By Cara Chamberlain
From my desk, I look out the window on a rain-drenched green morning, on rolling clouds in a cornflower sky. The neighbor’s cat stalks through my “untamed meadow” native-plant experiment near the back fence. If I were a visual artist, I would, perhaps, make a little plein air pastel or watercolor of the scene. Since I lack those sorts of skills, I might attempt to translate the June yard (and my luck of having such a place, with all its fraught cultural and economic significance) into words. If I were writing poetry, I would also pay strict attention to the sounds of those words and how well those sounds recreated my sensual and emotional and moral response. After the writing, I would critique, revise, rewrite, and, perhaps, toss the whole effort as a waste of time. I would, in other words, fail. Or I might feel I had succeeded. I would read the poem to others or send it to a magazine (or several magazines). I might be somewhat proud of it.
Pressure to create, to leave an artifact for others: many writers feel this. Yet, I wonder. Something else besides a (possible) bit of writing on paper or screen has been gained by my poem-directed scrutiny, by my noticing the white cat lifting her feet as if in distaste of the sopping grasses. What if art is not a sort of industrial process with a product as its end result? What if art is a way of being, a practice, an enhancement of the senses and the powers of observation? What if art teaches something beyond words, images, sounds? What if art is an ethical way of life? What if we could escape the Romantic notion of a “great talent” gifting the waiting world with an epic, an image, a towering crescendo?
I think anyone can cultivate art as an ethical practice. In “Riprap,” Gary Snyder guides readers through his poem’s work-out: “Lay down these words,” he writes, “Before your mind like rocks.” Participate, he says, though not everyone can achieve the same stretches and balance. That’s to be expected. Some of us have stubborn joints and unhappy tendons. But the feeling of the stretch—everyone can experience that. In this time of reflection, isolation, and fear, I’m taking the writing (and reading) of poems as a challenge to participate in our shared words, and, as Browning says, “exceed my grasp.”
Cara Chamberlain received degrees in English and creative writing from the University of Utah (B.A.) and Purdue University (M.A.). She taught writing and literature for over 25 years in Wyoming, Maine, Canada, Florida, and Montana. Her poetry, essays, and short fiction have been published or are forthcoming in over 150 journals, including Boston Review, Tar River Poetry, Nimrod, The Southern Review, Passages North, and CutBank. She is the author of three collections of poetry: Hidden Things (FootHills Publishing, 2009), The Divine Botany (Word Poetry https://www.wordpoetrybooks.com/chamberlain.html, 2015), and Lament of the Antichrist in a Secular World and Other Poems (Word Poetry https://www.wordpoetrybooks.com/chamberlain_antichrist.html, 2017). Her writing has been featured in Verse Daily and Poetry Daily. She has received three Pushcart Prize nominations. Currently, she works as a writer and freelance copy editor in Billings, MT.