William Erickson is a poet and memoirist from Washington. His work appears or is forthcoming in West Branch, Heavy Feather, Sixth Finch, Bear Review, and other pubs. He is the author of a chapbook, Monotonies of the Wildlife (FLP). His poem “Dear Dead Garden,” appears in the Fall 2022 issue of Carve.
The title, “Dear Dead Garden,” gives this poem an address. This lends a degree of intimacy to the poem, keeping it personal and overheard. What opportunities did the form of an address create for you as a poet?
I don’t know if I know yet where this poem lives, though it lives somewhere close to me. So the title as an address is a reaching, or a call to which maybe, hopefully, there will sound a response. That address let me direct the poem toward something tangible for the language to latch onto while the subject of the poem is simply now a memory. Which is to say, I think being an address to someone, something, somewhere is a way of giving the poem roots so as to keep it from floating too far off as it wanders into more abstracted areas. It helps keep the language close.
I suppose, too, that the epistolary form creates intimacy because, as you mention, there is a sense of privacy about it. I did have as one of my guardrails in the project of this and its sibling poems a sort of thinking that they could be read on little torn-out sheets of notebook paper from an ashy shoebox in an attic somewhere. Certainly, I hope that comes across when reading it, but more, it helped me to enter myself more openly into the writing of the poem(s), assigning it a memory I return to, a name, a self I used to be.
Though this is a brief poem, it feels very precise. What was your process like for this piece?
Thank you. This poem arose from a 5-week workshop led by Mathias Svalina which was aimed at developing a daily writing practice. It was not a workshop designed around discipline or the sort of obvious notion that to make art involves the making part. Rather, I think, its fundamental goal was to allow, through a routinized writing practice, the room to try and fail, and also to provide a path toward a sort of unified project, be that a manuscript or a series, or just a single poem even. I came to around 70 workable poems.
I arrived where I arrived in a sort of lazy way, by working from a single title as a prompt for every poem I wrote through the 5 weeks. What I tried to do (which is what I always try to do maybe) was follow the music of my thoughts into the music of my words, starting from a phrase and its accompanying idea. And maybe I’m not alone in experiencing many of my thoughts as fleeting and brief. Some of my most profound and influential memories are quite simple moments. I tend away from packing these thoughts with language and rather try to provide a scaffold onto which the poem can grow itself without a lot of help from me.
The first words of the poems are “Your last words.” What role does allusion to real life experiences play in this poem?
A significant one, ha! I’ve lost a number of people and things and places in ways that did not afford finalities of the sort I think we’d all hope for, so, to me, that line and the following one dredge up a hollowness and maybe an artificiality. But also there’s an embrace to it. A shelter about it. A protection within it. The last of a thing as a whole of the thing itself, now.
There is a lot of regret in this poem, but I think it’s an unwarranted regret, a regret about things over which no one has any control. There is a wanting-to-go-back. I wrote some of the lines with a very specific person in mind, and some of the lines remember very specific selves. So in a way the allusions waver line to line between the outward and the inward.
For me, it’s very difficult to write without some underlying emotional thrust that sits on top of lived experience, so I think I’d have to say allusion to real life is actually the core of most of my work and absolutely this poem. But sometimes the layers of abstraction and surrealism, even as I think them out, sock the material circumstances in so much fog I can’t see them, though I feel the presence. Still, there are lines in this poem, the first being one of them, that feel quite concretely like a moment in my life.
What is your writing practice like?
I wish I could say my regular practice was as tight as it was during the period in which I wrote this poem, but I can’t say that. I work in communications for a small company and do most of our contract and intellectual property drafting, which uses an entirely different brain space than writing poems does. Often I am unable to navigate between the two mindsets without a substantial amount of wind-down time. So, my writing sessions are usually relegated to days off or very late evenings.
I am a writer of ritual, and I stick with a routine that works until it doesn’t, which is often. One of my most fruitful routines, though, is to find a spot outside (a park, my porch, the woods) and work through editing a few poems from a previous session, then slip into something of an automatic write—pretty much writing the words as they boil up without any filtration between the thought at the page. Usually, I’ll start to slide into short ’lil thoughts and concepts from here.
In truth, though, my writing practice feels a lot like playing a slot machine: I try a lot and fail a lot and sometimes maybe I don’t fail.