Listen to poetry professor Stephen Cavitt read “ The Ghost of Fremont Canyon” and discuss couplets.
Explicit rating: sexual abuse
Stephen’s poetry collection Noctis Terrores is available now on Kindle Unlimited and in print at major online booksellers.
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Read the transcript below.
Intro
Welcome to the Poetry Professor Podcast with Stephen Cavitt, where every week I read you an original poem and then we talk about its key technique. In today’s episode, you’ll hear “The Ghost of Fremont Canyon” from my book Noctis Terrores, and we’ll talk about couplets.
This poem deals with sexual assault and coercion in a historical setting, so we’ll also talk about how to use technique to move past the emotional content or even the initial therapy purpose of a poem into its group experience as literature. Here’s…
The Ghost of Fremont Canyon
Nine Mile Canyon, Utah
The cottonwoods can kiss my ass, and the men
who lifted my legs like the haunches of a dead deer,
turning me this way and that in dusty creek bottoms
and yellow broken crags. Fourteen, fifteen.
The mute, stupid junipers waved in the wind.
My father kept busy with his prayers, murmuring
like a stream over stones. He loved me as long as I helped.
When he lit the winter fire, even the stars leaned close.
The rest of them can go to hell, their breath like bitterroot
and wild jerky, hands quick and tense as bowstrings.
Little comfort for a woman in that life: summer hills,
sunbaked sage, the laughter of girls too young to know.
My mother braided my hair and then we buried her.
No one carves women or corn into these canyon walls.
Only the men remain, chiseled with spears and tall shields,
dead buffalo, a handful of chipped stars.
It’s men’s stories that drove you across the continent
in your broken Jeep, telling every girl you meet how you sleep
on the ground, a .38 in your belt and a hound by the fire.
The desert is so quiet, you tell them. I can hear myself think.
You’ve never heard the crunch of a boot behind
you in the dirt as you bend down for spring water.
No, it’s men’s stories you’ll photograph: your Jeep in Prickly Pear
Canyon, the famous panels, “Coyote Places the Stars.”
When my father walked boys up the mesa to pray,
they came down slow, their eyes shining. Only I remain,
glimmering now in this box canyon, then the thin arms
of the scrub oak. Sometimes in the night, a slow wail
sifts my bones like cattail flour. You men. Your wolf moon.
The rough hands of history. I almost forgive you all.
Discuss:
This is a tough poem. It’s a tough topic. One of the ways that I deal with tough topics is to focus on technique. It’s easy to get emotion into a poem. It’s not always easy to make it a shared literary experience instead of group therapy. That requires the combination of the emotion and the intellect. Not just the pain, but what you make of the pain.
Here, I’m using these measured couplets and short outbursts to get it done. So, this one is written in couplets, which are just pairs of two lines separated by white space, or two line stanzas. And I did that for a couple reasons.
Number one, couplets give it a measured feel. They slow the poem down. This is a ghost who’s been stuck in a canyon for hundreds of years. She’s not in a hurry. But couplets are also elegant. They’re a little bit formal, so there’s an element of dignity as she talks about her suffering. She’s measured and composed, most of the time.
And then reason number two: because some of the ideas carry across from one couplet to the next, there’s a little bit of a pause for effect. If you’re reading it, your mind hangs on the last word until you get to that next couplet. So let me show you the first few couplets, and we’ll talk about where those breaks fall.
The poem opens with these lines: “The cottonwoods can kiss my ass, and the men who lifted my legs like the haunches of a dead deer. Break. Turning me this way and that in dusty creek bottoms and yellow broken crags. Fourteen. Fifteen. Break. The mute, stupid junipers waved in the wind.”
I wrote this poem in couplets first, and then I tried some other things. I tried putting it in stanzas of four or five lines. But this stanza break, or couplet break, this created pause after, “Fourteen. Fifteen.” That’s why I kept coming back to the couplets. I wanted a pause after these horrific revelations.
So she’s telling us the age that these things happened to her, and then there’s a little pause before she gives us this disappointment: “The mute, stupid junipers waved in the wind,” and now the trees are standing around doing nothing to help.
So couplets can create meaning through this pause, but they can also be very self-contained, where the whole idea is finished within one couplet. And that’s reason number three why I really like using couplets here.
So further down in the poem, our ghost is talking directly to the poet, right? And she says, “It’s men’s stories that drove you across the continent in your broken Jeep, telling every girl you meet how you sleep…” and here the couplet ends “…on the ground, a 38 in your belt and a hound by the fire. The desert is so quiet, you tell them. I can hear myself think.”
So there’s a little bit of sprawl there as the ideas carry from one couplet to the next. And then we have this short punch to the gut. The next couplet is completely self contained: “You’ve never heard the crunch of a boot behind you in the dirt as you bend down for spring water.” And that one is dense, right? It’s bitter and short. It’s a clapback in one couplet.
Most of the sentences or the thoughts in this poem carry over from one couplet to the next. There are only a couple of these short, punchy ones. If something’s happening only a couple times in a poem, it’s going to draw our attention, or it should draw our attention. It’s going to stand out, or it’s going to hit a little bit harder, and I really like this balance here.
I have a background in wellness and natural medicine, so I know a little bit about what it’s like when people tell hard stories. And there’s often kind of a mix between these sprawling, long, run-on ideas and then short stories, punchy sentences that have guilt, or shame, or hurt, or disappointment in them. So this poem is giving us both of those options, just like people do in real life.
Let’s hear “The Ghost of Fremont Canyon” one more time, and this time, I’ll say couplet at the end of each couplet, right, every second sentence, so that you get a feel for how it plays out across the page.
Here’s “The ghost of Fremont Canyon,” coming to us from Nine Mile Canyon in Utah.
The Ghost of Fremont Canyon
Nine Mile Canyon, Utah
The cottonwoods can kiss my ass, and the men
who lifted my legs like the haunches of a dead deer, {couplet}
turning me this way and that in dusty creek bottoms
and yellow broken crags. Fourteen, fifteen. {couplet}
The mute, stupid junipers waved in the wind.
My father kept busy with his prayers, murmuring {couplet}
like a stream over stones. He loved me as long as I helped.
When he lit the winter fire, even the stars leaned close. {couplet}
The rest of them can go to hell, their breath like bitterroot
and wild jerky, hands quick and tense as bowstrings. {couplet}
Little comfort for a woman in that life: summer hills,
sunbaked sage, the laughter of girls too young to know. {couplet}
My mother braided my hair and then we buried her.
No one carves women or corn into these canyon walls. {couplet}
Only the men remain, chiseled with spears and tall shields,
dead buffalo, a handful of chipped stars. {couplet}
It’s men’s stories that drove you across the continent
in your broken Jeep, telling every girl you meet how you sleep {couplet}
on the ground, a .38 in your belt and a hound by the fire.
The desert is so quiet, you tell them. I can hear myself think. {couplet}
You’ve never heard the crunch of a boot behind
you in the dirt as you bend down for spring water. {couplet}
No, it’s men’s stories you’ll photograph: your Jeep in Prickly Pear
Canyon, the famous panels, “Coyote Places the Stars.” {couplet}
When my father walked boys up the mesa to pray,
they came down slow, their eyes shining. Only I remain, {couplet}
glimmering now in this box canyon, then the thin arms
of the scrub oak. Sometimes in the night, a slow wail {couplet}
sifts my bones like cattail flour. You men. Your wolf moon.
The rough hands of history. I almost forgive you all. {couplet}
Prompt
If you’re writing along with me, you have two choices today for your prompt. Number 1, write a poem that uses couplets. Or, Number 2, write a poem that deals with a tough topic, and focus on a particular technique. Maybe that’s line breaks, sensory imagery, stanzas, or something else. Use that technique to elevate it into poetry instead of just raw emotions on the page.
Outro
Thanks so much for listening to the Poetry Professor Podcast. If you’ve heard a few episodes of the show, you’ve probably thought, how does it have such incredible sound quality? Does he have an entire production team? Is there a whole dedicated studio?
No, it’s just me and my amazing research assistant, Sadie Wilke. Sadie does the behind the scenes work to clean each episode up. So I want to give a big thank you to her and to the Office of Scholarly Innovation and Student Research at Florida Gulf Coast University.
Today, you heard “The Ghost of Fremont Canyon” from my book Noctis Terrores. It’s available on Kindle Unlimited and in print at major booksellers, and the link’s in the episode description. I’ll read you the whole thing here for free, but if you enjoy it, I’d love it if you picked up a copy.
I’ll see you next week!