A poet friend in the mountains who knows I am a bird watcher and that I have written a lot of poems about birds, recently sent me a poem about birds by another poet. That she sent me the poem is not surprising; she’s thoughtful like that. The poem is by William Stafford. She knows that he is one of my favorites, so that she chose a poem by him is not surprising either. What is surprising is her serendipitous timing.
On the very day that she sent me the poem, I was preparing a workshop on the use of participles as a way of beginning a poem. A participle is a verb form used as an adjective. In the phrase “running water,” for example, the verb form “running” describes the water; thus, it functions as an adjective modifying the noun “water.” Participles are often used to create entire phrases that describe a noun. We call these “participial phrases,” and they often appear (sometimes incorrectly when the noun they modify doesn’t come immediately after them) at the beginning of a sentence. In the sentence, “Running towards the bus, the boy tripped over the curb,” the entire phrase, “Running towards the bus,” describes the boy and is therefore a participial phrase modifying “the boy,” the subject of the sentence.
The workshop, which I used at my last Hickory Poetry Salon, begins by asking participants to write down what they are doing at that exact moment. Almost all of them will write their answers in the form of participles: “sitting,” “listening,” “thinking,” “yawning,” etc. Some will write them as participial phrases: “sitting in a classroom;” “listening to a lecture;” “thinking about what I’ll have for dinner;” “yawning again and again.” Occasionally, someone will take off with the idea right away: “sitting in a classroom full of other people who are now writing unimaginative answers to the question, What are you doing at this exact moment, posed by Scott Owens, our workshop leader, who is pretending to write an impromptu answer to his own question but who, in all likelihood, composed the perfect answer when he was thinking about this workshop last night and is now rewriting it so that no matter how creative our answers, we will all feel inferior to his own creativity.”
Participants are then encouraged to pause several times a day and ask themselves that question again, “What are you doing at this exact moment,” and write down any answers that are interesting or full of potential for further writing.
As illustration that they are not alone in this approach to writing a poem, I also give them a list of famous poems with titles that begin with a participle. For example,
“Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening,” Robert Frost;
“Keeping Things Whole,” Mark Strand;
“Counting the Small-Boned Bodies,” Robert Bly;
“Lying in a Hammock at William Duffy’s Pond in Pine Island, Minnesota,” James Wright;
“Leaning Against the Bar at Wrong Way Corrigan’s in Greenville, NC,” Peter Makuck;
“Traveling Through the Dark,” William Stafford (not the poem my friend sent me).
At the exact moment that I opened the email from my friend and read the poem that she sent me, I was constructing this list of famous poems with participial titles. And the punch line is, the title of the poem she sent me was, “Watching Sandhill Cranes.” Serendipitous, right?
But it didn’t stop there. I almost always have drafts of 3 or 4 poems that I’ve started but not finished saved in my email so that I can access them wherever I go when some idea about revising them strikes me. And it just so happened that one of the poems in that state of incompletion at the moment I was working on this workshop and received this email from my friend was about the fortuitous nature of how I came to see my first ever swallow-tailed kite while driving from Rock Hill to Hickory after giving a poetry reading. And the title of the poem, “Driving from Rock Hill to Hickory I See My First Ever Swallow-Tailed Kite.”
So, workshop, sent poem, draft poem, birds, participles, and serendipity all converged in a moment that seemed remarkable. But then, in the practice of writing poetry, of paying attention so that I notice the things I want to write about, it seems like this sort of serendipity happens all the time. Regardless, I hope I never become so used to these coincidences that I begin to take them for granted.
Here is the poem, and if you like the writing prompt, feel free to use it, and don’t hesitate to send me a copy of what you come up with. I’d love to read it.
Driving from Rock Hill to Hickory I See My
First Ever Swallow-Tailed Kite
Fate, luck, fortune,
chance, living right,
happening for a reason,
providence, coincidence, serendipity,
my wife just calls them
happy accidents,
and they happen often enough
that I can’t not believe
I must be doing something right.
Talking on the phone,
I don’t hear the GPS
tell me to turn,
and when it reroutes me
down a country road,
I see a bird
I’ve never seen
in all my years of birding,
more than four hundred cataloged,
and now here by a stroke of luck
one I’ve always wanted to see
but never have,
a swallow-tailed kite flying low
over a furrowed field,
hunting no doubt, cicada,
wasps, beetles, anything
in this case, unlike me,
in the wrong place
at the wrong time.
