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 felt this poem coming during a walk on a beautiful November day, the tranquility of a valley, the happening upon an old deserted graveyard, then looking down within a crevasse to watch a powerful train course around the valley. When we returned to the valley floor to learn of our cousin Tommy’s death, I needed to capture that emotional and physical journey.
Where were you when you started to actually write the poem? And please describe the place in great detail. I wrote the first draft that evening in the camper we’d parked on old family land. North Cove is a beautiful Blue Ridge valley (BELOW) between two mountains, Honeycutt and Linville. The camper sits way back from the highway, at the foot of Honeycutt, and is surrounded by fields where deer and turkey come to stroll. I sat at our little camper table looking out on the field and across to Linville Mountain, brainstorming images from the afternoon.
What month and year did you start writing this poem? I started the poem in mid-November of 2020.
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? My first version was a prose piece, loaded with more than I could fit. I ended up pulling images from a piece too long for a single poem. I kept working on the poem for months, changing a few words, mostly tightening. Even so, it’s long and I should have divided it into sections. Here are some of the bits I removed:
“We walked up the ridge and finally wandered into the old Murphy-Hayden cemetery, sunken graves which looked like mummy casings, deep and oblong, making clear their message. There must have been fifty jagged rocks, turned this way and that, toppled or upright, signaling the oblong sinkholes, with only a few carved stones—A. Murphy, Ida Murphy—somewhere the stone of Malachi Hayden, his own story nearly forgotten—somewhere the stones of two railroad workers who’d been killed during railroad times, another story. All those stories lay there under the deep autumn leaves, decorated by the chance fall of pinecones. Beneath it all lay those people whose grandchildren would not know where to find them in this deep woods with no path.”
……
“For the children growing up in that valley, life seemed easy and filled with play, sometimes work, but always wild play, wanderings on unexplored ridges leading up away from the cove or down into somebody’s pasture. Every hill was a playground, a camp site, a place to slide butt down upon the hillside broom sage.”
What do you want readers of this poem to take from this poem? I hope they feel the sense of transience, beauty, loss, and yet endurance within the shifts of time.
Which part of the poem was the most emotional of you to write and why? Paring Tommy’s death down to a few words was hardest.
https://redhawkpublications.com/Standing-On-the-Outcrop-p370559521
Has this poem been published? And if so where? This poem is published in my book Standing on the Outcrop (Redhawk Publications, 2021).
