Introduction for Up North
Martha Collins
In the fall of 2004, I finished a book-length poem I’d been working on for some years. During that time I wrote almost nothing else; now, on the other side of obsession, I had no idea how to even think about writing a free-standing lyric poem.
I don’t quite remember how the idea first came to me; I thought of sources and precedents only later. But as October approached, I decided I would write seven lines each day of that month; at the end of October, I would have a sequence of 31 little poems, or sections—half-sonnets, I remember thinking, and prescribed for myself a bit of form: the last word of the first would become the first word of the second, and so on.
I created other restraints as well. I was serious about writing each day; I couldn’t skip a day and make up, and I couldn’t skip ahead either. I did allow myself to scribble notes in the top unlined margin of the lined notebook where most of my poems begin, and I could of course revise; indeed, most days began with a close look at what I’d done the previous day. But I followed my own rules; I didn’t cheat.
I intended some thematic connection between the sections, however slight. And it’s also true that there were pressing personal concerns: my mother had died in June, and my husband was having major surgery in mid-October. Mortality was on my mind, and was one of the sources of the title I wrote down as I began the poem, “Over Time.” Of course the title also had a formal source, reflecting the day-by-day manner in which the poem was written.
In 2005 I was busy with final revisions of the book-length poem, so it wasn’t until the end of the year that I again found myself with empty poetic hands. Then, in mid-November, I thought: I will do that month thing again—in December, it would be. And then I thought: I will do one of these each year, in no particular order, until I have completed all the months. That I would finish in 2015 was both scary and exhilarating; it also, of course, assumed that nothing terrible would happen to me in the meantime.
As it turned out, I began moving not quite randomly, but seasonally—October, December, April, July—and when I’d finished those four months, I briefly considered stopping. But I kept going, and after two more months realized there was a completeness to what I’d done. So I put the six poems together, and the result is Day Unto Day, to be published by Milkweed Press in March 2014.
Day Unto Day was not my first working title; at first I was calling the project Daily Meditations. Friends rightly pointed out that such a title might put the book in the religion section of the bookstore (though I wasn’t thinking “bookstore” then); but it had a literary source. I’d been aware, since college, of Philip Pain’s Daily Meditations and Quotidian Preparations for Death, published in 1668; according to the facsimile edition issued by the Huntington Library in 1936, it is “the earliest known specimen of original American verse printed in the English Colonies.” I realized early on that Pain’s little book (including its complete title) was the immediate source for what I was doing, and I was conscious as well of the larger tradition of meditative poetry. That my “texts” were only occasionally scriptural was beside the point: I was trying to do some “soul-making” in these poems, and intended them as a spiritual practice of sorts; I had no intention, in the beginning, of publishing them. It was relevant that the second and final title of at least the first six poems came from the 19th Psalm: “Day unto day uttereth speech, / and night unto night sheweth knowledge.”
As I wrote, I became aware of other sources. The month I began, I remembered, I was teaching Jean Valentine’s The River at Wolf , which features two distinct but intertwining sequences and so many 14-line poems that it’s almost possible to read the book as a sonnet sequence; from there, I think, came my seven lines, my sequencing, and perhaps my spareness. Much later I remembered that one of my students at Oberlin had written several lines each day during December 1997; it’s a pleasure to acknowledge the influence of Jen Liu.
Of course examples of calendric sequences are everywhere, when you start looking. I hadn’t read—and confess I did not in the beginning know about—David Lehman’s Daily Mirror and Evening Sun. And since then the idea of writing a poem-a-day-for-a-month has become so popular that the internet is flooded with blogs recording the poets’ progress. But I was conscious of nothing except poems of meditation when I began.
So where am I now? With Day Unto Day finished, I’ve begun and completed four sections of what I’m tentatively calling Night Unto Night, referring again to Psalm 19. Ultimately, I intend for all twelve months to claim the original “day” title; but for now the second half is a “night” sequence, and it begins with “Up North.”
A word about the poem. My form has changed from month to month: I’ve sometimes written six lines, and I once allowed myself anywhere from five to eight; the way I repeat a word or phrase has also varied. When I began “Up North,” the form changed more radically: deciding for the first time to use indented lines (not just “dropped” lines), I found myself hearing an echo of Williams’ triadic foot, and using shorter lines than I had before. Perhaps this diminishment also reflected the shift from day to night; perhaps I just needed to do something a little different. In this poem, the “repetition” principle changed too: instead of repeating a word, I repeated a whole line from the previous section.
I wrote “Up North” in Ithaca, New York, when I was there as visiting writer at Cornell. The title reflects more about the weather I anticipated than the actual geography: by the map, Ithaca isn’t very far north of Cambridge, Massachusetts, where I usually live. But I put myself “up north” in my meditations, even as I moved from day to night.
from Up North
March 2010
1
Up north is where I think
we go, ghost-trees frozen
with mist, snow
paving the roads, cold
as we will be, no
roads except into
those trees, no road.
2
On a white field, faded
text of weeds:
1 1 1
In the distance, in the dark
of dense trees: little patches,
as we will be, no
more, of illegible snow
3
Distance, in the dark,
disappears: all
is close, closing
in, here
is all there
is, there is nothing
in between, no between.
4
As a skier down
that mountain, I thought,
bird into
that mist, dis-
appearing into that _ _
is all there
_ _
5
That mountain I thought
was a cloud is covered
with snow, snow I thought
to drift into
drips from trees, trees
are going to work
again, drinking in.
6
Earth shifts
its bones, quakes open
again, drinking in
its own, scrawled sign
on fallen wall, dead
body inside -> body
bodybodybodybody
7
My friend is gone, is
body inside body
of earth, sea
of atoms, she is,
her husband said, in a state
of grace and will
be forever.
8
Waterfall sculpted
itself into water-
fall, using cold
to mold itself solid
and still, as if to
be forever
fall without ever falling.
9
Snow is turning
itself into water,
branches once thinned
to diagram lines have lost
their single white sentence,
roofs are setting themselves
free in explosions of snow.
10
Bird tree fills
with black fruit, grackles
empty, fill again
their branches, utter together
their single sentence,
last word a rough creak
of opening air.
11
If bucket comes up
empty, fill again
with all that is
and there’s enough
again: nothing’s not
for nothing: don’t forget
the extended wings.
12
Head as in headway or
headlight on high-
way, way as in
wayward or in the or on
the, onward
with all that is
heading my way
13
Rain all day, slapping
my back, draping my shoulders,
heading the way
I am going, warmed
by the rain of the all of the, why
was I thinking
snow?
14
Snow person, no person, person
of broken of sorry of finishing, what
was I thinking?
No one is shooting my bombing
my hurting my no
one is counting
me out.
15
One is counting, sun
this morning, two
for gorges filling
with snowmelt where two
have fallen, jumped
this month, not counted on no
three, still counting up
16
Instead of black-and-white winter
through my windows
this morning, too
many browns to count:
brush weeds
path fields skin
of the earth
17
Through my windows
brush-stroked clouds
on blue, trees
reddened with buds, fields
with sun, there’s
even a hint of green
on this day for green.
18
Last week a white oval
edged with lace, today
the pond gleams
in sun, there’s
a red-winged blackbird
fanning his tail, and
there, that first robin.
19
Red-winged blackbird,
same top branch, but one
tree down, crow drives
him away. Do I in my tower caw
like that, or do
I wait below
for your love-call, Love?
20
Same top branch, not one
but four, now one
again, my bird
sings his insistent
song, no chittery answer
yet but arriving crows
don’t chase him away.
21
Back with my love
again, my bird
for life, this first
spring day with its baby
green blades, why did we squabble
about nothing when we
are as grass?
22
. . . are as grass
the crocuses, snowdrops, young
coming up from under, but
not the cattle grazing the grass
that fattens them up, not us:
without roots, we grow
only old.
23
Without roots, we grow
up, like daffodils braving
the rain, then down, at last
into those ghost-
trees or (remember
October?) gold
slipping into air.
24
Slipping into air,
then into that gorge
of rushing white water, or
bursting into crude bouquets
of flame: thus the young
of the world we have failed
proclaim our failure.
25
Of my Love, without whom not,
I do not sing enough;
for the world we have failed
I do not do enough:
in this season (I had forgotten,
mea culpa), this season
of penance, I confess.
26
Looking for yellow spring, I found
body: molecules particles:
we are eaters made
to be eaten, I dreamed—
in this season I had forgotten
(mea culpa), this awoke me:
The rest is soul.
27
Friend I loved, body and fine
mind, is gone, her end marked
by shining words even
as speech failed. Her chosen last
words were I shall give
you rest: is soul
afterword, or silence after?
28
Afterwards, the silence after
the words: yard’s
half-blue again
with scilla, little hats
opened into stars, her
words opened my mouth, my
god I was that yard.
29
My red-winged bird still calls
from his tree, but now
(news today!) she-
bird answers, I
open my mouth, my door
for love, my Love for life, so
easy to frame, shut, but it’s you Love, there.
30
News today, with
one to go, as once
before, but bad
this time, death
breathing down my neck, soul
on hold, good (but listen to
those birds!) I was thinking snow.
31
Up north is where I’ve lived
these days, but I have some
place else
to go, my once
and future someone, you, no
one else but you, Love, be
home soon.
Martha Collins is the author of the forthcoming Day Unto Day (Milkweed, March 2014), as well as White Papers (Pittsburgh, 2012) and Blue Front (Graywolf, 2006). She has also published four earlier collections of poems and three collections of co-translated Vietnamese poetry—most recently Black Stars: Poems by Ngo Tu Lap (Milkweed, 2013, with the author). Founder of the Creative Writing Program at UMass-Boston, she served as Pauline Delaney Professor of Creative Writing at Oberlin College until 2007, and is currently editor-at-large for FIELD magazine and one of the editors of the Oberlin College Press.
