You belong to the world, deal with it.
Carrie Fountain on how to remain true.
It has been a weeeeek. And instead of diving into the what and why and overwhelm of world events (there are about a million other Substacks you can go to for that), we’re going to keep this tiny bit of internet focused on our goal: more poetry, together.
“In a time of destruction, create something.”— Maxine Hong Kingston
This week’s poem:
🧶 Craft chat:
About this poem, Fountain says: “Once I believed to remain true to my art I had to keep the world away. I had to cloister. I remained pure. Of what? Who knows. My feeling of myself as an artist has changed. To remain true to my art, I try to be awake in the world. I try to succumb to it—the glitter, the Henrys, the rude things I find coming out of my mouth—and I try to make something of it.”1
Anyone who has ever been both a caregiver and a maker of any kind, is familiar with so much of what’s going on in this poem. And maybe also, with the worry that too much of your time and/or brain has been irrecoverably overtaken by endless tasks and needs. That the life you are living is not exactly the stuff of poems.
Which is why I love how Fountain reframes that perspective. She now creates not in spite of her current life but from within it. And invites us to see the fragments of our daily lives — the things we (are surprised we) say, the patience and understanding we dig for, the overwhelm and freshly washed kid hair and confusions about God and the passing of time — as valid material for poems.
She also pushes back against the idea that poetry should be esoteric or primarily academic:
“ Poetry isn’t to be analyzed first; poetry is to be experienced. What is the use of it if that’s not what we’re doing with it?
That feeling of play and discovery you have as a child is what you want when you’re reading and writing poetry. ”
When asked about her writing process, she shares “It’s hard to articulate, and it feels vulnerable because part of me still finds it ridiculous, but for me, my writing practice is a spiritual discipline. When I’m awaiting it, I’m awaiting the spirit. When it’s here, I’m attending to the gifts of the spirit. It’s not really about making books, though of course it is. But, more essentially, it’s about returning to the attentiveness of that discipline. Which is merely taking a breath and feeling it. Looking around and seeing. It’s the easiest and the hardest thing to do.
What is holy is all around. Isn’t that the most difficult thing to come to terms with?
It’s all around and all the time.”3
✍️ Try it:
Fountain often shares a tool she uses to help generate many of her poems:
“Here is a very simple, perfect practice I learned from the poet Naomi Shihab Nye: each day write down three things you remember from the last 24 hours that you’d forget in the next 24 hours if you didn’t write them down now.” This can be a quick, specific list, or a brief description of each moment, object, or dialogue. “If there is a more elegant spiritual exercise for planting one’s self in the moment while simultaneously accounting for the fleeting, groundless passage of time, I have not found it. I recommend this to all my students first thing. There is no beginner who cannot benefit from this practice. There is no master who cannot benefit from this practice.”4
So here’s your invitation
Try collecting your “three things” daily this week, either in a notebook or your notes app.
After a few days, use one (or more) of these details in a poem, or as an entry point for a draft.
You could also ground a poem in a surprising or ridiculous parenting/relationship moment you’ve experienced recently. Maybe start with something you heard yourself say. You could try beginning the poem, like Fountain, with a sentence that introduces the characters, while showing a bit of the emotional and physical setting :
When, at the end, the children wanted
to add glitter to their valentines, I said no.
✐ Writing Invite #2
Begin your free writing time with the sentence:
“I keep thinking…”
Let whatever comes, come.
💌 A few updates:
LOVED connecting with you in our Marco Polo group this week! To keep it a nice, not overwhelming rhythm on there, we’re going to designate the last week of every month as Sharing Week. This is when we can read aloud + get some feedback on anything we’ve written that month.
Lil’ reminder: You are never behind, and you are not expected to keep up with any other pace than what works for you. We all get how life goes. Just know we’re here to support each other’s creativity & poetry, and whenever you are able to write and share, you have a place to, here.
We’re going to move our imitation learning poems to the chat. I’ll post our new poem Sunday. Feel free to respond there whenever with your poem seed/venture, or a link to a doc where we can find it. And let us know if you’d like any feedback. I’m still learning the Substack app, but I think this setup will make everything easier to find and enjoy.
And now, one last poem for you:
You Belong to the World
by Carrie Fountain
as do your children, as does your husband.
It’s strange even now to understand that
you are a mother and a wife, that these gifts
were given to you and that you received them,
fond as you’ve always been of declining
invitations. You belong to the world. The hands
that put a peach tree into the earth exactly
where the last one died in the freeze belong
to the world and will someday feed it again,
differently, your body will become food again
for something, just as it did so humorously
when you became a mother, hungry beings
clamoring at your breast, born as they’d been
with the bodily passion for survival that is
our kind’s one common feature. You belong
to the world, animal. Deal with it. Even as
the great abstractions come to take you away,
the regrets, the distractions, you can at any second
come back to the world to which you belong,
the world you never left, won’t ever leave, cells
forever, forever going through their changes,
as they have been since you were less than
anything, simple information born inside
your own mother’s newborn body, itself made
from the stuff your grandmother carried within hers
when at twelve she packed her belongings
and left the Scottish island she’d known—all
she’d ever known—on a ship bound for Ellis Island,
carrying within her your mother, you, the great5
human future that dwells now inside the bodies
of your children, the young, who, like you,
belong to the world.
It’s such a joy to read your writing and learn from these poems together each week! Thank you for bringing and sharing all you do. ❤️
xo,
brinn
https://poets.org/poem/will-you
https://news.utexas.edu/2019/10/04/lets-just-experience-this/
https://www.tumblr.com/pwpoetry/653008658693783552/qa-with-carrie-fountain
https://theadroitjournal.org/issue-thirty-nine/a-conversation-with-carrie-fountain/
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2024/02/12/you-belong-to-the-world-carrie-fountain-poem