Joshua Sampson, CC BY 3.0, through Wikimedia Commons.
For our sequence Making of a Poem, we’re asking poets to dissect the poems they’ve printed in our pages. D. A. Powell’s “As for What the Rain Can Do” seems in our new Fall situation, no. 245.
How did this poem begin for you?
This poem started as a silence of wishing. As one does when falling silent. One needs a one thing that isn’t occurring. Or a one thing that’s occurring however ought to occur (one needs) in a different way. On this case, I used to be in my kitchen nook. Outdoors it was raining. However raining in that dire means—bushes falling, streets flooding. And endlessly so. San Francisco was on the backside of what meteorologists had been calling an atmospheric river. In thirsty California, rain is so typically wished for. And now right here I used to be, wishing it away. I didn’t need to be towards the rain.
Was there a sure phrase or picture that catalyzed your writing?
The phrase “properly you recognize what so-and-so can do” was floating round my mind, solely I had plugged rain into the spot marked “so-and-so.” And it appears as quickly as I caught myself considering negatively concerning the rain, I felt a correction in my considering was so as. So I went to all of the locations rain would possibly go, attempting to pick out principally constructive issues. Flood, for instance, is often a destructive, however the flooding of a rice area is magical—it creates a secure haven for birds whereas hindering weeds. The primary two strains appeared to strike a pleasant stability with one another—one lengthy and one quick. So I stored that sample going.
Did the poem come simply, or was it tough to put in writing?
It simply all fell out just about as it’s, besides that the sixth stanza was written after the seventh however appeared to belong earlier than the seventh. In any other case, my selection was to be mild with this poem and let it spill out line by line, separately, as if every line had been the one reply to the query of what the rain might do. Every line was made to face in a couplet with one different line. Solely within the fifth stanza do two strains of a couplet truly refer to one another. In any other case they’re meant to be odd {couples}. Sadly, there have been seven such {couples}, so that they wound up being a sonnet. However possibly they had been headed for sonnetness all alongside? I don’t know actually. Companions at a dance select one another for all kinds of causes and fall into patterns of movement. I let the poem inform me what it wished. I let it have its means with me. Perhaps I inspired it? When one has gone right into a wishing silence, one doesn’t know what want will come to fill it.
Do you want you’d carried out something in a different way?
I’ve no regrets.
D. A. Powell is the creator of 5 books of poetry, together with Repast: Tea, Lunch and Cocktails and Ineffective Panorama, or A Information for Boys.
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