Who is Seeing
I listened to this conversation between Suzi Garcia and Ada Limon, sitting cross-legged on the white white bedspread of the bed in my hotel room this morning. I’d planned to listen while tidying, but something Limon said made me need to go sit on the corner of the bed. That detail is important here, today, when I am writing this and thinking of that particular odd pleasure: the bleach-stiff sheets, the anonymity of this hotel room, its brown low pile carpet, the bag of cheetos on my lap–I could be anywhere in America, I could be anyone in America (my t shirt, running shorts, athletic clothing on the body of not an athlete). The details that seem important now may fade away. And in five or ten years when I talk about what Limon says about being witness vs witnessed, or about the lessons of observation, I may forget this version of myself entirely, this version of myself that is slightly anxious that I am not where I am supposed to be but have nowhere else I can do the work I’m supposed to do. So I may edit it out of an essay I write about it, either on the page or in conversation, consider it non-essential, superfluous. And I may be right, from an editorial perspective–I hate to hear too many unrelated details in an anecdote someone is telling, too many tangents, I lose patience, I lose interest. I can’t tell which details I’m supposed to be remembering, am left with all these tangles and threads. But in drafts, when there’s no audience but you, you put it all in. All of it. You can (and should) cut our details later, but you can’t be sure what you’d discover if you don’t allow the tangent to happen.
Our freewrite this week: “this week I saw…” just keep repeating the line and writing and writing: This week I saw grass blowing in the wind, people sitting by the pool, the haziness of the DC skyline, some little birds hopping inside a restaurant tent, sweat stained shirts, box of wine on the counter, the cop that sits on a stool in the whole foods.
And our poem this week is by (you guessed it) Ada Limon. Read it here.
And the prompt is: Take one moment, one visual from what you saw this week, and write deep deep into it. Start with the image, meander, but come back to the image. Allow yourself to see it, but allow all your selves to show up, allow the tangents to arise, walk with them as needed. The poem is not about what you saw, but about who is seeing it.
