Here's how it works.
You are given forty-eight hours to write a poem. There is a catch, however. They also supply you with a pretty random list of words you must use in this poem. You must use each word at least once. The poem must also not be longer than forty-eight lines (if you appreciate symmetry, this works out to one line per hour). The contest begins at midnight of one day and ends at midnight two days later.
I thought this was an extremely cool concept and so I entered! This past Friday evening at midnight (CV2 is published out of Winnipeg so, given the one-hour time difference, it was 1:00 A.M. on Saturday my time) these were the words we all received:
The word that stood out the most for me was "ham". I knew I didn't want to write a poem about food or cooking so how to work "ham" into a poem? I used the above pic as a Facebook status over the weekend and one of my FB friends commented that she didn't know how I was going to write a good poem with the word "ham" in it. I was rather in agreement. I spent about half an hour pondering this list of words and then finally went to bed with them swimming in my head.
I woke up the next morning and had, for all intents and purposes, wasted about seven hours of potential writing time. I didn't want to stray too far from my normal routine so I got up, would have read the paper if they'd actually delivered it, had some breakfast and coffee and spent a little time on social media and then decided I should maybe get to work.
I sat down with the words again, hoping that some connection or common thread would make itself known to me.
Just a day or two previously, I'd been going through an album of pics we'd taken on a trip to Agassiz, B.C., back in 2009. Lewis Nunn Agassiz, my great-great grandfather, had settled on a plot of land on the Fraser River in the mid 1800's, after an unsuccessful attempt at gold prospecting. Others found their way there as well and soon there was a thriving community which became known as, appropriately enough, Agassiz. I found myself looking at a pic of his travelling trunk. His name and other writing was on it and it appeared to me that it had been stenciled on. I remember a train of thought which had me wondering when they started using stencils for things.
Then, a day or two after this, I receive my ten contest words and, lo and behold, "stencil" is one of them. I continue on through the list and I come across the word "pyrite". Pyrite is also known as "fool's gold", something I'm sure Lewis likely encountered. At this point, I knew what the poem was going to be about! And I also had an inkling what I was going to do with word "ham"!
I sat down at the dining room table with my writing pad and started really looking at the words (now that I had an idea what the topic of the poem might be) and trying to work with them. I ended up with a bunch of scattered lines, words scratched out, arrows drawn, the whole rough copy thing going on. I then sat down with the laptop and started putting the whole mess together!
Back in the mid-eighties, I wrote poetry all the time. Much of it (as I'm sure a lot of poets would attest to) was garbage. I did, however, manage to get 7 or 8 of them published in well-thought-of literary journals, both in Canada and in the States. Then, for some unknown reason, I stopped. I do remember enjoying the process, though, and found myself once again on the weekend all wrapped up in wordsmithing. And loving it!
Here is the poem I finally came up with:
Agassiz
The satellite, overhead, told me how
to get here.
Before, though, much farther away
and in a different century,
he is on his knees, broken in a creek-bed,
and every golden fleck in the pan is pyrite,
just pyrite.
The water laps up to the soles of his boots
and freezes.
He knows now the promises were faked or fabled
and the one last tenuous fibril of this dream
is lapsed, dissolved between his fingers
and flowing away with the
glacial melt.
Back down the Fraser, then, finds flat land
at the foot of a mountain, goes into the forest
and begins to break it.
Stalwart beams interlock and crisscross
above his family who have come from
the other side of the continent. Wing
has cooked the ham, it is soaking in its juices,
its aroma and the wood smoke drifting
up among the rough-hewn timbers.
He is in the corner, sitting,
his own smoke is like a veil.
And through this veil, there is a trunk.
There are quilts and blankets on top of it
and on the side someone has taken a stencil
and painted on it, boldly, L. Agassiz esq.
His travelling trunk, it has followed him here,
it is ever-present and his eyes are upon it.
When he has gone again, the land continues to grow.
The sons and daughters grow as well and
generations are there, in black and white, on the front
lawn. Tea is being served.
In the next hundred years, it is a place
of pilgrimage, children playing on the back lawns,
grandchildren in among the trees,
great-grandchildren appearing
through the mountains
and then there is
me, standing in what is now
their driveway.
I am there with spirits.
There is still one hewn log visible in this place, the rest is
mirrored halls, chests of drawers, appliances.
And, above me, a ripping satellite.
So there you have it, my entry in the 2-Day Poem Contest. On CV2's website, you can go back and read past winning entries. Given the quality of those entries, I don't think this poem has much of a chance. I was aware of this as I was writing it and pondered starting all over. If I had done that, though, I simply would have been trying to copy someone else's style of writing and that would not have sat well with me. Nor should it have. I did find myself all caught up with the family heritage of what I was doing and this gave it a worth of its own, regardless of whether it goes on to win anything!
For fun, you can go back to the original list of words and double-check as to when and where I used them. I wrote the poem somewhat based on a picture of me standing in the driveway of "Ferny Coombe", the name given to the Agassiz homestead. I remembered having to use the our GPS heavily on our trip to Agassiz, and this really was the easiest way to fit in "satellite". And the "Wing" I mentioned was the Agassiz family cook.
The contest winners will be announced round about July 1, will keep you all posted! Wish me luck!
