The Woodlot

by Andy Weaver

Nine little words: “Are you going to write something for our son?” Only eleven syllables, asked of me, seemingly in passing, by my wife as we were driving somewhere. It seemed harmless enough.

That was in 2013, a few months after our first child was born. I was nearly finished the poems I had been working on for a few years, for a book working through the concept of “this-ness” (cleverly titled This; it sold tens of copies). I was immersed in abstract concepts (aided by my day job as a professor of experimental poetry and poetics). Writing about a person? Even worse, writing about how I felt about a person? I’d spent the better part of fifteen years and most of three books trying to not write about how I felt.

But I was also fascinated by how I did feel. The organism sitting backwards in a car seat, that creature who spent its time alternating between wailing, sleeping, and pooping, was making me feel big emotions I hadn’t felt before. Worth exploring, I thought, and started sifting through love as a concept. The idea was to deal with love as an idea, not as an experience, to write about it as a universal, something that we’ve all encountered but that we all encounter completely differently. So, the original foundational principle was to ponder deeply on Haddaway’s brilliant 1993 treatise, “What is love?” and my two guides would be two of my favourite poets, Robert Duncan and John Ashbery, because they both mixed abstract thought with deep thinking, while Duncan used strong emotion and Ashbery avoided the personal.

At this point, it’s worth detouring into a few personal facts. My wife and I met in grad school in our late twenties, and we moved from Edmonton to Toronto in our mid-thirties when I hit the lottery and got a tenure-track job at York University. At that point, we were newly married, seemingly settled, and—in classic academic fashion—“finally ready” to start a family. And we couldn’t get pregnant. We tried more and more systematically, but nothing worked. We finally went to a fertility clinic and—on what we said was our third and final attempt—conceived. I was forty two when our first arrived. I had spent the last twenty-plus years as a student, grad student, and professor, living the life of the mind. I was thrilled about giving the dog a new companion to play with, and completely unprepared for what life as a parent meant. I had been irrationally upset when my dog chewed on my copy of Robert Creeley’s Collected Essays around 2011. From 2013-2019, I was cleaning up every possible bodily excretion, often from places (halfway up the wall?!?) I didn’t think possible. Luckily, it turned out that I loved parenting as much as I loved having kids. (Even more luckily, my amazing wife was there to go through all this with me!)

By the time my second son came along in 2016, the book project that would eventually become The Loom was well underway. It was one long, rambling poem that used a lot of declarative sentences, and focused a lot on the practice of reading-writing, a practice both Duncan and Ashbery used throughout their careers in different fashions but with terrific results. I wrote in response to philosophical texts (Jacques Attali’s Noise, Jean-Luc Nancy’s Being Singular Plural, Michel Foucault’s The Archeology of Knowledge are just some of the annoying namedrops) and loved the process of working through the material, glancing at love every once in a while, swirling around the idea but never landing on it. And it was just not good.

The project had consumed my writing life for about six years when I realized that it just wasn’t working. I was writing what I wanted to, how I wanted to—and the results were completely underwhelming (I published a long excerpt of this early draft as a chapbook, “Haecceity,” with Gap Riot Press in 2018, if anyone wants to see the textual embodiment of “meh”). It was all too abstract and inert. As a way of helping, my wife (who is always my first reader) suggested that letting in the personal might be a way to bring to work to life.

I had pretty much abandoned first-person lyric poetry more than a decade before, so the thought of writing about the personal terrified and confused me. Eventually, I realized that “terrified and confused” was where this whole parenting thing started (and where it has always at least partially remained), so I decided to give it a shot. And the poems took on a liveliness they sorely lacked. I brought in actual lived anecdotes from living with my family and the poems took on a humour that I had sought but couldn’t incorporate before. I edited and rewrote, at first splicing in personal experiences and then finally blending in my life with my reading and my thinking.

Most of all, I think I eventually figured out how to ground the poems in my day-to-day life without making them about me. In a way, the poems stopped being what I thought I wanted to write and became more about being what someone else (even perhaps, eventually, my sons) might want to read.

from The Loom: 

“The Bridge” X.iii

And as I read Neruda writing of the birds
and their “order of the wilds,” your eyes
slip before mine like glasses correcting my sight
away from the book to the red-necked grebes
that floated in the breakwater the day before
your third birthday, how first I called them ducks
and you called them ducks, then I called them loons
and you called them loons, and then finally I called
them grebes and you demanded they are, were, will
always be loons. And over your shoulder the tern
fell to the water and tore into its target, a feathered
lance while we crouched behind the benches and hid
from each other, from your brother, from your mother.

Then we climbed onto the rocks and there the mute swan
suddenly at our feet, just feet below, its head plunging
and probing the water, alien and absolutely confusing
to you as it fed and preened, fed and preened, and we
watched the Canada Geese come near and fade away
as the swan stayed just away and the swallows circled
and looped overhead and your hand in mine, my hand
around yours, our hands linked under the swallows,
linked over the swan, linked near the geese, linked
so near to the tern, beyond the grebes that were ducks
and always, yes, always, are loons.
•••
 
“The Bridge” X.iv

Your mother comes with your brother,
their arms linked, and Kelly and I link hands
and we walk, four linked, and we walk, and
we knit together as pieces into one and
separate out into each other as whole parts
of a larger structure, not important in
ourselves but important to ourselves,
to each other, we cleave apart and we
cleave together, we are strands in the tapestry
and we are architecture and arche text,
and we are foundation and abutment,
pile and arch, and we span the entire length
and breadth and story of everything I can
understand as love.
•••

Andy Weaver is a settler writer and scholar. He is an associate professor of creative writing, contemporary poetry, and poetics at York University in Toronto and author of the poetry collections Were the Bees, Gangson, and This.