Awful Truths

Alan Soldofsky:

I began with the phrase, “It’s worse than what we thought,” that I overheard someone say at a coffee shop during the San Francisco Bay Area’s late August heatwave. I heard the remark not knowing the context. The poem’s task, I discovered, would be to construct a speaker’s voice from this conversational fragment. A speaker who, like me, likely had climate change on their mind. The poem’s first six lines came in the form of two tercet fragments. My impulse was to make a seasonal reference, but to not overdetermine the language. And to stay in a conversational register. But the tercet form didn’t feel right for the poem’s cadence.

So, I switched to couplets, a form which seemed to fit the cadence better, and which was generative of new lines, as well as allowed inclusion of other overheard fragments. A TV story about a red algae bloom along Oakland’s Lake Merritt killing thousands of fish that washed up along the shore entered the poem during the drafting process. That become the second couplet. Once the second couplet was in place, more lines began to generate themselves. The “embarrassing rash” came from a TV commercial running frequently at that time. The “highway lined with trash” describes the freeway I-280 onramp I frequently drive.

“We used to be gone until Labor Day” was another shred of overheard conversation, a couple bemoaning schools starting earlier in August than years before. And the line about a coyote knocking down a runner I lifted from another TV news story. Once I had written these lines, the problem was how they fit together. I moved them around a bit until I found what seemed the right order both for the poem’s music, rhythm, and the narrative movement. The final image of a field of clay pocked with snake holes was literally the place beside Coyote Creek where I walk daily. I tried to leave enough ambiguity so that the poem wouldn’t become dogmatically topical, leaving the poem’s context as much as possible open-ended.