Katharine Whitcomb frames a life with forests, hotels, and dreams
Welcome to Habitats, Katharine Whitcomb’s newest collection of poetry. You are entering a collection much as you would enter a large house — say, an old three-story house that seems new until you walk through the rooms. Each room is a piece of your life.
You walk through the first floor, and the rooms are less a progression and more a representation of how memory works. Thinking of a thrush reminds you of winter weather, or that Saturday when you fell asleep in front of the gas fireplace, “like an old dog.” You feel safe and secure, just like you did when you were a girl and dreamed of yourself inside of your books. Each room is a tree in the forest of memory, including the memory of people who have died.
The rooms of the second floor are hotels where you’ve stayed or dreamed about staying — Vienna, Paris, Italy, Istanbul, Budapest, Macao, Slovenia, perhaps even a generic place that is every hotel. Each has its story, and your story while you stay there.
The third floor is the floor where each room is a dream. No room is like another, and the progression, if you can call it that, is jumbled and without particular rhyme or reason, except for one constant — the dreamer. A dream about an inscription on a cliff face gives way to one about Anna Karenina or the National Zoo, followed by apple-picking or the world coming to an end. You know these poems have meanings, or perhaps only one meaning, and wander through each room trying to understand.
This poem is one of the rooms on the first floor, a room that is choked with an unsolved mystery, and you’re not sure which is more important — that it’s a mystery or that it’s unsolved.
Murder Mystery
So, the car rests side-saddle on the trail while she walks the dog
& she didn’t tell anybody where she was going. No, no dog,
only her iPod but no purse or backpack, not even a PowerBar
in the pocket of her running pants. Or maybe the holidays
came & instead of flying east as usual she didn’t but we just assumed.
The creek bubbles thickly over the rocks down the slope,
barely liquid. Footprints ink the snow but they’re blown out.
No car, no dog, & the porch lights blaze all night & all day
in an un-notable way. No more piles of envelopes carried to
the post office, no sloppy shoveling jobs, no more shades up
then down, no gray garbage bin on the curb Sunday nights.
She kept a quiet house in the first place. Messages to the larger world
do not return the favor, she should have known. & fate has a tall swing
like the one out back, where once her feet hit the blue curtain of the sky.
Katharine Whitcomb
Whitcomb has published two previous collections, The Daughter’s Almanac and Saints of South Dakota & Other Poems, and two poetry chapbooks, Hosannas and Lamp of Letters. She is also the co-author of The Art Courage Program, a parody self-help book. Whitcomb has received a number of prizes and awards, including being a Stegner Fellow in Poetry at Stanford University. Her poems have been published in a number of anthologies and literary magazines, including Narrative, The Paris Review, The Yale Review, and The Missouri Review. The Distinguished Professor of Creative Writing at Central Washington University, she lives in Vermont.
Habitats is a collection of rooms, the rooms we inhabit in our lives. Some are physical, some are foreign; some are pleasant while others are not, and still others are both at the same time. But it’s these rooms that we examine to make sense of our lives, as Whitcomb does so vividly and arrestingly.
Photo by A.Peach, Creative Commons, via Flickr. Post by Glynn Young.
How to Read a Poem uses images like the mouse, the hive, the switch (from the Billy Collins poem)—to guide readers into new ways of understanding poems. Anthology included.
“I require all our incoming poetry students—in the MFA I direct—to buy and read this book.”
—Jeanetta Calhoun Mish
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