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Poetry - and Putting the Garden to Bed. Write a comment.
blog by SHUTTA CRUM listed in categories: Writer's Life

Recently, I taught a literary technique workshop for adult writers of poetry. At one point I stopped to ask this group of writers what a particular poem we were reading was about. On the surface the poem spoke of nailing the framework of a house together. There was a long pause before a single timid voice piped up . . . “He’s building a marriage.”

“Good!” I said—though there may have been other interpretations for this poem. The point was simply that pieces of art often have subtext. The surface subject may act only as a symbol for some force, abstraction, endeavor, or feeling with which many people can identify. It is basic communication—the thing toward which art strives. But it made the writers of the workshop stumble . . . after all, a symbol is not as easy a thing to grasp as alliteration, meter, or personification.

Later that week, while putting the garden to bed for the winter, I was thinking about symbols. When a writer writes on more than one level we are asked, as readers, to give something more of ourselves. We are asked to kneel down in the dirt of that written world, push aside the obvious, and pull out something meaty that’s hiding there—like the last of the tomatoes.

And so, I sought out the last of the tomatoes—those hard green possibilities with just a blush of orange that might yet ripen. I yanked out the bindweed trying to trip me up. I considered the cold frame—was it too late to plant seed that could green-up during the first blustery days of winter? And what about the pole beans, grown thick with their private burdens? Should I keep them in a cool dark place until it is time to plant again?

I found a sprig of cilantro—self-sown. I dug it up and put it in a little pot for that morning I will go to the window and stare out over the silent crush of snow upon our fields. On that day, I will rub a leaf of it between my fingers and inhale the pungent subtext of poetry.

Perhaps I’ll hold the next workshop in the garden.

Ciao! Shutta

Posted in December, 2007