"Next Time Through"
with prompts inspired by Matt Miller & Yours Truly
After publishing my first full-length poetry collection, NIGHT SWIM (Diode Editions) in 2022, I struggled with a writer/human crisis of sorts—maybe I had written every poem there was to write? Maybe I was…done? What was I supposed to do now? I hate hiking and I am not coordinated enough nor do I have the patience for knitting.
A dear friend offered her home in Massachusetts for a small gathering of friends to enter into a writing retreat together. There, we shared dinner each evening and were otherwise on our own to walk, stare out the window, read and write. It was here that I first read the poems of Ursula Le Guin, leant to me by another writer at the retreat. It was here that I discovered a way to transition from NIGHT SWIM into the rest of my writing life.
I wrote 32 poems in those three days. Each one was entitled “In This Version,” and all of them imagined softer realities. After the suicides of my younger sister and her 11-year old son, I needed to create a world in which (to borrow June Jordan’s line), “sorrow was not my name.” Or more precisely, where I could imagine something other than sorrow.
What version of your life would you build if you had the chance to do it all again?
This week, I was a reader and panelist at the Poetry by the Sea Conference in Madison, CT where I dreamily shared my first conference meal with Cornelius Eady, Kai Coggin and Antoinette Brim-Bell.
The first evening there, I attended a reading that included the poet Matt Miller, author of TENDER THE RIVER, who I had first met at AWP in Philadelphia in 2022. At this reading, Matt read his poem “Next Time Through” which appears in Tupelo Quarterly.
Listening to his poem had a profound impact on me. It centers around a moment in which he sees a schoolhouse and thinks to himself “next time, my kids can go through there.” Then, the sudden realization that of course, there will be no next time. We get one shot with our kids. Our kids get one shot at their lives. Matt’s poem go on to imagine his own “next time through—” what he would do differently. Is there anything more poetic than imagining the impossible and insisting that it come to life on the page?
~Check out my upcoming virtual, generative workshops for summer & September! I will be taking a break from teaching workshops from October-December as I adjust to a new full-time job & a move across the state.
Okay! Ready to write?!
