Blackbird ArchivePerpetual Beginning
I almost never remember drafting poems, and when they are good, I almost never remember writing them. As I learn more about process, the more paralyzing writing becomes. Still, I tap the side of my head and feel sounds trickle out from time to time. Over time, I tape images to my wall. In silent periods, I slide old drafts from the drawer, and though I find comfort in them being there, they are also the most difficult to continue.
I wrote “The New Poem” and “Existence” at separate times in my life. “The New Poem” began in North Carolina seven years ago, during which I’d sit out on my porch at night and watch undergraduates walk by. I’d see the same old dog roll in the grass while his owner smoked out of the upstairs window. “Existence” began at the end of my time in California. I remember the months after fire season, waking up in the middle of the night without coughing. I’d follow my dog out to the yard when I couldn’t sleep and sit under a tree.
The tenacity of early writing is often riddled with sounds for the ear and little for the mind. The poems I am most grateful for are poems that have the earmarks of innocence, poems in which I inhabit that original space where I first wrote fiction in my childhood upstairs bedroom, sitting in a broken chair with the window wide open. I find myself wondering why I continue, but it’s in finishing flawed poems, finding myself in language—the most flammable material—that keeps me present.
Writing became the way in which I interact with the world. I’ve learned that if I lean my head down, I can see new things in the old: the poem negotiating a trajectory that I have not resolved in my own life, every image imbued with the experience of living, in being human. This isn’t to say that time equates success, necessarily, but how we form relationships to our own work helps us better understand the silvery nonsensical cadence we know as intuition. Sometimes discovering a poem’s limitation is victory. Sometimes the poem rocks down the tracks, but moves nonetheless. In the words of one of my most important teachers, “the work has to get done.”
Simon Shieh’s poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in Beloit Poetry Journal , Best New Poets , Poetry , Poetry Daily , Shenandoah , and elsewhere. He was awarded second place in Narrative ’s 30 Below Contest and a 2021 Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Fellowship.
Caleb Braun’s poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in 32 Poems , The Atlanta Review , Cherry Tree , The Crab Orchard Review , Image , and elsewhere. Braun earned an MFA in poetry from the University of Washington, where he received the Harold Taylor Prize. He is a PhD candidate in creative writing at Texas Tech University. Photo by Emma Aylor
Colby Cotton’s work has appeared or is forthcoming in Best New Poets 2020 , Gulf Coast , Iowa Review , Prairie Schooner , and elsewhere. He is the recipient of a Wallace Stegner Fellowship at Stanford University and a Tennessee Williams Scholarship from the Sewanee Writers’ Conference. He earned an MFA from the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. Photo by Kris Brunelli
Catharina Coenen’s essays have appeared in The American Scholar , The Normal School , The Pinch , The Threepenny Review , and elsewhere. Her work was listed as “notable” in Best American Essays 2021 and anthologized in Best of the Net (Sundress Publications, 2020) and Flash Nonfiction Foods (Woodhall Press, 2020). Coenen is the recipient of the Appalachian Review ’s 2019 Denny C. Plattner Award in Creative Nonfiction, The Forge ’s 2021 Flash Nonfiction Competition, a Science-as-Story Fellowship from the Creative Nonfiction Foundation, and a Hedgebrook Residency. She is a professor of biology at Allegheny College. Photo by River Branch
Lena Fultz’s short fiction has appeared in The Loch Raven Review and Archipelago - The Allegory Ridge Fiction Anthology . She earned her MFA from Hollins University, where she was runner-up for the Andrew James Purdy Prize for Short Fiction. She works as a ghostwriter.
Patricia García Luján’s work is forthcoming in Coolest American Stories 2023 (Coolest Stories Press, 2023). She is a former culture writer at Vogue and a current James Michener Fellow at the University of Miami’s MFA program. In 2021, she was a Cecelia Joyce Johnson Award finalist and the Sewanee Review Fiction Contest finalist. Luján is at work on a short story collection. Photo by Xavier Luján