Walking in Wild Places

Where do poems come from? Where do dreams come from, and artists’ ideas, and mathematical proofs, and inventors’ projects? The creative process has multiple sources, and often a protracted timeline, including times when it seems as if you’re doing nothing at all.

“Incubation” is the label for this part of the process. And part of being creative is trusting that something inside of you is keeping the project alive. Somewhere, there’s a solution, image, idea, phrase, or feeling gestating.

Different poets will have different sources for creativity, and, for many of us, poems often originate in place.

Mary Oliver has her Blackwater Pond that she visited so many mornings, slipping into the lives of the creatures and the sights there. In my daily life I have the path to Picnic Point near the UW–Madison campus and the prairies, rivers, and marshes of Wisconsin. And every winter I return to the Canadian Rocky Mountains of Banff in search of poems.

If place is a trusted source, wild places make the prospect of finding a poem even more variable—it can take ten years to stumble on all the elements needed; or the poem can arrive even as you run along the Picnic Point path. 

Or you will remember a landscape.

Sometimes memory isn’t enough and you need to return to a place. Two of my poems about the same piece of land in Wisconsin’s Marquette County, written thirty years apart, visit and revisit a hillside remnant prairie and oak woods about two miles from naturalist John Muir’s boyhood home, a place where my first husband and our young children camped on weekends. 

The first poem I carried with me for ten years in my pocket notebook as nothing more than the last two lines of a title. I walked the hill each summer, thinking that John Muir had lived nearby.

But I knew I needed more than this vague thought for a poem.

His autobiography of growing up there, The Story of My Boyhood and Youth (1913), gave me a sense of the young Muir’s hard life, and the sensation that I might be crossing a path he once walked looking for bees.

Still not enough.

I set myself to reading more books about Muir’s life and even paid a visit to the Wisconsin Historical Society in search of a device he created in 1862 while a student at the University of Wisconsin.

In his autobiography, Muir describes the “clockwork desk” he constructed in his dorm room to help with his studies. “I invented a desk in which the books I had to study were arranged in order at the beginning of each term,” he writes, 

I also made a bed which set me on my feet every morning at the hour determined on, and in dark winter mornings just as the bed set me on the floor it lighted a lamp. Then, after the minutes allowed for dressing had elapsed, a click was heard and the first book to be studied was pushed up from a rack below the top of the desk, thrown open, and allowed to remain there the number of minutes required. Then the machinery closed the book and allowed it to drop back into its stall, then moved the rack forward and threw up the next in order, and so on, all the day being divided according to the times of recitation, and time required and allotted to each study.

Only when I had time for further reading about Muir’s life, and actually saw his incredible clockwork desk, did the poem come together and the first line of its title appear:

WISCONSIN HISTORY LESSON:
JOHN MUIR ON A HILL
IN MARQUETTE COUNTY

John Muir

walked across this hill

when he was a boy.

 

Bones aching

from digging out oak grubs

or hollowing out the cramped

damp well

fifty, seventy, ninety

feet down

day after day

until the neighbor noticed

that no more buckets

were coming up

and hauled him out

just before the oxygen gave out.

 

Head aching

from his father’s grim message:

You’re no good boy,

no good unless you work;

the only salvation

from our evil nature

is prayer and work;

reading and education

are the devil’s temptation.

 

Eyes aching

from reading at three a.m.,

catapulted out of bed

and sleep

by a contraption 

of wooden scraps

to the wooden desk

that turned the pages

like clockwork,

twenty minutes a book.

It’s still on display

At the Historical Society.

 

Years later,

heart aching,

he walked away

from the education

that wasn’t the answer;

walked away from a Yosemite sawmill

and a woman who wasn’t his;

walked home to Wisconsin once

when he imagined

his mother dying.

 

But walked

most of his life

toward the High Sierras,

Yosemite’s upper reaches,

the Grand Canyon,

toward the views that stunned

the heart into forgiveness

or forgetfulness

and peace.

Talked Teddy Roosevelt

into leaving

all those views

to the nation.

 

His own salvation

foreshadowed

in the aching boy

seeking some ease,

watching and walking

through the Marquette County trees,

the light

shining in benediction

through the leaves.

 

Mapping the Marquette County Hill

On the forty acres of sandy hill, century-aged,

remnant-sown, John Muir’s boyhood footprints

crossed the sand blow, following bees, or so

I like to think; though it might have been only

the crest of the hill he crossed, through the oak,

or the turkeyfoot and little bluestem ranks

that wave there now. Small orchids, earthstars,

goldenrod and blazing star were found in the sand

blow, and under our shelter at the top of the hill

our own sons dug in the dirt, hammered nails,

grew to build their own skateboard ramp and hang

in the sky like the hawk’s brief survey. And here’s

the path I wandered with my field guide, learning

names—ten new species flowering every week—

here’s the place the hairy puccoon bloomed, there

the pussytoe patch, the hawkweed acres;

and here’s the place we put the bench, sightline

into Wisconsin thunderstorms, moving opposite

to lower clouds, and here’s the east toward which

the bluestems bowed; its coordinates include

the firepit—marked “kitchen,” on our map, the path

through the woods to the three-sided outhouse,

the other path to back bedroom—Adirondack

shelter where we slept to the insistent voices

of the whippoorwills, the bark of fox and coyote.

Mark the fox—it had a den in the woods. And mark

the whippoorwills—we saw one once on a limb,

its legs so weak you could scarcely see them;

and mark the trail where the ladies-slippers bloomed,

past the outhouse. Mark the locust woods to the west, 

oak and hickory woods to north; question mark 

for where the owl lived, nightly questioning us. Here

we found the webs of the writing and funnel 

spiders, and here the walking-stick. Say that this

was the map of our days. Say that we too walked 

here once, if the barred owl asks you.

Of course, not all poems take decades to accumulate their component materials. And, in my experience, creativity in writing poetry requires a kind of double vision: a strong intention coupled with a receptiveness to not knowing. Carrying a notebook and pencil. Even a title, an equation, a memory. Being present in loved places. Open to what comes. You too may find lines coming to you, walking our Wisconsin places—wild and otherwise.

Postscript: “Mapping the Marquette County Hill” first appeared in The Cortland Review, Issue 60 (August 2013)