In our second episode of the seven-part Divinations miniseries, poet Sandra Yannone and I dig into her work-in-progress poem, "The Stars on the Snake River," inspired by the Little Oracles lexical fractal "twine," part of the original Little Oracles multimedia digital installation, which is back on view at littleoracles.com/exhibit.
We talk about the liminality of travel and creative revision, map-making, the poet Elizabeth Bishop (including a reading of her poem, "The Map"), and more. Plus, I share a snippet of my response poem to Sandy's featured reading! It's a meta-meta episode indeed. :)
Enjoy, and, as always, take care, keep creating, and stay divine.
Resources
IG: @littleoracles
In our second episode of the seven-part Divinations miniseries, poet Sandra Yannone and I dig into her work-in-progress poem, "The Stars on the Snake River," inspired by the Little Oracles lexical fractal "twine," part of the original Little Oracles multimedia digital installation, which is back on view at littleoracles.com/exhibit.
We talk about the liminality of travel and creative revision, map-making, the poet Elizabeth Bishop (including a reading of her poem, "The Map"), and more. Plus, I share a snippet of my response poem to Sandy's featured reading! It's a meta-meta episode indeed. :)
Enjoy, and, as always, take care, keep creating, and stay divine.
Resources
IG: @littleoracles
[Intro music]
Allison Arth: Hi everybody, and welcome to the Little Oracles podcast, an oracle for the everyday creative. I'm Alison Arth. Welcome back to our second episode of the Divinations miniseries here on the Little Oracles podcast, wherein poet Sandra Yannone and I are trading poems across the miles, inspired by one another's work and by the lexical fragments, these tiny micro-poems, that constituted part of my multimedia digital installation, called Little Oracles, which inspired this podcast, and which I showed at Orcas Paley last fall. And we're sharing that work here with all of you in its glorious in-progress-ness, and talking about the creative process, and artistic collaboration, and all that kind of good stuff. And if you haven't listened to Episode 1 of this Divinations series, I'll link that in the show notes so you can go back and get even more backstory about this project. But first, Sandy, glad to see you again; welcome back.
Sandra Yannone: It's a joy. And a thrill. It's a joy and a thrill.
AA: [laughs]
SLY: What else can I say?
AA: I love it. So Sandy is going to kick things off with reading her poem, the first one in our series — our epistolary exchange. We're going to dig into that a little bit and have a little teaser for next week's episode after that, where I'll be reading my response– or a few lines from my response poem to Sandy's work. But let's not get ahead of ourselves. Sandy, do you want to set us up a little bit, and kind of tell us what lexical fragment you're inspired by? And if there's anything else you want to tell us about this poem to, kind of, tee us up before you read it?
SLY: Absolutely. Thank you again for the series and the graciousness of being willing and able to be in conversation with me about poetry. It's– it's very inspiring to me. And I'm, I'm enjoying the process.
AA: Yeah.
SLY: And that's about the best thing I can ever say to any human being, is “I'm enjoying the process.”
AA: [laughs] Yeah!
SLY: So, thank you. Well, to get back to the poem that I'm about to read: it began with diving into the lexicon — the fragments — and I chose– it was pretty immediate, actually; I felt a gravitational pull toward the word “twine.”
AA: Mm; mm-hmm.
SLY: And it wasn't so much what the suggestions about “twine” were; it was the word itself that led me to this poem. And I really thought I was going to go in a different direction with it. I immediately thought I was going to start writing about the world's largest twine ball.
AA: [laughs] Yeah, the noun of twine.
SLY: The noun of twine. And the way that poetry goes sometimes, the twine ball did not make a cameo.
AA: [laughs]
SLY: And if, and if you are one of those people that is interested in the strangest of strange Americana — this is the added bonus to the podcast — there are two twine balls in the country, and they both bill themselves as the largest.
AA: [gasps] Scandal! [laughs]
SLY: It's a scandal! It's a twine ball scandal. So look up the two twine balls, go visit them, see for yourself. I've only been to the one in Minnesota, so I've not done the thing that I'm inviting you to do.
AA: [laughs]
SLY: But back to the poem that we haven't gotten to yet. So, yeah; so I used “twine.” It was the perfect word to enter into sharing an experience that I had just recently had as I was driving across-country this summer. And I was grateful to be able to have a word that gave me an entry point into the experience.
The Stars on the Snake River [Note: to see the author-intended shape and indentations of this poem, visit littleoracles.com/blog]
We twined our way up or down
the mountain at the edge
of the Snake River. We were not
anywhere a map could call
home. We were not anywhere
a map could comprehend.
In 2023 the maps went haywire
and took us down a crude,
curved road. Curved is too kind
a word for the needle
we found ourselves threading;
road is too generous.
We white-knuckled a car
around rock faces
laughing hysterically
to assuage the terror
and amazement. Later we stood outside
inside the black-blue bowl of night
while the river twined around
us. I once trusted this woman
I could not love. She has come from two
worlds. The one she thought
she understood and the one
in front of her ten times over.
She chose neither, electing instead
to stay pinned inside her glass
cage. I tried to reach her,
but the glass was too thick
from where I stood in front
from within my own glass cage
not understanding what glass
stood for: breakable, unbroken,
seemless, flat. I could see only
on the other side of both
our panes: dirtied, foggy, wispy
with seeds. Those antique panes
survived longer than we’d lived.
That can sum up 1995 and six.
Tonight we stepped inside
the cabin with no glass shields
to protect us and slept
under the stars
of our own making.
AA: Mm. So a couple of things really stand out to me in this poem. One of them is a visual thing — so, you know, perfect for an audio podcast, of course. [laughs]
SLY: [chuckles]
AA: But you are using a form of indentations to create the shape of a snake, or perhaps a river, on this page. And I'm– I'm just wondering, like, do you often work in, uh, shaped poetry in that way? Do you use formal elements on the page like that to create a sense or an impression or a feeling in your poetry?
SLY: I think I try to when it feels authentic and integral to the poem. And this certainly, with the word “twine,” I wanted the poem to twine. I mean, I wanted the poem to create that sense of switchback that we were feeling in the car.
AA: Yeah; yeah, well, and I think that the word “switchback” is very interesting, because something that I noticed, also, in this poem is this switchback of, kind of, hard and soft sounds, right? In the initial part of the poem, where there is kind of this tension and this intensity of experience, where you're wending your way down this road that maybe isn't a road [chuckles], we have all these really hard, like, R and D sounds, right? And then as we move past that; we move toward the river; we move toward this cabin that you're staying in; we move toward these feelings of nebulousness around your feeling toward this woman — toward other people in your life, we get much softer sounds: we get those C-L sounds; we get those sibilant sounds: those S's with the words “glass,” and even the word “cage,” despite what it connotes, is a pretty soft-sounding word.
SLY: Mm.
AA: So what draws you to, kind of, those sonic implications in a poem?
SLY: You know, this is an early draft.
AA: Yeah, yeah!
SLY: This is really a first draft. And so I am quite taken that you could find all that sound in it.
AA: [laughs] Yeah; yeah!
SLY: Because I'm not even aware that I was that consistent in the sound. But certainly, in writing — and this would take us to the revision process — is that I would start to pay attention to the more I would be reading it out loud to hear it, where the sounds were going to take me, and where I needed to revise for sound.
AA: Yeah.
SLY: And I could already hear in what I've shared today, where there are some pitches and stops and places I need to revisit and wrangle with a bit and it's in progress; it's in process.
AA: Right.
SLY: And so this information about sound that we've just talked about is going to help me pay attention to that moving forward. And to now be more intentional and see where that takes the revision process as well. So that's a very astute observation about the poem, and I hadn't had it yet, so I really appreciate it. But I will say generally about myself, I do love– I love the hard sound in a poem. I really– I love the hard C. I love the crackle of the K. I– you know– I really like how those words that have those consonants, you know, create the tension; they– they really create tension in the poem.
AA: Mm; mm-hmm.
SLY: And it's really interesting though, because I'm also– I'm writing a book right now — I'm actually almost done with it — where every single poem in the collection had the word “glass” in it, which meant I was working with the softer sounds–
AA: Right.
SLY: –of something that is often shattering and breaking.
AA: Yes! And very harsh–
SLY: And very harsh.
AA: –what it represents. Yeah; yeah. You know, you're bringing up such an interesting point here, especially when it comes to thinking about process and revision, and taking a poem to, kind of, its next iteration: this idea of looking at a poem on the page and reading it in your head, which is what I've been doing until I heard you read it today, and hearing a poem; reading it out loud; hearing what it sounds like in the ear. And something I talk about here on the podcast a lot is the fact that I often listen to poets read their audiobook versions of their collections, sometimes while I'm reading the collection, because I hear inflection and I hear pacing, and cadence, and all of those things that I wouldn't necessarily get when I'm reading a poem just on the page to myself. And I really like this idea that it's almost like you're exposing the tension of revision there — of what does it look like? What does it sound like?
SLY: Well, we had talked about in our opening episode, about that this was going to be so much about a process of discovery of revelation. And so keeping in mind that this is one of the first, early times that I'm hearing myself read it out loud.
AA: Yeah, exactly.
SLY: I– I think I've shared it with maybe one other person on the page, maybe. And I'm trying to actually think if I've read it out loud until today.
AA: Yeah.
SLY: I mean, I certainly get to the point where that's what I'm doing to help me revise, but that's really fascinating, and a good reminder that– a reminder to all of you listening today, that this process is new for us, right?
AA: Mm-hmm; mm-hmm.
SLY: So this isn't a poem I practiced reading; it's– it's a very new poem. It's interesting, because by the time we air this program, maybe the poem will be finished.
AA: Yeah, it's true.
SLY: Right now, It's only existed for about a week and a half.
AA: Right; right!
SLY: So I've barely had time to hear it myself.
AA: Yeah, well, and you're exposing this idea to that time is such an important part in that revision process, and in that process of, even in collaboration with people, and sharing with people; sharing your work to get feedback, or to get a reaction, or things like that: that just takes time, and you gotta percolate sometimes when you're making something; you gotta put it away and come back to it. But in the interim, in those interim moments, having this kind of conversation as a correspondence, it can kind of take you out of your usual process a little bit, and kind of show you those inner workings, and show you a little bit about what this poem is in someone else's ear as well, and in someone else's mind, and kind of see how they're reacting to it, and see what they're feeling, and what it sparks for them as well.
SLY: As you were describing this process of the correspondence, the conversation, I really heard the word “correspond” for the first time, realizing it's co-respond.
AA: Yeah. Yeah!
SLY: And I hadn't really thought about that.
AA: Yeah.
SLY: I love the “re-” words; I love all the “re-” words. But to add a “co-” to a “re-,” that's like a double whammy!
AA: It is! It is; we're doing it together.
SLY: It's like a meta-meta.
AA: It's a meta-meta! [laughs]
SLY: There are not many meta-metas. Only episode two, friends.
AA: Oh my god.
SLY: We're at meta-meta! Oh my gosh.
AA: [laughs] Where are we going to go by the end of this?
SLY: Spontaneous combustion. [chuckles]
AA: [laughs] Yeah, it's– absolutely! We're gonna launch out of the stratosphere. [laughs] Well, meta-meta-wise, that actually draws me to something else I was thinking about as you were sharing this poem with me, and as I was hearing you read it, but also as I was seeing it on the page: you have this reference to maps, right? You have this beautiful line, “We were not anywhere a map could call home.” Which I just– I love that line so much. And maps are, you know, something you look at; they are on the page; they're very much rooted in something that is kind of flat and stagnant, right? And home has this idea: it's cozy; it's welcoming; it's warm, right? And I'm just wondering, like, can maps really tell us what is home? And do they– do they simply just chart things? What's a map's relationship to the concept of home for you? And in this poem specifically: like, what drew you to– to stick those words together?
SLY: Well, there's the literal, and then there's the metaphysical probably. So let's start with the literal.
AA: Sure.
SLY: So the literal is that we're recording this episode after I have just only weeks ago completed a cross country drive from the West Coast to relocate and move to the East Coast after living in the West for 22 years. And we had mapped out where we were going to stop and people we were going to visit. And this particular place that we found ourselves, and this person that I found myself visiting with, was not in the original plan.
AA: Oh!
SLY: It was a completely serendipitous occurrence on our journey. And truth be told, of all the things — I mean, we could do a podcast just about the drive across country.
AA: [chuckles] Yeah; yeah.
SLY: We could have episodes for every one of the places that we stopped on the map. This place does not exist on the map.
AA: Mm.
SLY: And the experience of being on this road that doesn't exist anywhere, with a beloved that I have a history with, it brought up the feelings of the second part of the poem. There was no map for that relationship back in 1995, just as there's no map for the present or the future. You know, a map– a map is an illusion. We think it's telling us where we can go, but it really never is telling us where we can go.
AA: Yeah.
SLY: Metaphysically.
AA: Uh-huh.
SLY: Physically, yes: you could drive down this road, go from point A to point B, right? But it's not gonna tell you everything in between.
AA: Experientially, yeah, certainly.
SLY: Experientially: there's no map there. And that also was working on me because I was leaving a place that, honestly, I never called home.
AA: Mm.
SLY: When I would refer to home, I was always referring to where I'm living now, back in Connecticut. And so I've been very mindful of that for a long time, too. And so, how does home get signified?
AA: Yeah.
SLY: And can a location on a map be a home? Well, only if your language allows you to call it home. The map isn't the thing that names it home.
AA: Right; [chuckles] it's almost like this maps and territories idea, right? Like, you can use words as labels for so many different things in your life, kind of depending on where you are, and how you want to contextualize the veracity of the thing itself versus, you know, this– this label; this set of letters that creates the word to map it.
SLY: Yeah. It's also, you know, another word that I think functions that way — or dysfunctions that way [chuckles]–
AA: [laughs]
SLY: –is border.
AA: Oh, right, yeah!
SLY: I mean, borders! And of course, as I'm saying this to you, as we're in conversation about this right in this moment, it's making me think about one of my absolute favorite poets, Elizabeth Bishop, who has a poem called “The Map.”
AA: Yeah.
SLY: So Bishop, if you're not familiar with her poetry, was really writing at the height of her career, mid-20th Century. Her books are all related to geography.
AA: Mm-hmm.
SLY: In fact, one of her collections is called Geography 3; another is called North and South; another is called Questions of Travel. I mean, I love these poems of hers, in particular, that are about the nature of travel, and of movement, whether it's metaphorical, or literal–physical. So here's “The Map.”
Land lies in water; it is shadowed green.
Shadows, or are they shallows, at its edges
showing the line of long sea-weeded ledges
where weeds hang to the simple blue from green.
Or does the land lean down to lift the sea from under,
drawing it unperturbed around itself?
Along the fine tan sandy shelf
is the land tugging at the sea from under?
The shadow of Newfoundland lies flat and still.
Labrador’s yellow, where the moony Eskimo
has oiled it. We can stroke these lovely bays,
under a glass as if they were expected to blossom,
or as if to provide a clean cage for invisible fish.
The names of seashore towns run out to sea,
the names of cities cross the neighboring mountains
-the printer here experiencing the same excitement
as when emotion too far exceeds its cause.
These peninsulas take the water between thumb and finger
like women feeling for the smoothness of yard-goods.
Mapped waters are more quiet than the land is,
lending the land their waves’ own conformation:
and Norway’s hare runs south in agitation,
profiles investigate the sea, where land is.
Are they assigned, or can the countries pick their colors?
What suits the character or the native waters best.
Topography displays no favorites; North’s as near as West.
More delicate than the historians’ are the map-makers’ colors.
AA: Oh, it's beautiful. Not just, like, aurally beautiful, right? Not just– it doesn't just sound gorgeous; there is this beautiful implication of that questioning and that looking and that searching, which I think is so perfectly depicted in the imagery of a map, right?
SLY: Yes. And, I mean, and it really does make you think about a map in an entirely new way. The creation of the map.
AA: Mm-hmm; mm-hmm.
SLY: And what does the creation signify and hold? What does it leave out? I mean, I love that last line about the historians, right, you know? But I've read her so much, and I reach for her; I, subconsciously, I have to believe I– I was reaching for something that was going on in that poem when I wrote those lines.
AA: Well, and those two poems I feel like– are very in conversation with each other, and in conversation with your experience of traveling across the country, in this idea of liminality, right? This idea of traveling through space that is maybe not identified, or identifiable, by the tools that we as humans have right now. And also, you know, you have all of these images of glass and, you know, the windshield, and– and panes, and things like that: you have these tenuous and breakable things, but all of those things feel, in a sense, kind of liminal as well; there's a transparency there; there's a gossamerness, something that I can't quite grasp. [chuckles] And you're writing things down; I can see this: you're writing things down. So what is this bringing up for you? [chuckles]
SLY: [laughs] Well, yeah, sorry for the noise in the background.
AA: It's okay. It's fine; it’s fine! [laughs]
SLY: [chuckles] The spirit was calling me, right? Um, that's what the podcast is about anyway!
AA: Yeah, yeah!
SLY: Um, I'm traveling toward the unknown, and this is literal– this is literal, as I'm on that journey, and it's also metaphorical. So the map and where I was going, and literally where I was going on this particular drive, was unknown, was unmappable, just as the relationship was unmappable, and in– in many ways remains unmappable, and I really kind of like that quality to it. And we were talking about sound earlier, and so when you said “glass,” and you said “windshield,” I was like: oh wait, the windshield's in here, but I don't think I use the word “windshield.” And I probably do need to; that would be a great addition to the poem, so I wrote the word “windshield” down and circled it. That's what you were hearing: the circle part.
AA: [laughs] You're hearing live collaboration here; live inspiration. It's going on in the context of this very episode, everybody. [laughs]
SLY: You know, I'm looking at the poem and I'm looking at that line; it's where– where the speaker is realizing that she is in the same glass cage that she sees the other woman is in.
AA: Mm-hmm.
SLY: It's that line, “But the glass was too thick / from where I stood in front / from within my own” (meaning the cage) “not understanding what glass / stood for.” So this– this is a poem about trying to come to terms with what was not understood, or what was not said, and just as I'm trying to make sense of what glass means to me throughout this entire book that I'm writing — I mean, every single poem is a meditation on it– something made of glass, and also the properties of glass. So it's like the map maker: it’s trying to reveal something. We keep using that word reveal–
AA: Mm-hmm.
SLY: –in the first episode and back here today. Where will the revelations come from? Where will the understandings come from? And isn't that one of the things that a poem is– is seeking to do: is to try to reach towards some understanding of something. And I say all of this in a very nebulous way because it's the effort — it's not that we're going to land there.
AA: It's the journey; it's that liminality.
SLY: Yes.
AA: It's existing in unknowability, right?
SLY: Yeah; and feeling as comfortable as one can feel within the discomfort of that.
AA: Mm. Mm-hmm; yeah. So we're talking about, you know, this– this living in this liminality, in this living in this unknowability, and actually traveling through that: you know, an unmappable relationship; an unmappable road; an actual journey that is unmappable to some degree. So I ask you: where do you see this poem going next as you revise? [chuckles]
SLY: It's really interesting, because I've been playing with the idea of flipping the poem on its head, and starting with the revelations about glass, and ending on this apocalyptic drive.
AA: Mm! Mm-hmm; mm-hmm. Well, to kind of step back from that a little bit, I like this idea of iteration as something that you engage in by not just copying and pasting a few lines. and changing a word here and there, that. like. small tinkering that you can do,
SLY: Which I love to do. I love to do that, yeah.
AA: Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's a– that's a wonderful part of revision, right? That recontextualization for yourself in terms of, like, the way a poem sounds or looks on a page. But thinking about that larger picture and that larger intent and that larger impact that a poem can have just emotionally to the reader and to the listener by taking that step of iteration and completely going against your initial impulse for how the story should be told.
SLY: Right; you and I talking here: we don't know what the poem will release until I try that.
AA: Yes; yeah!
SLY: And it may fall silent, and may fall flat, but it may open up something else that is equally as profound as where I'm hoping this draft is going to take us.
AA: Yeah. This is something that my partner, John, and I talked about in our Creative Chat episode in Season Two of the podcast, where he was talking about artistic iteration, where he'll take, you know, a piece of art, for example, take a little bit of time away from it, and when he comes back to it, he's like, “Well, maybe I should completely do an opposite color experiment. Maybe I should take this title and put it on the bottom of the piece. Maybe I should change the fonts entirely and go with a completely opposite approach.” And how valuable that is as an iterative process, and in a creative practice, to just, like, see where something leads you when you completely change it up.
SLY: And that takes us right back to that Bishop poem.
AA: Yeah; yeah!
SLY: The color of the map maker paints the country: how does that define the country?
AA: Ugh, yes! Absolutely. It's blue now, but what if it were pink?
SLY: What if it were pink?
AA: It's green now; what if it were yellow? Absolutely. So, as we look ahead to the next episode, I'm going to share an excerpt from my response poem to The Stars on the Snake River, just as a little teaser to whet your appetites.
The working title is “Hereafter,” and this poem is inspired by, obviously, Sandy's work, “The Stars and the Snake River.” The lexical fragment — the word that I chose to create from — is the word “lake.” And also this poem has echoes of “After the Fire” by Ada Limon.
Whether by chance, by red-weather-charm, to chance a change of coastline, from coats lined with flannel to those lined with down, filed in a childhood closet, those soft arms unfilled, like to say: where have you been?
SLY: Another kind of map.
AA: Another kind of map, yeah. Yeah. Sandy, thank you so much for sitting down today. Before we go, is there anything you want to shout out? Anything you want to hype up? And– and where can we find you online?
SLY: Well, I believe we are heading into the month of December soon, and we'll be having our closing year episodes of our fall season of Cultivating Voices Live Poetry. The last program before we take a break for the New Year is called our “Ho-Po-OH!” program — our Holiday Poetry Open House.
AA: Oh, I love that. [laughs]
SLY: So join us for the whole month of December, but if you have a hankering for the celebratory as we look to the New Year, I hope you'll feel free to join me, and the folks from around the world, that will be coming together to celebrate our year together on Cultivating Voices Live Poetry. And I'm looking forward to the New Year myself; I'll have my new collection, it’ll be coming out in February, called The Glass Studio. We talked a little bit about the sounds that glass makes today, and may we continue to explore that as we move forward. And I'm really looking forward to exploring your poem with you in the hereafter–
AA: [laughs]
SLY: –of the next episode.
AA: Yes; yeah, thank you. We will link to Cultivating Voices so you all can register, you can sign up, you can watch it on Zoom. That will be included for you if you want to go ahead and hop on to Cultivating Voices. You can follow Little Oracles on Instagram at little oracles; check us out on the blog at little oracles dot com: you can find all the poems that Sandy and I are sharing there. And you can also find all of the lexical fractals, the original Little Oracles digital installation, in its entirety at little oracles dot com slash exhibit, so you can go ahead and check that out, and maybe use it for your own poetry project going forward. We'll see you in our next Divinations episode, and until then, as always: take care, keep creating, and stay divine.
[Outro music]
[Secret outtake]
SLY: So let me find “The Map” for us, here. Um, okay? Why– where are you? Where are you?
AA: Have you tried the Table of Contents?
SLY: I– I'm looking at the Table of Contents!
AA: Okay, okay. [laughs]
SLY: Believe it or not, I'm actually doing the smartest thing that one could do, which is look at the Table of– oh. It's the very first poem. [laughs]
AA: Perfect. [laughs]
SLY: [laughs]