How Writing Poetry Can Freeze Time

I was one of those teenagers who wrote and read poetry, who dreamed of being a poet. I still have my teenage poems, the ones I wrote in notebooks between classes, on the bus, late at night when my family were deep in their own dreams. In those poems, I reveal my inner self—fraught with love, loss, and mostly desire—and colored by the world I lived in, my family, my town and the abundant green nature that surrounded me. Poems preserving my youth through the decades like the Jim Croce song “Time in a Bottle” that played constantly on KJR in my early teens.

In college, I studied English literature and creative writing, fueling my poetic ambitions. And then, my senior year, I stopped writing. I needed money to pay for my tuition and, following graduation, to pay for everything. Earning a living kicked the poet in me to the curb. What remained: books, journals, sheafs of poems locked in a trunk in my parents’ basement for decades.

While I kept on living. I married and (regretting that) divorced, remarried, gave birth and raised three children, moved across the country and around the world. Working long days building a business career to support my family. A career in which I founded several companies, served as an executive for technology corporations and the world’s largest philanthropic foundation, and as a CEO for a global marketing firm.

Could I have written poems in the margins of business plans or client presentations, in the margins of my busy life? Perhaps, but I chose not to. Nor did I choose to keep a journal. Or to continue writing long newsy letters to friends and family once the internet took root. Whatever writing I did was in service of feeding my family, not my soul. Or was that the tradeoff I thought I was making at the time?

Forty years flew by, without a written record. Sure, there are photos in boxes and albums and in the cloud that tell the story of those decades. Or a version of the story—the one for public consumption, mostly posed, smiling. Thousands of photos that give a snapshot of my life. But they fall far short of telling the complex narrative of the life I was living. Until I started writing poetry again at 58.

I’m often asked if I regret not writing during those decades. Perhaps implying that I resented the work I did and everything else that got in the way of writing. “No, not at all,” I respond. “I loved how I spent those years, the work I did and the life I created.”

Yet, the other day when I read the poem “Will You?” by Carrie Fountain, where she describes making valentines with her young children, I cried. I tried to remember making valentines with my own children—the pink and red construction paper, white doilies, stickers and glitter. I have a few of their valentines tucked in a box in my basement. Proof that we did this: that we cut out hearts and glued them. The doilies now yellowed; the glitter dulled. In some, my handwriting declares “Happy Valentine’s Day” and “Will You Be Mine?” above their squiggly signatures. I try to conjure the scene, the kitchen table (what house was that?), what age were my children? Maybe there’s a photo somewhere of us. But there’s not a poem.

I didn’t kiss my children goodnight and stay up to write that scene, to describe the smell of the glue, my daughter pressing stickers on her face, the earnestness of my oldest son working his fingers stubbornly to cut out a heart, the baby covered in glitter. Or to capture how I felt in that moment—making valentines, little declarations of affection, with my children—to write my love for them. That would have been a valentine to my future self.

The act of writing a poem stills time—freezing the action, emotion, meaning of a moment. Carrie Fountain wrote a beautiful poem, but it’s also the story of one February evening with her children who “are so young they cannot imagine a world/like the one they live in.” In the poem, she preserves a slice of their childhood, even as the poet is already looking ahead “I know they will someday soon/see everything and they will know about/everything and they will no longer take/never mind for an answer.” That time has no doubt already arrived for the poet and her children.

Witnessing even the dull dailiness of our lives through writing also leads to the kind of discovery Ada Limón, our recent U.S. Poet Laureate, describes in her poem “Not the Saddest Thing in the World.” On an ordinary day, she finds a dead bird and buries it, and goes “about [her] day” realizing that the ordinary has been transformed, that “Now something’s/breaking always on the skyline…” Limón’s poem urges us to lift our eyes, to see and record even the smallest events, for they each have significance.

In preparation to celebrate my mother’s 90th birthday, I read through fifty years of her travel journals. I realize that even in the desert of Turkmenistan or in the Mekong Valley, it’s the ordinariness of breakfast, of meeting someone in a market or washing clothing in a bucket that make an experience extraordinary. It is the poetry of being in a place. In her journals, there is an intimacy in the daily details that allow our family to visualize my mother (and my father when he was alive) not only exploring the world but living in it. It’s a gift to her family.

Recently, I wrote a poetic series called “Time Capsule” that imagines various objects from my life (photographs, a shoe, postcards, newspaper clippings, and other detritus) that might go into a time capsule. Beneath each item and the date, is a very small prose poem. Together the thirty or so poems form a timeline, a narrative of my life so far. And hopefully symbolize that a life, no matter how ordinary or seemingly small in the face of time and history, has import. But the “Time Capsule” sequence can only, at best, be an excavation of frayed artifacts, as it lacks the insight of the moment when filtered through the lens of time and experience.

So, if you ask me. “Do I regret the years without poetry?” No, I don’t regret putting my dream of being a poet on hold for forty years, but yes, I keenly feel the loss of what is left out of my story. That I failed to witness a span of my life in writing. Poetry is of course much more than mere documentation. But a daily writing practice for a poet heightens observational skills, deepens emotional tentacles and alerts all our senses. These days after a walk with my husband, I return with souvenirs of all I’ve gathered: an overheard conversation, the suddenness of a dogwood tree in bloom, the wind’s bite. While he, on the other hand, went for a walk. I can’t wait to get to the page, to capture the fragments.

It’s those fragments that I regret not scribbling in the margins. The lost conversations and observations that if chronicled, I could return to, once I was ready to recommit to poetry. That not writing for those decades, I missed discovering and documenting the deeper meaning of the life I was so busy living.

But who wants to live with regrets? So let me phrase it differently, as advice. Right now open your Notes app or grab a pen and a scrap of paper and write something—an observation, a response, a list of no-regrets, a poem. Consider it a valentine to the future you. To those you love. Write in the margins of your busy life. Maybe it will be the opening line of your next chapter.

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tic tic tic by Heidi Seaborn is available from Cornerstone Press.