On "Summer Storm"
By Karla Huston
Being asked to write
something about a poem I wrote more than ten years ago and about an event that
happened twenty-five years before that is like attending a class reunion—both
curious and scary. You know the feeling:
you look forward to seeing your best friend since grade school and hope you
still have something in common.
The
poem “Summer Storm” likely started from an exercise—to write about a storm,
either real or imagined. And storms,
whether weather-related or emotional can be fodder for lots of writing. But I didn’t start with that intent. I wanted to show what happened in a small
moment taken from a much larger event.
While I hadn’t been writing long, I knew enough about the process to
understand that creating a narrative about the entire day wouldn’t work. There was too much story to tell.
Briefly, a bunch of
friends decided to camp on the sandbar along the Mississippi River near one of the
locks and dams close to La Crosse, Wisconsin, where I was living in the late
70s. That summer, we’d had record rains; so much had fallen that
everything was sodden and whole hillsides—boulders and heaps of sludge—were
slipping onto roadways, blocking traffic along the both sides of the river.
Maybe it was dangerous. Or maybe we were just impetuous 20-somethings bent on a good time, but we—four or five couples—boated to the sandbar, secured tents, unrolled sleeping bags and located food and beverage coolers in a large screen tent where we gathered to hang out and play euchre.
Across the river, thunderheads started to build and move like ships forming a huge gray-black wall. Undeterred, we joked and talked inside the screen tent while the storm gathered momentum.
Soon rain and wind arrived, and we hung onto poles to keep the tent standing while swaying in the wind. To celebrate our situation, someone decided to pass a bottle of bourbon. As the bottle rounded the square, the winds became fierce, blowing rain, throwing hail, and hurling sand and debris. We saw our sleeping quarters flattened by wind. Seeing them in sodden heaps seemed kind of funny at first—until we thought about crawling inside later.
That’s much of what happened, in more detail than anyone needed to know, but it’s important to show what I didn’t include, which was most of it. As I started to write, I somehow knew to show the event in medias res. I kept the screen tent scene only, with the bourbon and friends and our quarrel with the weather and didn’t include the rest. I knew that too much of the story would render the poem boring, begging the question, “so what?”
Trying
to seize the power of the storm, I looked for strong words then, and revisiting
the poem now shows how many single syllable u sounds I included: clutch,
lurch, gusts, bluffs, huff, slung, and bullet. I hear hard c sounds, q sounds, too,
contrasted with soft s’s. These
weren’t conscious choices that I remember making, yet playing with words,
finding the right one based on meaning, sound and rhythm is one of the most
pleasurable parts of writing.
The “old man,” who, in the heart of the storm, hurls mud and
clams and weeds, is perhaps a cliché—“old man river?” We were on the Mississippi, but “he” brings
another character into this narrative other than the ubiquitous “we.”
The quarrel with the weather outside ended when the storm wore itself out, some of us deciding to break camp and head home back to dry warmth and safety.
For many, writing through an experience is a good way to bear witness to “stormy” events. For me, though, time is the way I distill an experience into something artful. While I may write in a journal or a letter to an imaginary someone about an emotional experience, when I try to write too close to the “storm” of an event, I find what I’ve written is often not artful. I’m too emotionally attached, and these pieces of writing may be good catharsis but don’t make for good writing for me.
When I sent this packet of poems to Poet Lore editors for their consideration, I never imagined they would choose this piece. Though I don’t remember what else I sent, I thought this poem was the weakest of the lot. So I was both surprised and pleased with their selection. Looking back at it now, I think I like it.
Karla
Huston has published six chapbooks of poetry, most recently, An Inventory of Lost Things: Centennial
Press, 2009. Her poems, reviews and interviews have been published widely,
including in the 2012 Pushcart Best of
the Small Presses anthology. A book of collaborative poetry, written
with Cathryn Cofell, was recently published by Sunnyoutside Press. Visit Karla
Huston's website for more information.
SUMMER
STORM
We
clutched together in a screen tent,
nine
of us lurching between
tent
poles and gusts, watching
clouds
gather up in the west,
the
angry wave of them
hovered
over the Mississippi River
bluffs
like a black wall. The wind
huffed
down the face of the limestone,
threw
clay and trees onto highways
and
shorelines. We shivered
and
while the sky slung bullets,
the
old man reared back, spit mud
and
clams and weeds.
The
wind made sodden debris
of
tents and sleeping bags
while
under the plastic canopy
we
passed the bourbon—an amber torch,
the
burning liquor the only thing
that
quenched the quarrel outside.
—Poet Lore Volume 97, No 3/4, p 22
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