The Indestructible Observer

with guest writer Amie Whittemore

How would a petunia consider a spoon? How would your future self consider plastic bags? How might an alien consider dried roses? Or melting snow?

This week’s guest writer is Amie Whittemore—Amie Whittemore (she/her) is the author of three poetry collections, most recently Nest of Matches (Autumn House Press), and the chapbook Hesitation Waltz (Midwest Writing Center). She was the 2020-2021 Poet Laureate of Murfreesboro, Tennessee, and an Academy of American Poets Laureate Fellow. Her poems have won multiple awards, including a Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Prize, and her writing has appeared in Blackbird, Colorado Review, Terrain.org, Pleiades, and elsewhere. She teaches creative writing at Eastern Illinois University.

Amie writes: My speculative poetry collection, Star-Tent: A Triptych, features poems from three different personae: a woman reflecting on her abduction by aliens, an indestructible observer caught in a black hole for eternity, and the collective voice of an alien species who encounter the Voyager Golden Record. While any of these personae could spur a writing prompt, I’d like to focus on one of the Indestructible Observer Poems, “The Indestructible Observer Remembers Summer.”

In this poem, the Observer recalls summer, a birthday party, his beloved whom he refers to as Someone, and examines the memory through the lens of his current state, trapped in a black hole.

This current (non)existence, casts a new light on memories: What makes a self? What can we know about ourselves through the act of remembering? How does where we are during the act of remembering influence our understanding of that memory?

Okay! Ready to write?