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I first put together the manuscript that would become Where You Come from Is Gone in the fall of 2017, when I returned from the Appalachian Writers’ Workshop (AWW) and Bread Loaf. I was inspired by how both workshops focused on the need for poetry to take emotional risks. The two poets I worked with that summer—Rebecca Gayle Howell at AWW and Ed Hirsh at Bread Loaf—emphasized how the poetic process must be driven by authentic feeling and lay bare the vulnerabilities of the heart. I wanted to follow Nazim Hikmet’s imperative:
“You must grieve for this right now —you have to feel this sorrow now-- for the world must be loved this much if you’re going to say ‘I lived’” Shortly after the workshops, I read Ilya Kaminsky’s essay “A Soul’s Noise” about Marina Tsvetaeva and was moved by his description of Kitezh, the myth of a beautiful Russian city “whose residents . . . decided . . .[they] must fall through the earth” to “escape invasion.” This powerful metaphor of humanity’s fragile beauty resonated with the suffering and resilience I have witnessed as someone from a geographically gorgeous but economically and racially wounded place. The manuscript was becoming a meditation on the loss and suffering born of the American South’s uniquely cruel exploitation of labor and nature, a meditation on what it means to live in a landscape saturated with a history of racial, economic, and environmental violence. I organized the manuscript into different forms of “Kitezh”: “Henry County as Kitezh,” “Country as Kitezh,” “Family as Kitezh,” and “Body as Kitezh.” My book’s title comes from a line in Flannery O’Connor’s novella Wise Blood—“Where you came from is gone, where you thought you were going to never was there, and where you are is no good unless you can get away from it.” I chose this title knowing white supremacy is the great monster-making force in her work and in her vision of America. Where I am from, who I am, must be viewed through the lenses of white supremacy and the unfettered capitalism that has shaped every aspect of my life in order to be truly seen. O’Connor told truths in her work about the spiritual void created by whiteness that she maybe wasn’t capable of living up to in her life or even acknowledging in her theology. I have the same complicated feelings about her work as I do about my own geographic, cultural, and familial identity. Her unsentimental vision of rural America and the potential for grace—albeit harsh and mysterious—informs my own writing. I am also aware of the “rot” Alice Walker identified in O’Connor’s work (and try to be aware of it in my own). The poem SHR published, “A Poem in which I Grab My Poverty Like that Jaquar in the Video Grabbed a Crocodile Out of the River and Carried It Into the Jungle” was added to the manuscript when I started to merge newer work into it in 2019. I took out poems that felt redundant to my first book and started adding newer poems that represented my continued attempt to take emotional risks in my work. The poem was workshopped in 2019 in Lyrae Van Clief-Stefanon’s class at AWW, where I started to see a clearer shape for the book, driven by this idea in Gwendolyn Brooks’ “Paul Robeson,” which we read that summer: we are each other’s harvest: we are each other’s business: we are each other’s magnitude and bond. Van Clief-Stefanon centered spiritual practice and the importance of caring for each other as individual human beings in her workshop. She went around the room and said the line from James Baldwin’s letter to his nephew to each of us: “Here you are to be loved.” This was the new energy I brought into my manuscript as I continued to organize it in the fall of 2019. Her workshop gave me the courage to write plainly about the pain I felt at both my own financial situation and the structural inequities of our economically and racially stratified our living spaces. “In Order to Deny the Fact of Death, Which Is the Only Fact We Have,” (published in Waxwing in the fall of 2019) was one of the newer poems I added as I tried to ponder what it means to be “each other’s / magnitude and bond” and “to feel this sorrow now— / for the world must be loved this much.” The book started feeling complete around that time, when the different sections started to reverberate against each other, allowing individual poems to hit different, varied notes that nonetheless held a relationship to each other, a sort of confluence of melody and tune, of lyric and music. I built upon what I learned from arranging my first book, which was influenced by a great essay poet Thorpe Moeckel shared with me about arranging a manuscript, Natasha Sajé’s “Dynamic Design: The Structure of Books of Poems,” where she advises one consider “the idea of gesture (Latin, to carry) as a trope for a book’s organization: How does the book carry itself, and how does it move the reader?”. Saje’s essay led me to reading Roland Barthes and have a discussion with musician Tim Thornton, who described old-time string musicians as “not keeping a rhythm, but instead a sort of counter-melody. Everybody is playing off each other, playing differently”—which is the sense of a song, Barthes’s “perpetual interweaving,” that I look for as I finalize a manuscript. |
Manuscript Making: On Crafting Collections |
A Poem in which I Grab My Poverty Like that Jaquar in the Video Grabbed a Crocodile Out of the River and Carried It Into the JungleMy daughter said
You think it’s the wind, but it’s the highway. Pot smoke wafts from a passing car, caress of funk and fable, though, at eleven, I don’t think she knows the scent. We walk the grounds of the school she was zoned to attend, the highway and Walmart still visible through woven plastic fence. We toss the half-deflated hearts of playground balls back into the packed dirt yard. I find a child’s sweater on the gravel, vinyl butterflies pressed across its chest, its thin acrylic knit wet with dew. I drape it across the gate, bright totem of all the love I send and forsake. My daughter grabs my phone and poses her face-- seeking her own beauty in her smile—in front of our distant mountains, egalitarian in their soft pink excess, planes descending from places we never have the money to visit, wingtips luminous with low sun, while all over town tonight people sleep in their own piss because Medicaid must make profit. A coyote tried to hide behind the trashcan at the jail today but it was shot. Inmates used to shout from out the window slots until those slots were sealed. You’d think it was catcalls or something unspeakable, but it was really the wind, if God is the wind and sometimes takes the form of human voices. |
In Order to Deny the Fact of Death, Which Is the Only Fact We HaveRead in Waxwing.
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ANNIE WOODFORD is the author of Bootleg (Groundhog Poetry Press, 2019), which was a runner-up for the Weatherford Award for Appalachian poetry. Her second book, Where You Come from Is Gone, is the winner of Mercer University’s 2020 Adrienne Bond Prize and will be published in Fall/Winter 2022. Her poetry has recently appeared in Beloit Poetry Journal, Asheville Poetry Review, and Smartish Pace. A recipient of scholarships to the Appalachian Writers' Workshop as well as Bread Loaf and Sewanee, she was awarded the Jean Ritchie Fellowship in 2019. Originally from a Virginia mill town near the North Carolina border, she now teaches community college English in Wilkesboro, North Carolina.
