surely i am able to write poems
celebrating grass and how the blue
in the sky can flow green or red
and the waters lean against the
chesapeake shore like a familiar
poems about nature and landscape
surely but whenever I begin
“the trees wave their knotted branches
and…” why
is there under that poem always
an other poem?
— Lucille Clifton, “surely i am able to write poems”
I am choosing to consider Lucille Clifton’s epigraph partly because I felt challenged by Dr. McCoy’s remark that nobody had really tackled it in their blog posts. In addition, I’m really interested by the question that Clifton raises: “why / is there under that poem always / an other poem?” (9-11). I wonder who Clifton is addressing this question to, and I wonder whether that “other poem” is self-imposed. Is Clifton frustrated that others are assigning a meaning to her poem that she did not intend? Or is she frustrated in her own writing process, where she cannot seem to give words to what, exactly, she means? These questions have a double implication for me, as both a student and a writer. As a student, I want to take care that I am not trapping writers within my expectations of them. As a writer, I find myself worrying about the idea that I cannot control the way others understand my work. Continue reading “An Other Poem”