How did I write these poems? I got cancer. During recovery I couldn’t write, couldn’t think, could do little but stream TV and groan. So I began to keep a journal: note one daily observation, tie each day to a single bright particular, as evidence (to myself) that I was still alive. I saw some cardinals reflected in window panes on a neighbor’s lawn. I felt a breeze and noticed myself listening for windchimes. The world was still out there.
This practice represented a second kind of recovery: in the first poetry class I took, my gateway and conversion, students were asked to keep an Observatory log. Record one thing a day. Not a thought or memory, a live instance. W.H. Auden suggests that beginning writers should learn many languages and care for a farm animal. I think they should keep an Observatory. Try it for a while. You’ll see patterns in what you note. You’ll end up with a document more interesting than most poems, more interesting than most “ideas.”
Months later, somewhat steadier, I started forming my observations into poems. I wanted to preserve the sense of distinct seeing, emulsified delicately with other elements, embedded into something larger. One line is adapted from Virgil. One occurred to me—marginalia—while reading a poem by Jorie Graham. One describes a dream in which Jack Christian and I found a time machine and were arguing about where to go. We agreed to visit the present. I still agree with that decision.
Zach Savich is the author of the poetry collections Full Catastrophe Living (U. Iowa, 2009), Annulments (Center for Literary Publishing, 2010), The Firestorm (CSU Poetry Center, 2011), and Century Swept Brutal (Black Ocean, 2014). His work has received the Iowa Poetry Prize, the Colorado Prize for Poetry, and the Cleveland State University Poetry Center’s Open Award, among other honors. He teaches in the BFA Program for Creative Writing at the University of the Arts, in Philadelphia, and co-edits Rescue Press’s Open Prose Series.
