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? This poem began in 2018 when I heard about Tahlequah, the Salish Sea orca who carried her dead newborn on her head for 17 days before letting it go. I’m a mother, I’ve experienced miscarriage, and I love whales, so seeing her grief tour gave me feelings of profound loss. I wanted to write something for her. To find a starting place, I read about her pod and its larger community, the Southern Resident orcas. What I learned was grim: their primary food, chinook salmon, is threatened by habitat loss and overfishing, so they face starvation. They also suffer from collisions with ships, underwater noise pollution, and toxins. It was all so dire I couldn’t get a poetic toehold. I put the idea aside.
Then, two years later, I heard Tahlequah was pregnant again. I thought I could perhaps write about her from that moment of possibility and went scouting for hope. I found it in learning her mourning had drawn worldwide sympathy, and in news of determined efforts to restore salmon populations, like the project that removed two dams from the Olympic Peninsula’s Elwha River.
The metrics in those stories gave me the idea to approach the poem through an image of scales. I wrote a draft and shared it with my brilliant critique partner, Laura Reece Hogan, who had suggestions on clarity.
Click on the below link to visit Laura Reece Hogan’s website
http://www.laurareecehogan.com/
I made some changes and workshopped a revision in a terrific Orion Magazine environmental poetry class led by the amazing Elizabeth Bradfield, who had helpful notes on form and title, and then, finally, finished the poem.
Click on the below link to visit Elizabeth Bradfield’s website
Where were you when you started to actually write the poem? And please describe the place in great detail. I was at my kitchen table, in the magic hour before dawn, with a candle burning and a cup of hot, strong coffee. I love to write when the moon’s still up and the stars are flickering through the palm fronds outside my back window. We live by a Los Angeles canyon and most days a coastal breeze flows through it before sunrise. Somehow the way it stirs the trees in that cocoon of darkness gives me a feeling of potentiality. I don’t always manage to wake up early enough to enjoy it, but I wrote this poem during covid shutdown with my family of five all home and staking out Zoom spots, so I had extra incentive to roll out of bed!
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? Oh, yes, a bunch. I played around a while trying different openings before the scale image bubbled up. Once I found a structure, most of the lines stuck. The ones left out definitely don’t deserve airtime. But I did cut some words for orca behaviors that I loved, like spyhop, lobtail and cartwheel.
There’s a fun list here, for anyone interested:
https://www.whaleresearch.com/orca-behaviors
What do you want readers of this poem to take from this poem? I hope this poem will leave readers with the feeling that every moment offers us new possiblity, and that we can use that possibility to do big things, like heal rivers. And I’d be delighted if it sparks curiosity for anyone.
I’d also like to share that the calf Tahlequah gave birth to in 2020 is named Phoenix, and happily he appears to be thriving.
For anyone who’d like to know more about the Southern Residents, Friday Harbor’s Whale Museum is a good resource:
Which part of the poem was the most emotional of you to write and why? On the side of sorrow, thinking about orcas starving and feeling powerless to help. They can become so emaciated, their heads thin into a peanut shape. On the side of joy, hope, gratitude, and inspiration, thinking about the fish returning to the Elwha River and the coalition working to heal its ecosystem.
Has this poem been published? And if so where? Yes, it appears in my chapbook Little Victory (Finishing Line Press, 2021), a collection of poems about the planet, politics, and small things that spark big hope.
Click on the below link to purchase LITTLE VICTORY from Finishing Line Press
https://www.finishinglinepress.com/product/little-victory-by-elizabeth-kuelbs/
Elizabeth Kuelbs writes poetry, fiction, and non-fiction for children and adults, often with an emphasis on bringing attention to the natural world and our place within it. Her work for young readers appears in Spider, the caterpillar, Cricket, and elsewhere. Her work for adults can be found in Claw & Blossom, Kissing Dynamite, Poets Reading the News, The Children’s Writers Guild, Minerva Rising, and other publications. Her poetry has won awards from the California State Poetry Society and the Ventura County Poetry Project, and her fiction has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize. She holds an MFA in Writing for Children and Young Adults from Vermont College of Fine Arts, and a Master of Science in Information Systems Analysis and Design from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Elizabeth is the author of the poetry chapbooks How to Clean Your Eyes (dancing girl press, 2021), and Little Victory (Finishing Line Press, 2021), which was selected as a Distinguished Favorite in Social/Political Poetry in the 2022 Independent Press Awards. Visit her online at https://elizabethkuelbs.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