Andrea MacPherson

Beyond the Blue was listed on January Magazine’s annual ‘Books of the Year’.  You can see the full list here.

I don’t make resolutions.  I don’t believe in them.  But I do consider things that have been working over the last year, and the things that haven’t.  What wasn’t working in 2007?  How little I was writing.  Maybe it was because of a demanding teaching load, maybe it was because I had two books come out and I had a lot of readings and press to do, or maybe – and this is what I always fear – I was fresh out of words.

The most frightening thought to a writer.  No more words.

Is this possible?  Can we use them up?  Do they melt away, disintegrate if we don’t use them frequently enough?  Is writing, like everything else, a muscle that needs to be exercised?

 In a bout of new year’s office cleaning (inspired by my friend Jane) I came across some pictures and scraps of paper with lines of poems written on them.  Most of them were fragments only, snippets I had scribbled with the intention of coming back to them and fleshing them out.  And now, here they were, a strange and sad gift.  Limbless poems.  Lines looking for their whole.  Titles floating.

I sat with them for a while, these words I had written but barely recognized now.  I couldn’t quite get the texture back: where was I going with words like treeline, face, pebble?  I set them aside, but found myself – for the first time in a couple months – really thingin about poetry.  Not reading someone else’s poems, but thinking about my own, about the words and the way one line might end, hang tenuously over the edge towards the next.  It was exciting – that rush when language fills your mind, a hot, quick blush of possibility.

I’ve written two poems since then.  One containing one of the found phrases from my desk, and another inspired by a photo left at the bottom of my drawer.  Both kept me up late, doing research, trying to find the right word, considering (at length) a comma or a line break.  And it felt grand.