In The Field: Conversations With Our Contributors—David Thoreen

“Departures” is the final poem in V. 28 of Water~Stone and focuses on a memory of an uncle’s death. When did you begin to write this poem?

I’d like to think I began writing this poem when I was thirteen years old and sifting through totems taken from my father’s uncle’s house after he died—one of these was a cedar chest that his sister had been given by her husband. On the inside of the lid was an inscription in pencil, “For Marcella, love George,” with the date: “December 25, 1916.” The inscription was faint, and I’d had the cedar chest in my basement bedroom for a few weeks before I noticed it. I had known neither George nor Marcella, but I understood how the chest had come into my uncle’s possession . . . and into mine. The fact that the chest had been purchased and given as a Christmas present during the middle of World War I, and to someone related to me, invested it with mystery, and I put other things I’d taken from my uncle’s house into this chest: spectacular silk bowling shirts from the fifties, which I wore to school for a while, a swagger stick, a cigar box with old watches he’d had in a dresser drawer—one was a trench watch from World War I, its crystal shattered and gone but the metal cage over its yellowed face intact, and it had an ancient leather band that was definitely original. I was like the narrator of James Joyce’s “Araby”—drawn to the romance of these objects. I would kneel in front of the cedar chest and open the lid, read its inscription, then rummage around inside, rearranging the objects within. Even then, I understood that I’d made it into a kind of altar. I suppose it was a way of resurrecting my uncle, a species of liturgy that helped me grasp the unfolding of time, the presence of death. It was a way to manage my grief.

The writing itself began after reading a poem by Peter Balakian in which the speaker sets personal experience against a series of national events marking historical or sociological rupture. The Education of Henry Adams comes to mind, the way we’ve all been educated for a world that no longer exists.

The timeline and setting is developed with references to the Columbia Record Club and Steve Miller, but you also weave in so many family details, drawing a whole picture of life in under 30 lines. How do you consciously build multiple in-depth scenes in your work?

In part, I’m drawing on memory. In the 70s and 80s, the work of the cartoonist Dick Guindon appeared regularly in the Minneapolis Star and Tribune. When I was fourteen or fifteen, my father tore a Guindon cartoon out of the paper and handed it to me. It featured a proud-looking young man standing a bit like Superman, flexing maybe, like he’d just defeated his arch-enemy. Instead of an S, he had the letter R on his chest. Behind him, dozens of record albums leaned against a wall. The caption: “Ira Stevens has escaped from yet another record club.” Something like that. On the one hand, music is like ice skating and driving a motorcycle. Music frees us. On the other hand, like all consumerism, it’s another kind of prison. How much time did I spend learning pop song lyrics? I wish I’d spent some of that time learning poems by Yeats or Keats, or reading Ecclesiastes or the Book of Psalms.

It’s gratifying to hear that these brief snapshots feel like fully realized scenes. I think this poem works a bit like a slide show, a series of still photographs that together produce a sense of animation, the feeling that time is passing. For me, this meant overwriting, then revising and compressing, finding the right details, the right touch. Words are the world embodied in sound. I think the richness of sound—alliteration, assonance, consonance, sound echoes of all sorts—helps us see and feel a verbal description as something real. 

The poem begins with efforts to escape. Psychologically, these are the beginnings of individuation. But the poem also foregrounds process, with its series of present participles. At some point in the writing I became aware of that chain of participles, and I now count eleven of them, in a poem of eleven stanzas. Even in the second-last stanza, where the speaker has become an object—he’s been taken by his father and grandfather to do something grammatically redundant—he describes his emotional state as a “growing feeling of pure forlorn,” an adjective-noun combination that echoes his own early attempts at escape and the uncle’s and grandmother’s present-participle responses to grief.

There’s a feeling of speeding past moments in the first half of the poem, and then a sudden pause and a refocusing on the family upon the uncle’s death. What was your thought process in creating this rhythm?

Those first five stanzas really foreground the speaker’s attempts at individuation, so the speed is essential, the idea being that if we can build up enough momentum, we can break the gravitational pull of family. But then the heat and friction of loss pull the speaker back into the web of family. It’s sticky, and it’s emotionally messy, complicated. It slows us down. After five closed stanzas in a row that feel quick and airy, we approach the climax of the poem, which unfolds across four stanzas and emphasizes the twining connections of family and loss. 

In the third stanza, the speaker at least temporarily escapes the weight of history by listening to Cat Stevens, who shows it can be done. But the uncle cannot escape the gravitational pull of the bottom of the stairs, the bottom of a bottle.

The idea of a departure is often given over to sadness, a goodbye; but in your work, there’s a hopeful note at the end of the poem, a sense of gathering into flight, literally and metaphorically. Can you talk about the title, how it played into the emotion behind your piece, and also the ending?

That’s high praise, hope being one of the cardinal virtues. The title reverberates, I think, referring to the speaker’s various strategies of escape (physical, mechanical, musical, consumerist, mythical), as well as to the uncle’s drinking, the grandmother’s prayer, and to departures that are the most mysterious of all, the deaths of the uncle and father. Finally, there’s the speaker’s literal departure, and we never learn where he’s going, only that he has accepted and embraced his family’s history and experience. Maybe there’s something hopeful and empowering about accepting sorrow and grief.

What books are your favorites? What authors do you admire?

Marilynne Robinson’s Housekeeping and Henry Beston’s The Outermost House come to mind, as do Berryman’s Dream Songs and Carver’s Where I’m Calling From. Then there’s B. H. Fairchild, Robert Cording, Bruce Smith, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Emily Dickinson, Bob Dylan, Robert Frost. I read and teach a lot of fiction, too, so Melville, Nathanael West, Annie Proulx, George Saunders, Joyce Carol Oates (her story “The Translation,” a rewriting of a John Updike story, is a masterpiece), William Gay. William Gay’s sentences might be as close to heaven as some of us get.

What are you working on now?

I’ve usually got my hands full just working on the next poem—and then going back to fix the last poem and the one before that. I try to write lines that I want to reread, in the hopes that other readers will find the lines similarly compelling. A good poem is like a good song. You just want to hear it again.