by Joe Miller
I wrote a poem last week. I’m pretty sure it’s the first one that I’ve written since I left college. It’s not that I dislike poetry. It’s just that my particular writing style doesn’t really lend itself to poetry.
I was a bit nervous walking up to McClintic Library for the workshop.
The very fact that I was headed up to Ned Dougherty’s poetry writing workshop happened through one of those only-in-a-small-town moments. I’d been at the library a couple of days before, chatting with my friend who was working at the front desk.
Ned’s work came up in conversation, and she handed me a flyer advertising his workshop.
Ned describes the workshop series as a sort of living history project, one in which the community will document Pocahontas County through a series of odes to the county.
I didn’t really know much about odes, other than that they had famously been dedicated to nightingales and Greek pottery. I certainly had no idea how to write one.
But I knew that Ned is both an outstanding writer and a skilled teacher, so I figured I was in good hands. I had my notebook and my favorite pen, and I was going to go write a poem.
The workshop was amazing.
I learned that odes are about finding meaning in ordinary things. Ned also assured us that we would be writing what is called free verse. That meant we didn’t have to try to worry about rhyme or meter.
But it was the process itself that really resonated for me.
We began with a brainstorm of descriptive words, writing them on Post-it notes and organizing them into different topics. We wrote more notes expanding those words into sentences. We each grabbed our favorite sentences and organized those into stanzas.
You could have spent a month interviewing everyone I’ve ever met, and you wouldn’t have designed a method more suitable to the ways that I’m comfortable working.
I make my living working with words. Sometimes I get to write those words. But most of the time, I’m organizing words that other people have written.
What I had never done – never even thought to do – was to turn the tools of my trade inward, toward the place where I live.
There were just three of us in the workshop that day, and we were by no means a representative sample of Pocahontas County.
For one thing, none of us were native to the county – we all moved here as adults. There’s always a danger in commenting on a place as an outsider. Nobody likes a carpetbagger.
But I think there’s also real value in looking at a place through the eyes of a newcomer, especially when those newcomers looked around and liked what they saw well enough to live here rather than in some other place. When you’re a fish, you don’t notice the water. Sometimes an outsider can help you see what you’ve taken for granted.
For me, it’s the little things that really make this a special place.
It’s Pickles, the firehouse cat, greeting me as I cut through the First Citizens parking lot and escorting me home, meowing the entire way. It’s the footprints in my front stairs, a permanent reminder of a Pickels of yore.
It’s the way that every errand takes just a little bit longer than I thought it would because I see a friendly face and stop to catch up.
It’s how 200 people will come out to a lovingly restored theater to hear music that would have been familiar to my great-grandparents.
It’s somehow having five libraries in a rural county of under 8,000 people. Libraries that host poetry writing workshops, of all things.
It was an experience that is unique to this place and that was about the uniqueness of this place.
Ned still has a few more workshops to go – at the Durbin Library on May 27 and at Hillsboro on May 28, both from 4-6 p.m. He’s working on a few more, so stay tuned.
You should go to one of them.
Living history projects only work when they capture the full richness of a time and a place. That means hearing from those of us who have been here for a few years. It also means hearing from those who have been here for a few decades. And from those who have been here for a few generations.
Once you’ve written your poem, come down to the Pocahontas County Opera House at 7 p.m. Sunday, June 18. That’s where you’ll get to hear the poems that were constructed at each workshop, including the one I helped write last week.
joe.miller@fountaindigitalconsulting.com
