*Contains brief mention of drug use and sexual themes.
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. This season, you’ll hear poems from my book Noctis Terrores.
Today, I’ll read “Nocte Visita” and we’ll talk about choosing a writing community. Here’s…
Nocte Visita
Two years after he died, Paw Paw stood
behind a screen door while spadefoot toads
cried like children at a car wreck.
They were down in the ditch water,
in the mud and mosquitoes,
with their mouths open.
I’d just started dating Raina.
This was before she forged the checks
and slept with the snare drummer.
Before all the girls: the writer
who laced her cigarettes with cocaine
and the stripper whose ex-husband looked
like me and the horsewoman,
my own sliver of Appalachia.
I have been one acquainted
with the night, Frost wrote.
I have walked out in the rain,
and back in rain.
I have outwalked
the furthest city light.
A white wolf stood at Paw Paw’s knees.
“I hope you know what you’re doing, boy,”
he said, but I was too mad
at him for dying to listen.
Discuss:
I usually talk about techniques in these episodes, but today I want to talk about something different. I want to talk about community.
This poem exists in the forum you just heard in its final form because of my writing group, a collection of writing teachers from Florida Gulf Coast University. We get together once a week on Zoom, and sometimes we have a warmup prompt. We work on ongoing projects, read things to each other if we’re proud of them, or if we need advice, and we give feedback when people ask for it.
My group shaped this poem. So it started out as a typical Stephen Cavitt prose poem. I’m leaning more and more into the chunky prose paragraph-looking poem these days. It had extra quotes and a four line reference to Loren Eiseley the insomniac anthropologist who wrote The Night Country.
In a couple of working sessions, my group steered me away from the Eiseley thing. There was just too much happening in the poem. It was too busy or there were too many competing directions. We had the ghost appearance, the speaker’s troubled relationships, the Frost quote, and then also that piece about Loren Eiseley and insomnia.
They changed the shape of it as well. I had originally opened with the image of the spadefoot totes because I was out walking the dog at night, and the toads were crying in the ditches after the rain. I write a lot of poems while I’m walking and I just chant them over and over to myself, and then when it feels right, I’ll grab my phone and use either a voice memo or the notes app to get down that first draft.
My group suggested that I move PawPaw to the top of the poem and make it sound like the toads are crying while he talks to the speaker. They gave me some other structural advice, too, and then I got to this ending, and they really liked it. So it wouldn’t exist in this order and probably wouldn’t be nearly as strong or as different from some of my other poems if not for my writing group.
The takeaway for you, I think, is that writing is a solitary activity, but it doesn’t always have to be. Find your community. Find at least a few people that you can trade poems with and ask for input when you need it and take the feedback that works and politely leave the rest, and then give as good as you get in those groups.
Let’s hear “Nocte Visita” one more time with a shoutout to my writing friends for making it what it is. I appreciate y’all. Here’s …
Nocte Visita
Two years after he died, Paw Paw stood
behind a screen door while spadefoot toads
cried like children at a car wreck.
They were down in the ditch water,
in the mud and mosquitoes,
with their mouths open.
I’d just started dating Raina.
This was before she forged the checks
and slept with the snare drummer.
Before all the girls: the writer
who laced her cigarettes with cocaine
and the stripper whose ex-husband looked
like me and the horsewoman,
my own sliver of Appalachia.
I have been one acquainted
with the night, Frost wrote.
I have walked out in the rain,
and back in rain.
I have outwalked
the furthest city light.
A white wolf stood at Paw Paw’s knees.
“I hope you know what you’re doing, boy,”
he said, but I was too mad
at him for dying to listen.
Prompt
If you’re writing along with me, explore a writing community this week in some way that makes sense to you. You could check out writing meetups in your town, or Facebook groups, or Reddit threads. Reach out to a few writer friends and see what they’re working on. Ask if they want to swap a poem or a story, and ask for the specific feedback you’re looking for.
I forget which amazing writer and writing teacher I first heard this from. It may have been Heather Sellers. Someone said, you can ask for what you want. If you share a piece of writing with your friend, you can say, I’m not ready for criticism yet. I’d love to hear a little bit of praise. I’m still vulnerable about this one.
Or you can say, The ending isn’t even finished yet. Don’t give me any feedback on that yet, but tell me what you think about the opening. Or you could say, Tear this apart as much as you want. I’m ready. And you can ask your partner what he or she’s looking for from you.
Maybe you need a little more accountability and a little more company, so reach out to a friend and set up a writing date where you sit in a coffee shop and write quietly next to each other, or have a Zoom call like my friends do, and take an hour or so to write and share.
Whatever you try, and you can try more than one thing over more than one week, take some step toward writing community
Outro
This season I’m reading poems from my book Noctis Terrores. It’s available now on Kindle Unlimited and in print at major online booksellers, and there’s a link in the episode description. You can support the show by picking up a copy.
I’ll see you next week.