kid collecting trading cards, even as the world burns? What is more human than trying to find something small to sustain us—despite it all?

And what American, doesn’t remember tucking their head into a handful of Pokémon cards while their parents argued, too loud for comfort? I am moved by every little thing that makes us human. 

My good friend and colleague, C. Russell Price, is, in my opinion, our generation’s resident PhD of all things “Doomsday,” but they’re also our expert in beauty.

In their poem, “Désirée Says, ‘There Were Crisis Actors at the Crucifixion of Jesus Christ,’” Price writes:

You can always tell a lot about someone
by how they roll and how they want the end
to happen. Fire and ice are so passé.

Maybe nothing says more about American boredom
than by how well fleshed we imagine Armageddon.²

These lines, of course, are brilliant. They directly address what is most true about American fantasies of the apocalypse. Put plainly: having the time and space to imagine Armageddon is a luxury in and of itself. To relish reruns of The Walking Dead, to play The Last of Us, to re-read Kamandi year after year—these are luxuries born from a space of comfort where I, and maybe we, can only hypothesize a more uncomfortable world.

I suppose all of this is to say: having a go-bag and having already used one are two very different things. And to need a go-bag but not have one—more different still. Apocalypses are all over, scattered about our past, present, and most certainly our future.

Should an end come, I’ll propagate my house plants in the toilet before I leave. Should an end come, I’ll make certain to keep a seed or two of perennial joy in my pocket. I am just grateful to be here, for however long.

 

*This blog post was adapted from a craft talk delivered to North Carolina State University, in the Spring of 2021.

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¹Candrilli, Kayleb Rae. “A Marble Run for the Lights & A Marble Run for This Finite Earth.” American Poetry Review, vol. 49, no. 4, 2020, pp. 37–38.

²Price, C. Russell. “Désirée Says, ‘There Were Crisis Actors at the Crucifixion of Jesus Christ.’” Forthcoming. Guesthouse, 2021.