Can you go through the step-by-step process of writing this poem from the moment the idea was first conceived in your brain until final form? While the title of my new book is All Morning the Crows, the collection features 51 poems each with the name of a different bird—crows is just one of many. And the title of the book is actually taken from my poem titled “Pheasant”! When I was nearing what felt like the end of writing these poems, I still had not been able to write “Ravens” or “Crow” – successfully, I mean. Those turned out to be the two last poems I worked on for the collection, and among the last that I finally declared “finished.” (Ellen Bryant Voigt would interject here: “Honey, it’s all draft until you die.”)
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/ellen-bryant-voigt
“Crow” had several false starts as I tried to discover where it wanted to lead me. One draft included a made up and not very good joke (a crow walks into a bar; the bartender says “We don’t serve your kind here,” and the crow replies, “I thought this was a crowbar”) and another told the story of hearing a woman read a crow poem in Robert Frost’s barn up in the White Mountains of New Hampshire, and how that included her cawing so loud that my Labrador retriever ran toward the podium, barking. A true story, but not interesting enough to put in a poem.
It wasn’t until I pondered the fact that crows are songbirds, and that nuns in their habits can resemble crows—all this while doing some research about my birth mother, that the final version of the poem was born. Then I wrote most of it in a sort of white heat. Emotionally it turned out to be one of the most difficult poems I’ve tackled yet.
That said, it took many, many revisions—using feedback from a trusted reader along with feedback from editors at literary magazines (who were intrigued but didn’t deem it ready, because it wasn’t), to get it right. At last it seemed about as good as I could make it, and the next time I sent it out—to The American Journal of Poetry—they snapped it up, thank goodness. It’s a long poem, so finding the right home for it required some extra effort.
http://theamericanjournalofpoetry.com/
Where were you when you started to actually write the poem? And please describe the place in great detail. Every summer I spend most of the month of August in a little cabin in New Hampshire’s White Mountains—I go there with my dog and leave my husband and two cats behind for this annual writing retreat. It’s a very small cabin, but perfect for one person and her dog in summer. After a morning walk, usually I try to write from about 9 a.m. to 3 p.m., then we go for a hike. Unless the weather is unusually hot or stormy, I work on the screened-in front porch. I have a rocking chair and a table. It’s very cozy. Thirty-plus years ago I could see the Presidential Range from there, but nowadays I mostly see trees and—on clear days—the top of Cannon Mountain.
What month and year did you start writing this poem? The very first throw-away drafts were in 2012, then again in 2015. In August of 2017, I finally nailed the first draft of “Crow” that I knew was worth keeping. It would take another year before it felt ready to send out.
How many drafts of this poem did you write before going to the final? (And can you share a photograph of your rough drafts with pen markings on it?) There were probably 20 or more drafts in the end, if you include those first attempts. I begin all poems by hand—with a pencil on a lined pad attached to a clip board. Usually I hang onto those, but for some reason now all I can find of “Crow” are those first, horrid attempts I spoke of earlier. The other working drafts are somewhere—I’ll find them at some point when I’m not searching for them! But what I have now are old versions saved as Word documents, which aren’t as instructive.
Were there any lines in any of your rough drafts of this poem that were not in the final version? And can you share them with us? Right in the first stanza I originally used the word “stone” instead of “headstone.” That change seems so obviously right now, but of course many things do in hindsight. Another stanza that comes just a bit later in the poem read:
“Scientists say crows have an innate sense
of fairness.
Also: all’s fair in love
and abandonment.”
Later I changed “scientists” to “ornithologists,” and got rid of the “Also…etc” and instead wrote what’s there now:
“Ornithologists claim crows have an innate sense
of fairness. One will scoff
at your proffered raisin, for example,
if you’ve given her sister two peanuts.
(If you’ve given her sister
away—that’s a fact best kept cached
like the crows’ scraps of road kill
and white-oak acorns.)”
What do you want readers of this poem to take from this poem? As with anything I write, I hope to make the reader feel something—surprise or connection or joy or longing or sorrow or any combination of things. Sometimes I hope the reader will laugh, even if the poem’s humor is of an uncomfortable sort. This poem might make the reader feel a gamut of emotions; at least, I hope so.
Which part of the poem was the most emotional of you to write and why? This was a difficult poem to write as a whole because of its subject matter—my first mother, who gave me up for adoption when I was five months old. It tries to get at her backstory as well as “our” backstory and what happened to her after she left me behind, much of which is very mysterious—and forever will be because she is dead and unable to tell me what really happened. The whole dang thing was emotionally difficult to write, as were many poems in this book.
Has this poem been published before? And if so where? Yes, it was first published in The American Journal of Poetry; you can read it here:
https://theamericanjournalofpoetry.com/v7-kearney.html
and published in All Morning the Crows (Winner of the Washington Prize & published by The Word Works, 2021
Crow
It was a crow first taught me
how to pry a thing open—snatch
a stick to leverage a headstone or widen
the hole in a rotten pine’s trunk
to get at the story inside.
*
New York, 1999:
If our mother had kept you,
my newly found sister said,
you’d never have gone
to college. Wouldn’t have done
a lot of things you’ve done.
*
Ornithologists claim crows have an innate sense
of fairness. One will scoff
at your proferred raisin, for example,
if you’ve given her sister two peanuts.
(If you’ve given her sister
away—that’s a fact best kept cached
like the crows’ scraps of road kill
and white-oak acorns.)
*
I wasn’t the first apprentice
to the crow, first to learn that old term
“crowbar.” Handy for getting at grubs
and slugs or warding off a man
with a brick for a fist. Flip the bar
around to hook a beetle. But not
a mother. Not
a sister.
*
—if she had kept me?
*
A rooster crows;
crows caw. Explain that,
and while you’re at it, how
you came to laugh my mother’s
laugh, my newly found sister said.
I said, I never claimed to be anyone’s
interpreter. She said, Our, I meant to say
our mother.
*
Rhode Island, 1960:
Hear that? Crows are songbirds, too,
squawk the nuns in their choir loft.
See the one with a little silver cross
in her beak, jimmying the blue-gold window’s
latch? That’s her. My first mother.
*
Our mother told me,
my newly found sister said,
she went to Catholic boarding school.
I said, Well—the convent…
Our mother did not speak
a secret language. She spoke
the language of secrets.
*
As any ex-nun would tell you: the world
isn’t simply black and white. Consider
a plum in a crow’s mouth in sunlight.
Consider the nun’s habit, sunk
to its knees in the confessional’s
dark. Color of a broken vow,
iridescent as a cancer cell.
*
Apprentice, yes, I told
my newly found sister.
Ravens?
You have to work your way up
to ravens.
*
Corpses. Cemeteries. What many people think
when they hear “crow,” also known as
the pall-bearer of souls.
By the time I found her, my first mother
had already been dead
seventeen years. Why was I
surprised? At her grave
I buried a silver earring
for the crows to find.
*
Does anyone ever see a scarecrow and think
“crow”? Corn fields,
maybe. Or,
Father, is that you?
*
If you leave us, the nuns in Bristol
told my first mother,
you will die a terrible death.
But she stole a dress yellow
as a crow’s eye plus
five hundred nickels.
Bought a ticket to Boston.
The dress? A newly arrived novitiate’s.
“Crow’s eye yellow”? Code
for so sexy it was in
the to-be-burned bin.
*
How did she go from Boston to New
York to Tucson? Why didn’t she tell us
about you? my newly found sister wants
to know. She now thinks
I have the knowledge of crows.
*
From the crow’s nest of her get-away ship
my first mother could have seen
nothing useful. Not the snake-charmer with his
charming snake or Prince Charming or how
a daughter can shrink to a name on a dotted line,
to one wide brown eye on the horizon
before falling off the edge
of her world.
*
In Scotland, crows are “corbies.”
Grand-Dad never lost his brogue,
my newly found sister said.
She said she could still hear him singing
about the “twa corbies” who feast
on a dead knight’s bonny-blue eyes.
*
When still in her Sister Gabriella disguise,
my first mother taught Kindergarten.
All those children, not one of them hers.
Snack-time milk box cost five cents.
Add it up.
*
Fact: crows can recognize human faces,
even remember them years later.
The first time I saw my mother in a photograph,
I thought it was some sort of trick
mirror. Hello, I said, I know you.
*
You are she
when I last remember her well,
my newly found sister said.
*
No place for a ship in Arizona, meaning
no daily departures leaving from Boston
or New York,where I was harbored. Was that
the allure? To be far from the Atlantic,
its relentless chant. Though the desert
is its own type of sea.
She was given a photograph of me to keep.
Grief came in waves like the heat.
*
On overcast days—before clocks—
Jews began the Sabbath
when crows came home to roost.
Crows don’t need a timepiece—
sunset’s when all the good stuff
starts to happen.
*
Arizona, 1983:
(This the story I’ve been told, with a few guesses thrown in.)
Round and around my first mother’s deathbed
flew the Sisters of Bristol, that murder
of crows.
I have another daughter, she whispered
to her husband. Low, so her children
wouldn’t hear.
He promised to find me. Thinking
this would make her live.
*
Told you so, chanted the crows
settling like a wreath at her feet.
*
How did she get to Tucson?
Some say the southern route, a brand-new
Corvair convertible.
I say she flew.
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