“Do You Have a Favorite Piece of Writing That You’ve Written?”
December 12, 2023
This question came to me from Alden Beane, my dog Beverley’s hydrotherapist, and it’s a great one because it got me thinking. (Beverley tore her canine cruciate ligament this past summer and has been swimming with Alden at True Balance Animal Wellness to try to bring back her strength. It’s working!)
While the first answer that sprang to mind is, “The next one I write,” I also think that’s sometimes true, but not always. (The piece I just delivered for the Spring 2024 issue of Berkshire Magazine fits that bill, but more on that later.)
I’m assuming she meant prose, so I’ll stick with that for now (perhaps I’ll do a poetry post another time). A few of my recently published pieces come to mind, as do a few older ones that I use as writing samples when I’m either pitching new pieces or want to share examples with students I’ve mentored. So here, in no particular order, are my favorite pieces of my own writing (so far) prose edition:
“Love & Patience on Mt. Pico” — Published in The Write Launch, this is a very recent essay about an ill-fated attempt to climb Mt. Pico, the tallest peak in Portugal, in the Azores. I owe a big shout-out to Suzanne Roberts for this one, for I started writing it in a travel writing workshop she led in 2020. (Also a big shout-out to my wife Samantha for being the foil in this one and my first reader as well.)
“Birds in the Hand: The Berkshire Bird Observatory’s Impassioned Ben Nickley” — Published last summer in Berkshire Magazine, this was the first profile I did for the magazine and it was also the return to subject matter that means a lot to me–birds and nature. It got me out in the field again with a passionate scientist, which is something I used to do a lot of when I worked for The Nature Conservancy years ago. Thanks to my editor Anastasia Stanmeyer for the assignment!
“Hallelujah! I’m no Genius” — Published in the Schuylkill Valley Journal online, this was one of my first forays into memoir–and I owe the journal’s editor Mark Danowsky a big thanks for doing me the solid of writing to me: “I’ve been thinking about [Malcolm Gladwell’s podcast] Revisionist History’s Hallelujah. (Incredibly good.)…. Do you think you can write about how this construct (Picasso v. Cezanne) applies to approaches to poetic craft?” And then, when that wasn’t exactly what I delivered, for being delighted with the result! (A truncated version of this essay appears as a chapter in my book, Falling Up: A Memoir of Second Chances; if there’s ever a second edition of that book, I want to restore some of what was edited out.)
“Açorianidade and the Radiance of Sensibility” — Published in Barzakh Magazine, this essay from my memoir-in-essays/work-in-progress, The Others in Me, is a deeply personal take on my journey of (re)discovering or uncovering my roots on the Azores and the mixed emotions and complex feelings that surround such a late-in-life discovery. A shout-out to my fellow 2018 Disquiet Azores Retreat attendee, Christy O’Callaghan, for being intrigued enough to publish it in her last issue as editor-in-chief of Barzakh.
“Poetry as Practice: How Paying Attention Helps Us Improve Our Writing in the Age of Distraction” — Grant Clauser, in addition to being a fine poet, edited the craft section of Cleaver Magazine and I wrote to him about this idea before it was finished. While I “knew” what I wanted to write, I struggled with its direction. Grant’s guidance–especially regarding minimizing the quotes and emphasizing my own voice, among other things, greatly improved this piece and proves the old adage that every writer needs an editor.
“Looking Out, Looking In: Gary Snyder and Sourdough Mountain Lookout” — On the tail end of my “Hallelujah!” essay, Schuylkill Valley Journal‘s Mark Danowsky pitched another idea to me. He knew I’d studied with Gary Snyder and he was “wondering if you have insight into his poem ‘Mid-August at Sourdough Mountain Lookout.’ It’s a poem I’ve returned to again and again and I’ve never been able to explain why I think it’s so good (even to myself).” Well, it turns out I did…
Finally, two lectures that I turned into essays need be included in such a list: First, a craft talk called “Making Poems Better: The Process of Revision,” which was originally delivered at the University of Alaska Anchorage for its Writing Rendezvous conference in 1998. Then, in 2018, I updated the lecture and presented a 20th Anniversary edition of the talk at the Boston Book Festival. In that lecture, I discuss the revision process and examine in detail Donald Hall’s “Ox-Cart Man” and my own poem, “Black Angus, Winter.”
Second, the more recent “At Home in the World: A Reading and Reflection on Dwelling, Nature, Phenomenology, and Ecopoetry,” which was originally delivered at the Providence College Humanities Forum in September 2021. Professor Ryan Shea taught a course in environmental philosophy and included my book, Dwelling: an ecopoem, on his syllabus. I spent a week with him and his students discussing my book, which was an amazing experience, especially given the fact that I was born in a hospital just a three-minute drive from the college. Who says you can’t go home again? The lecture was later published as an essay in Brown University’s Gávea-Brown: A Bilingual Journal of Portuguese-North American Letters and Studies.
Thanks to Alden for a great question–and for helping Beverley to heal!
“Poetry As Practice,” A Craft Essay
March 24, 2018
Cleaver Magazine published my craft essay, “Poetry As Practice,” earlier this year:
POETRY AS PRACTICE
How Paying Attention Helps Us Improve Our Writing in the Age of Distraction
A Craft Essay
by Scott Edward Anderson
In this lyrical essay on the writing life, Scott Edward Anderson shows how poetry can be more than a formal approach to writing, more than an activity of technique, but a way to approach the world, which is good for both the poet and the poem.—Grant Clauser, Editor
Walking in Wissahickon Park after dropping my twins at their school in Philadelphia, I find muddy trails from the night’s heavy rains and temporary streams running along my path. The fuchsia flowers of a redbud tree shine brilliantly against the green of early leafing shrubs. A few chipmunks scurry among leaves on the forest floor. Birdsong is all around me: I note some of the birds—if they are bright enough and close enough to the trail or I recognize their song—the red flash of a cardinal lights on a branch nearby; a robin lands on the trail ahead, scraping his yellow beak against a rock.
Observation like this helps feed my database of images, fragments of music, and overheard speech, which prepares my poetry-brain for the work of choosing words, putting them in a certain order, and forming phrases into lines, stanzas, and eventually entire poems.
Remembering a line I’m working on, I worry it like a dog with a bone, gnawing on the words, their syntax, imagery, sound or feel in my mouth and mind. Playing with the line, I’ll follow it until it leads somewhere or dumps me in a ditch, when I’ll file it away for another day. I’m paying attention to where the poem wants to go. READ MORE
The Hamline University English Department recently conducted an in-depth Q&A with me about two of my poems, “Naming” and “Villanesca.”
Here is a link to their blog, Hamline Lit Link, where it was posted: Read more
My poem “Villanelle on a Line Hated by Auden”
January 7, 2017
W.H. Auden
“September 1, 1939” is one of the most famous poems by W. H. Auden. He wrote the poem after learning the news of Hitler’s invasion of Poland at the start of World War II, published it a month later in The New Republic magazine, and reprinted it in his collection, Another Time, the following year.
Despite – or perhaps because of — rushing it into print, Auden appeared to dislike the poem almost as soon as it was published. As little as five years later, reprinting the poem in The Collected Poetry of W. H. Auden (1945), he cut the stanza with its most famous line, “We must love one another or die.”
“Between you and me, I loathe that poem,” he wrote to the critic Laurence Lerner, and resolved to keep it out of future collections of his work during his lifetime. He relented in 1955, allowing Oscar Williams to include it in his New Pocket Anthology of American Verse, but only with the proviso that the last line be edited to “We must love one another and die.”
Why did he hate this line – and the poem — so much? He claimed in a preface to the 1965 edition of his Collected Poems, “Some poems which I wrote and, unfortunately, published, I have thrown out because they were dishonest, or bad-mannered, or boring.”
In a Penguin anthology the previous year, the poem and four others were included along with a caveat: “Mr. W. H. Auden considers these five poems to be trash which he is ashamed to have written.”
What was it about the poem and, in particular, this line that Auden didn’t like? Was he embarrassed by its earnestness and sentiment, as some have suggested? Did he feel it was sappy and self-indulgent, as others would have it? Or was it “the most dishonest poem I have ever written,” as he put it?
And yet, the last line endures and the poem remains one of Auden’s most famous, surviving even today as one of the most eloquent pleas for empathy and peace in the face of totalitarianism. The poem even resurfaced as a touchstone for people in the wake of 9/11, as I have written elsewhere.
I wrote “Villanelle on a Line Hated by Auden” on 3 September 2014 as part of Jo Bell’s “52” experiment, and it was recently published in The Road Not Taken: The Journal of Formal Poetry.
Here is my poem, “Villanelle on a Line Hated by Auden”:
“We must love one another or die,”
The poet instructs, though doesn’t believe it.
“We must love one another and die.”
Revised to inclusive and on another try,
Then repudiated the poem, banning it.
He who must love another or die.
“Ours is not to reason why,”
Another poet said with the soul of wit.
Ours is to love one another. We die.
Changing a word makes meaning fly
To the far reaches of our minds and sit.
Must we, really, love one another or die?
Can we exist without knowing why–
Knowledge straining at the bit–
Until we can only love each other and die?
When we live without love, we die.
At least, those of us who desire it.
We must love one another or die.
We must love one another and die.
–Scott Edward Anderson
A Poet’s Work at the Condensery
July 12, 2010
I signed off of Twitter Saturday night with this note:
“Goodnight from my condensery…”
A friend saw it and wrote to ask what I meant by “condensery,” which seemed to have to do with making milk, not poems.
I was working, revising some poems, and meant “condensery” as a reference to the poet Lorine Niedecker.
It is an interesting choice of words, because condense means “to make denser or more compact; especially : to subject to condensation,” according to Merriam-Webster, which perhaps connotes compactness rather than concision. Concision, cutting away or making more concise, is probably closer to my method of revision. (I try not to make my poems more dense as I revise; and I rarely, if ever, can get as compact as Miss Niedecker did in her poems.)
Niedecker called her desk a “condensery,” in part to connote her process and in part to make it clear that, for her, her desk was a physical place of genuine, creative labor. Making poems is real work.
Here is Lorine Niedecker’s poem “Poet’s Work,” from which the phrase comes, in its entirety:
Grandfather
advised me:
Learn a trade
I learned
to sit at desk
and condense
No layoffs
from this
condensery
##
You can read more about Lorine Niedecker and her poetry at Poets.org
Her collected poems are available here: Lorine Niedecker: Collected Works.
Revise, revise, but when is too much?
June 25, 2009
Fallow Field by Joshua Sheldon
In fact, we were both inspired by the same image we saw, one summer driving south out of the Adirondack Mountains. A field, a car, a barn.
I wrote the poem in a quick burst of notes crawling around in the field as Joshua searched for the best angle to capture the scene on film. (See the result at left.)
Joshua’s photograph hangs on my wall and has adorned at least one book (not yet mine). My poem was published in Blueline, a journal published at SUNY Potsdam.
Some time over the years, after its publication, I revised the poem, excising what I thought were superfluous lines that made too fine a point in trying to draw a parallel between the subject’s experience — a woman who ended her marriage abruptly — and the landscape we found. The lines removed are underlined below:
Fallow Field
The old car is there,
where she left it,
out by the old shed,
breeding rust–obscured
from the roadway by the rye grass
that grows up all around.
Long triangular tentacles
blowing and bending
in the hot breeze, as
sunlight filters in
through gathering clouds.
By now the grass has worked
up into the engine block.
The car--an old
Chevrolet or Buick?–
no matter, it’s what
is planted now,
in this fallow field,
awaiting bulldozers.
They call this grass
“poverty grain,” and there’s
no small comfort in the fact
that it’s as tolerant
of poor soils
as she was of the poor soils
of her marriage.
On the day she left,
she packed her whole life
into an old grip: clothing,
framed photographs
of the children, her parents,
the salt cellar she’d bought
on her honeymoon in Rome.
While packing, she’d given
pause that her whole life
had become so
portable, where once there’d
been permanence. And now,
she blows and bends
like this rye grass
on a midsummer afternoon,
so far from home,
so far from the old shed
of her former self.
Joshua’s objections are outlined in the following email:
SEA: Ok, I’ve read and re-read the two versions of Fallow Field and again I want to express my support for the earlier version. There are three changes I’m aware of, two lines in the body and the ending. I don’t feel the two lines alter the poem much but the ending! The ending Scott! It flowed before, it let you down easy, it tied it all up like the well written present that it was.
I agree with Joshua that the old ending tied it all up neatly — just a little too neatly for my taste. I think the newer ending, with its abruptness, speaks more to the experience of the woman in the poem, and is more true to life.
Things don’t always end neatly. In fact, I suggest that most things don’t. Life is full of messy, sudden changes, especially in relationships.
Below is how the revised version of the poem reads today. What do you think?
Fallow Field
The old car is there,
where she left it,
out by the old shed,
breeding rust–obscured
from the roadway by the rye grass
that grows up all around.
Long triangular tentacles
blowing and bending
in the hot breeze, as
sunlight filters in
through gathering clouds.
By now the grass has worked
up into the engine block.
The car
is planted now,
in this fallow field,
awaiting bulldozers.
They call this grass
“poverty grain,” and there’s
no small comfort in the fact
that it’s as tolerant
of poor soils
as she was of her marriage.
On the day she left,
she packed her whole life
into an old grip: clothing,
framed photographs
of the children, her parents,
the salt cellar she’d bought
on her honeymoon in Rome.
While packing, she’d given
pause that her whole life
had become so
portable, where once there’d
been permanence. And now,
she blows and bends–
rye grass on a midsummer afternoon.
##
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