Says New Poet Laura Catherine Abbey Hodges: “Mirthful, generative, thoughtful, and zany? Yes please!”

Over the past two years, it’s been an honor to see a number of my poems up at Tweetspeak Poetry’s Every Day Poems, talk about poetry and collage with L. L. Barkat, and have my most recent book, Empty Me Full, thoughtfully reviewed by Glynn Young. When Tweetspeak founder and managing editor L. L. Barkat invited me to consider serving as the Tweetspeak community’s next Poet Laura, I read up on the role; that’s where mirthful, generative, thoughtful, and zany—descriptors of the post—come in. Especially now, I need more of all those qualities in my life. I suspect I’m not the only one. And the idea of writing toward them, writing to foster them—well, I love that.

So here I am, accepting the feather from the wonderful Donna Hilbert, whose Poet Laura posts I’ve enjoyed tremendously and will miss.

Speaking of feathers, and by way of introduction, here’s a poem I wrote some years ago about feathers:

Letters from Birds

My first grade teacher told me
            feathers are letters from birds.
                        About that time I knew a lady

who wouldn’t let her children
            touch feathers. They can
                        make you sick, she told them.

No, no! I wanted to shout, but
            I was small and she was big. I wanted
                        to tell her that feathers

are letters from birds, and letters
            are made of words, and words (even
                        then I knew this) words
                                    can make you well.

—Catherine Abbey Hodges, from Instead of Sadness, Gunpowder Press, 2015

For most poets, childhood is a rich source of material, a well that keeps filling from beneath. Louise Glück takes it a step further than that in the last two lines of her poem Nostos:

We look at the world once, in childhood.
The rest is memory.

Glück’s lines don’t necessarily claim that we remember it all, or with great literal accuracy. Rather, I read them as an acknowledgement that certain early memories have an indelible quality bordering on the realms of myth and magic. The painful and in some cases traumatic, the joyful, as well as grab-bags of ordinary, seemingly random, experiences (like a teacher’s whimsical statement about feathers): they hold power, keep therapists busy, send artists to the easel and poets to the page.

But I doubt this is news to you! I imagine you have a go-to stash of poems, perhaps some of them your own, about childhood. Here are three I return to again and again.

Elizabeth Bishop’s famous In the Waiting Room—While I confess to not loving this poem, I admire it as a master class in capturing an early experience of sudden self-awareness.

Joseph Stroud’s Knots—A gut punch and a beauty (I do love this one) in which the title becomes the central metaphor for a difficult father-son relationship.

Robert Hayden’s sonnet Those Winter Sundays—Another beloved father-son poem; I encourage reading it aloud and listening to the sounds, hearing their contributions to the tone of the poem.

I’d love to know what’s on your list.

And now, I hope you’ll indulge me while I play the contrarian. Do we really buy this notion that “we look at the world once, in childhood,” and that “[t]he rest is memory”? Speaking for myself, while I feel a core of truth there, I also chafe against it. I want, badly, to view and experience my life in the present in the freshest possible way every day, and I want to write from that place. You, too?

Surely there’s room for both: the profound hold of childhood memories on the one hand, and a fully-awake life in the now. Louise Glück’s own alert, astute, and surprising poems suggest she would agree.

Here’s what I think. Glück’s closing lines in “Nostos” capture our natural default. To bring the wide-eyed receptivity and vision that were ours in childhood to our adult lives, on the other hand, takes both intention a great deal of effort. Annie Dillard gets at this in The Writing Life when she observes, “We still and always want waking.”

How do we achieve this fresh vision and childlike openness? All I know for sure is that it has to do with attention.

In a frequently quoted section of her poem Sometimes, Mary Oliver writes:

Instructions for living a life:
Pay attention.
Be astonished.
Tell about it.

Of course the bad news, and also the good news, is that there’s no formula for cultivating this way of being. There’s just the daily practice, the devotion if you will, of bringing our attention to the ordinary—the water flowing from the faucet, a plastic bag billowing through the air like a jellyfish—and of letting it surprise us, delight us, sadden us. Of letting it be utterly itself and also remind us of something else. And then finding some words for it and following them.

And finally, because it’s the season of Thanksgiving here in the United States, and many of us will be gathering around tables with friends and family, I want to leave you with Joy Harjo’s “Perhaps the World Ends Here.” Everything is here in this poem—joy and sorrow, war and peace, birth and death, the dogs and the chickens wanting their share of “the last sweet bite”—and we’re invited to the table.

Your Turn

Here are two suggestions for writing, one based on childhood, the other firmly situated in the present.

• Is there something someone said to you in your childhood that you’ve never forgotten but haven’t written about? (Or maybe you’ve written about it, but you have the urge to come at it from a different angle?) Give it a try now, thinking in terms of writing into the experience rather than writing about it. Go wild with the sensory details and associations—put it all in! In another draft, you can select the material that best serves the emerging poem.
• List several routines you engage in on a daily basis, things you do without giving them thought—these might include making coffee, getting ready to shower, opening mail. Choose one, slow it down in your mind, and write what you see, smell, feel, taste, hear. Include any emotions, however faint or unlikely (especially those!), that arise as you’re writing. Mine this slo-mo, newly sensory routine for complexity, whimsy, strangeness, beauty or whatever else emerges.

Photo by Arneliese, Creative Commons, via Flickr.

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Catherine Abbey Hodges

Catherine Abbey Hodges is the author of four full-length poetry collections, most recently Empty Me Full (Gunpowder Press, 2024), and two chapbooks. Her first book, Instead of Sadness, won the 2015 Barry Spacks Poetry Prize; recent poems appear or are forthcoming in Birmingham Poetry Review, Inflectionist Review, SALT, Plant-Human Quarterly, Gyroscope Review, CALYX and elsewhere. Catherine serves as a staff reader for SWWIM and an advisory editor for Anacapa Review. English Professor Emeritus at Porterville College, she writes, teaches privately, watches the light change, and collaborates with musician Rob Hodges in the foothills of California’s Sierra Nevada.

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