#360 Backstory of the Poem “Beyond the Field” by Emilee Kinney.

LEFT: Emilee Kinney. RIGHT: The field next to Emilee’s childhood home in Michigan. Credit and Copyright by Emilee Kinney.

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? I initially set out wanting to write a poem about a headless deer carcass that my sister and I found while we were riding our horses through the woods back home. It was a brutal image of death, but it was also a symbol of poachers, of our family’s land being trespassed. The place we found safety in suddenly stripped of that comfort. I wanted to write a poem in which we reclaimed our power but found that the poem needed to do more. I needed to show readers the woods around and behind the house I grew up in, needed them to feel the importance of this place. I didn’t want it to be a faraway reflection of the woods though; I wanted to bring my reader into it, walk them through the trails and under tree limbs. I first brainstormed all the times I remember going through the woods on my own, why I did it, what I felt, what I saw, but this didn’t feel like enough. It still seemed like the speaker was alone. I switched gears and brainstormed times I was there with my sister, grandparents, friends, my dad—both exercises actually resulted in several different poems.

Credit and copyright by Emilee Kinney.
Copyright by Emilee Kinney
Credit and Copyright by Emilee Kinney

I needed to tie my family to the land and to do that, I needed to include family with the speaker, more than just the sister. This would allow me to talk about the land my family has worked and lived on for several generations while also showing the landscape that had such a profound impact on my childhood. There’s an excerpt from an old Gaelic blessing in the poem that I had been trying to find a home for because it’s something my family often recites and physically passes down to hang up in each other’s houses. The repetition at the end of the poem that frames the blessing excerpt is meant to mirror the sound of an incantation, calling back to the line “like we knew anything about the magic in these woods.”

Emilee Kinney in the field of her childhood home. Copyright by Emilee Kinney.

I quickly realized I had a lot to pack into this poem and turned to Brigit Pegeen Kelly’s poem “Silver Lake” for guidance. I studied her poem for several days, considering how she moved from image to image, how and when she propelled readers into reflection, and marking the meter of each line. This was how all my brainstorming finally found a form and the poem began to take shape. Since its initial draft, it has been shortened, there’s been lots of reordering and restructuring of the lines, and stanza breaks have been added, but it’s still doing the landscape and family work I set out to achieve.

Click on the below link to read “Silver Lake” by Brigit Pegeen Kelly.

http://www.poetrysky.com/quarterly/13/quarterly-13-kelly.html

Where were you when you started to actually write the poem?  And please describe the place in great detail. Unfortunately, I wasn’t anywhere interesting—not even in the state of the place I was writing about! I’ve found this has helped me focus on the smaller details though. Being displaced so I can reimagine it clearly enough in my mind to write about it has been the most generative and beneficial process for my writing.

The Kinney Family Horses on the Family Home and land. Credit and Copyright by Emilee Kinney.
The Kinney family fields. Credit and Copyright by Emilee Kinney

I was sitting at a hand-me-down kitchen table, in a wooden chair whose legs and braces were duct-taped together to keep the chair functional. A bookcase at my back, and sun-filled windows in front of me and on my left. Outside, there was a light dusting of snow covering the porch and the yard, and it reminded me of home, how they were probably buried with at least a foot of snow.

The writing space where Emilee Kinney wrote “Beyond the Field”. The chair with duct tape was eventually thrown out, thus the missing chair. Credit and Copyright by Emilee Kinney.

The sun lit up the dust that lingered on the table and the white dog hair stuck to my sleeves. Brigit Pegeen Kelly’s book “Song” was held open on the poem “Silver Lake” by my phone which displayed a picture of the deer carcass my sister and I found. My notebook with various image-notes and half-similes was held open by an open bag of peanut M&Ms. I typed the first draft into my laptop with my dogs’ snores filling the quiet room, the two of them cuddled on the dog bed to my right. I was over 600 miles from the place I was writing about, but it felt like I had never left.

Click on the link below to order SONG from Amazon.

What month and year did you start writing this poem? Pieces of the poem are from 2016/17 but the overall beast itself was started in February 2021.

Emilee (up front) with her sister Colleen riding horses. Copyright by Emilee Kinney.
The deer carcass the two sisters encountered. Credit and Copyright by Emilee Kinney.

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? The title was the first to change once my readers reminded me of the Disney movie “Into the Woods.” It took a couple tries to figure out the best title, but I’ve always appreciated a working title (one that feeds into the first line of the poem), and that led me to “Beyond the field.” Here are some lines that didn’t make the final cut:

“Spring peeks over the treetops, scatters clover through the pasture:”

“that instead / we make our crops lesser, profits scarcer to keep everyone near.”

“I pull the branch cutter from my back and snip at the joint, sure to catch the knitted branch / before it falls. Its sharp sweetness lingers as my mare shudders and I run my resin-sticky fingers / through her honey white mane, shaking needles and bark-skin / to the dead leaves, but even this is not a waste: for the birds.”

“we didn’t worry / about stains or how numb our fingers became, just ambled back to arrange them in a circle / around what was left of the blood-crusted fur and sun-kissed bone yellowing along the sides.”

Beyond the field. Credit and Copyright by Emilee Kinney.
Credit and Copyright by Emilee Kinney.
Credit and Copyright by Emilee Kinney

What do you want readers of this poem to take from this poem? I’m not sure I ever have much in mind of what I want readers to take from a poem. It’s more of where can the poem take them if that makes sense? For “Beyond the Field,” I wanted to show how much life and weight is in a small farm town, how the quiet places can be the loudest. It’s a moment of sisterhood and how children use magic to escape trauma. There’s also the inherited weight of living on a family farm, one that’s dying, one that holds so many memories of love, rage, and loss, and thinking about the type of memories we were leaving behind too.

Credit and Copyright by Emilee Kinney

Which part of the poem was the most emotional of you to write and why?  Much of the middle of the poem from the line “we aren’t two horsegirls” to “We were so young—” Writing the poem was emotional because I hadn’t been home in months, my horse had passed away the summer before, and our barn cat shortly after. I lived out of state for school but also because of the pandemic lockdown, there was a lot of fear for my grandparents’ health and whether I’d be able to get back if anything did happen to anyone. Overall, there was a lot of loss and sadness around my memory of home but also a lot of longing for the past, the days when I could just hop on my horse’s back and my sister and I could spend the afternoon exploring the woods like they were something new, even though we knew every inch of them.

Sisters Colleen and Emilee Kinney with their horses. Copyright by Emilee Kinney
Emilee Kinney with her partner Tyler and her two dogs. Copyright by Emilee Kinney

This poem, just in its draft form, took me the longest to complete because it was so hard to put myself back in that place. Because I wanted to finish the poem, I don’t think I truly let myself feel all of it until the first time I took the poem to a reading. When I read the lines aloud, I couldn’t pretend the place I was conjuring wasn’t there, entirely real and inescapable in my mind and heart’s eye. I cried during that reading a lot, (which was terribly embarrassing), but I also felt like this poem was some of my most authentic and necessary work.

Has this poem been published?  And if so where? Not yet, but I’m hoping for the best.

Click on the below link to visit Emilee Kinney’s website

https://www.emileekinneypoetry.com/

Most of the BACKSTORY OF THE POEM links can be found at the very end of the below feature:http://chrisricecooper.blogspot.com/2021/02/will-justice-drakes-intercession-is-251.html

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