Fields of Yellow Flowers
On art and renewal.
Hi Folks,
A few weeks ago I taught a lesson to my 6th grade students on collage poetry, specifically the form of centos, where you take one line from a plethora of poems and weave them together to create an entirely new poem. I handed them an old book of nature poems I found on the bookshelves of the trailer classroom I borrowed space in, and set them loose.
I love collage poetry. Some will say that the form is unoriginal, and less worthy of appreciation than words that have come entirely out of your own head; others will say that the best art comes from stealing and getting away with it. I stand somewhere in the middle, a firm believer that there is an art to borrowing, and that if done right, something entirely new can be created from it. I’ve always liked writing more than anything else because it feels almost like a magic trick: out of nothing, something is born. Words come from the air; they are made, and then they make us new again within their messages.
The below is a poem written by my student Emma, shared with permission. Emma likes to tell me all the time that she is not a poet, to which I always argue against her. I have thought about this poem every single day since I first read it. I have thought about what it means to bloom, to put yourself in plain sight for all to see. The ways in which that can frighten. And too, the ways in which it can inspire, fear and greatness a line we straddle. Emma did not title her poem, and I did not ask her to. I think it speaks well enough for itself.
I am the master of fate,
The rose that grew from concrete,
who never found forgiveness.
But I laugh as the world goes down in fire
as I hurt all living things.
Don’t run, I hold all the whispers in my hands
as all the leaves crush beneath me
and everyone sees the narrow
broken life that you so dearly want to live.
No one but the rosebush knows
where I grow from, what a phantom it is.
How big of a show is put on.
•
When I walk through the woods each evening, I think to myself that surely she is right. No one but the rosebush knows how lonely it has been, how the dusk shadows and overwhelms. How there were meant to be so many visions of myself in this life, a multitude of versions, and none of them seem aligned with who I am now. I think of myself at her age: clinging to a future in which I could be happy, free. In which I could disappear from my home and build an entirely new one. Become unknowable. In my notebook I covered the whole front page in those words: I am unknowable, I am unknowable, I am unknowable.
It was winter then and the world was still frozen in time. Only the roots of the trees snaking over the barren ground could understand what I wanted. They seemed to know even when I did not. When no one was looking, I ran my fingers along the bark, imagining that there was someone inside the wood speaking to me. Later, in my iPhone notes, I would find the following: “This morning the man in the tree appeared and spoke to me / You will be okay, he said / Even if today you cannot see or feel it / His face rough hewn, his shoulders knotted and arms cut off / At the elbow / I could not help but trust him / He has been here before / He has seen the weathered world in ways / I can only begin to imagine.”
My whole life I have felt like I have something I must say hanging off the tip of my tongue. It is there, right there, so close, and yet I have not ever been able to find the right words. Or maybe I have them, but I am afraid to say them, to give them physical space in the world. I am afraid that others will say things back that I will not like, or that they will twist my words into something unrecognizable, take from me the only thing it feels I have left at times. If we lose our words we lose ourselves.
Perhaps this is why I like to take the words of others and make them into something new. I have always liked to lose myself in things: in song, in obsession, in crush, in love or what I thought was love. In stories and forests, in cities and strange, invisible mental threads that criss-cross between my body and the bodies of everyone around me. Forging connections that it feels safer to imagine. Sometimes I wonder if I have ever had any original thoughts or if everything about myself has been borrowed from another, pulled from the media I like, the propaganda sold to me. The things I am told I ought to enjoy, I ought to understand. If you strip it all away, what is left? And where shall I stand within that?
This morning I was on the phone with my mother. We were talking about addiction and creativity, and I said something along the lines of, well, that’s part of why I moved out of the city. I wanted to figure out where my creativity stems from away from all the other artists. I wanted it to come from myself first. I wanted to find a new path that wouldn’t turn me into something dangerous. I wanted to pull my art out of my own brain and body, and to see what the words could look like without constant stimuli.
Surely, I am not the first to think this. It’s kind of the entire point of artists retreats, to figure out where your work comes from when it is just you and the page, the canvas, the instrument. To relearn originality. There is a purpose to this isolation, but there is also a privilege there. Finding the time and space to exist alone is not something that comes naturally or easily. I run from isolation, even when I know it is the thing I need most. When I force myself into it in the name of creative production, I end up feeling overwhelming loneliness, which leads me to this conclusion: art is not enough to sustain us alone.
For a long time I thought it could be, and I think there was a part of me that needed it to be as well. For a long time it felt like my art was all I had, and all I would ever have that could singularly belong to me. Against everything else, I could cling to my work to provide meaning to my life. If I did not have relationships, community, love, and connection, at least I could have my art. I might die alone and unhappy, but I would be remembered as someone great. If my physical self could not reach out and touch those around me, at least my words could.
Of course, like all the myths we cling to throughout teenagehood, I grew up and realized this story that I had told myself all my life was both false and unsustainable. Our art alone is not enough. Even when I began to gain the recognition I had always craved, what I wanted more than anything was community. To walk into a room and feel connected to the people within it. To not be able to go days a time without speaking to a single person any longer. For my brain to stop glorifying the idea of the tortured, isolated genius, believing all the pain and hurt would be worth it if I could just be this thing, this one thing that I had hinged so much time and effort on becoming. I lost so many important relationships in trying to become this thing. I wasted so much energy and it only made my art suffer. I was trying to create writing that existed in a vacuum of writers before me, those who had profited off their pain, or who had written and then harmed the people they loved most, or who had found themselves alone on their deathbed with a bottle in hand. I couldn’t write anything original when I held onto this narrative so deeply; I could only copy the path I thought I had to follow to become something.
In my favorite novel, Arcadia, Lauren Groff writes about the power of the stories we tell ourselves: “It isn’t important if it was ever true. Bit manipulates images: he knows stories don’t need to be factual to be vital. He understands, with a feeling inside him like a wind whipping through a room, that when we lose the stories we have believed about ourselves, we are losing more than stories, we are losing ourselves.”
I had to lose that story in order to begin healing from it. But for a while, without it, it felt like floating through space, wandering through the empty field and waiting for someone to appear and find me and carry me back home. When I began to try weaving a different story for my life, I promised myself that it would be one of joy. That if I was going to keep writing, I would pull it from a place of sustainability. I would write about hope and healing and connection. I would make art in the name of love.
It is not easy. I fight myself constantly to not give back in to the urge to isolate and hollow, to let my pain feel sharp and biting once more. People don’t like to talk about it, but healing is work. And healing artistically is another process entirely. I often think that my work now means less than it did before, that no one wants to read about empathy and joy and hope. The largest award I’ve ever won in my career was for a piece where I wrote about death and depression. Does that sting, that no one has been interested in anything I have written since? Absolutely. I will do it anyway. I know no other way in which I survive this story, and which I can bring my art along on that process of survival with me.
•
My students inspired me to write my own cento, titled “GRACE”, which is my actual name, though I have never gone by it. It goes like this:
Every love poem, I think, is a poem
of grace, which is my name some days when
I feel like a god, or at least,
a woman. There’s a dream I have in which I love
the world with everything in me, all my
details. This year is just a visitor and this winter
feels it has gone on forever. How many times
do we recreate the world when, each morning,
we open our eyes and ask
Will I be something? Am I
something? One day I’ll be good
but for now, I want to spit
me out. Listen, really
listen. Keep busy with survival. Imitate
the trees. You know you could live
a better life than you do, be softer, kinder.
You go on by being generous. You go on
by being true. To survive this we must be very strong.
There’s something soft and tender in me
that says, love yourself. Then forget it. Give me
everything. I want my details
so that I can prepare to live again.
I did not come here to suffer.
Come here. Be still. Let me look
at you for a moment. Our seeds
sprout, I tell you. I’m dawning.
•
Everywhere now North Carolina is covered in yellow flowers. They crop up in the cracks between train tracks, across the rolling green fields, outside the school buildings and the barns. They wisp and bend in the breeze. Against the blue sky, they appear more neon than golden, bright and blossoming.
A quick Google search reveals that the flowers, described as a carpet, are known as rapeseed or canola. I learn that rapeseed is a cover crop, which means that it is designed to help improve soil in preparation for spring, reduce weeds, and increase plant area biomass for insects. Most importantly, it helps protect against soil erosion from rain and wind, sustaining soil life through periods when other crops are not sustainable. The yellow flowers are the thing that make all the rest possible. They keep the ground ready for whatever else may come. At the end of their life, the flowers are harvested and turned into, you guessed it— canola oil, which rests glinting and buttery on shelves under fluorescent grocery store lights. In this iteration, it seems so far removed from the way I see it now: as something beautiful, worthy of appreciation.
At my most depressed, I would sit in my 4x6 foot bedroom in New York City and stare at the brick wall that my window faced, dreaming of one day laying in a field of wildflowers and feeling the sun on my body. It was a simple image, nothing great or glamorous about it, but it sustained me for years, the knowledge that somehow, at the end of this, I would put my feet in the grass and feel the flowers brush over my skin.
I do this now, whenever I would like. I drive through fields full of these flowers every day to and from work, and each time they take my breath away. It is such a simple thing; in a few weeks they will be gone. But still, somehow, I am awed by the resiliency, the fortitude of them to crop up in every free space they find. I like to imagine that beneath the earth there is a golden web weaving all between them, criss-crossing through the dirt, connecting each stem to another. Like the flowers, I imagine us this way too, a tiny thread pulling us all towards another. We are never alone, even when we most feel like it. These dreams, these stories, these desires we hold onto— they are sustaining us through whatever the world may throw at us. They are the cover crops of our lives. They are the seeds sprouting within our ribs, which will soon bloom. Soon I will burst my heart open wide and pour into everything, and there will be nothing to hold me back from letting this love pour out vast and wide.
Your prompt this week is to try your own hand at a cento. Take a book, any book and flip through the first twenty pages. It could be a novel, a book of poems, a memoir, an encyclopedia. If you don’t have a book, find a news website, a dictionary, a thesaurus, a history journal. The more “boring” the book seems, the better. Go through and pick out at least one sentence or phrase per page (or 20 sentences, if using a website) that stand out to you. Don’t think too hard about why they stand out. If your eye jumps to them, write it down. Once you have your sentences, rework them into a new poem. You can add and delete words as necessary for it to make sense. As you do this, think about art being something we make and them make anew.
Go walk through a field of flowers this week, friends. Get your feet in the grass. Remember your roots.
See you Thursday,
Spencer
This week’s song is Dance Yrself Clean by LCD Soundsystem. I come back to this song in a cycle about once a year, where I play it on repeat for a week and think about being made clean and anew. Music— and art and writing and dance and film and every other form of creation— really does have this power. To take us from one thing and make us into another. This is an incredible opus of a song in its own right, but I dare you to listen to it and not feel like you are a movie character having their grand moment of realization and deciding that their life is theirs and theirs alone. Put on headphones and blast it. Dance yourself clean.