What it means

If you follow me on Instagram, you may have seen the celebrity review of A Constellation of Half-Lives.* In the video, the celebrity (my mother) says, “Seema, please explain,” and reads a line of the opening poem out loud. It’s very funny, because of course, she turns the “your mother” into a question about my mother which is to say, herself. Which it only very slightly was–I was actually thinking about how women who are trying to survive an intense patriarchy align with it against other women. Accept it, and buy into it, particularly in prizing their sons over their daughters. Leaving that particular line open to interpretation was a choice I made, but there were other places in the manuscript where I felt certain that the meaning of a phrase or image was crystal clear and didn’t realize until a new reader, in a new round of editing, asked a question or inserted a comment that showed me a new way to read it. It is the exciting and terrifying thing about sharing creative work with an audience. Oh boy.

Last weekend I was at a workshop that was not exactly a writing workshop, but it was not exactly not a writing workshop. It was a Narrative Medicine workshop at Columbia University, and the conversations and lectures were rich and interdisciplinary and spiritual and scientific and I found myself with that great brain buzzing, connection-making joy happening. It was pretty delightful. But more (expensive) school is NOT what my life needs. We had several five minute writing sessions, preceded by close reading of a text. One of those was this poem by Denise Levertov.

A Clearing

by Denise Levertov

What lies at the end of enticing
country driveways, curving
off among trees? Often only
a car graveyard, a house-trailer,
a trashy bungalow. But this one,
for once, brings you
through the shade of its green tunnel
to a paradise of cedars,
of lawns mown but not too closely,
of iris, moss, fern, rivers of stone rounded
by sea or stream,
of a wooden unassertive large-windowed house.
The big trees enclose
an expanse of sky, trees and sky
together protect the clearing.
One is sheltered here
from the assaultive world
as if escaped from it, and yet
once arrived, is given (oneself
and others being a part of that world)
a generous welcome.
                                  It’s paradise
as a paradigm for how
to live on earth,
how to be private and open
quiet and richly eloquent.
Everything man-made here
was truly made by the hands
of those who live here, of those
who live with what they have made.
It took time, and is growing still
because it’s alive.
It is paradise, and paradise
is a kind of poem; it has
a poem’s characteristics:
inspiration; starting with the given;
unexpected harmonies; revelations.
It’s rare among 
the worlds one finds
at the end of enticing driveways.

Read it twice and jot down what you think of it before reading the below.

In the small group discussion of the poem, with about 8 or 9 other workshop participants, I was so completely certain that this is a poem about how to write a poem, the clearing being a metaphor for how sometimes, in rare and wonderful circumstances, the driveway (the writing) leads you to somewhere extraordinary, rather than the usual graveyard of expected human junk. How a poem is a matter of construction, a living thing. So I said this aloud, and everyone looked at me rather blankly and politely moved the fuck on. They did not read it this way at all. Everyone else read the clearing as a literal place. These were all very smart people. They were not wrong. But neither was I. So whatever your reading of the Levertov poem is, it’s fine. The question is, what is your “clearing”?

Here’s my response to the prompt, copied from my scrawl to this nice font on your screen:

The clearing, for me, is of course the page. The receptive, non-judgmental, graceful, patient page. The words wind, perhaps toward a target but more often an uncovering. I discover some part of myself, free of productivity (no that’s not true, I am never quite free of productivity) but the wandering is the point. There is no clearing, there is only the cool green tunnel and the time to travel it, a cartography. The birds, the trees grow where they will, tangle of roots, thorny branches, unflowering wildnesses. And me: exempted from the responsibility of axe, of tidying, of making passage accessible, of clearing a single thing.

*If you’re able and interested, please pre-order A Constellation of Half-Lives. It’s really really helpful to have as many pre-orders as possible.