Behind-the-Scenes Look: “Poem Beginning with a Text to My Neighbor"

Annotation & Author’s Note

Hi, Friend.

Last Monday we bailed on our family vacation after only a couple of days at the beach—Holden Beach, North Carolina—and drove back to Ohio, all to avoid Tropical Storm Debby. When we got home, there was a copy of Alaska Quarterly Review in the mailbox, with two new poems of mine inside it, one inspired by another Debbie, my next-door neighbor. So today I’ve annotated that poem, “Poem Beginning with a Text to My Neighbor.” Thanks to editor Ronald Spatz and guest editor Danusha Laméris for giving these two poems such a good home, alongside work by Jane Hirshfield, Pádraig Ó Tuama, Emily Raboteau, Kim Addonizio, Dorianne Laux, Pam Houston, Ellen Bass, and so many others. Talk about being in good company!

Here is the poem as it appears in the journal:

from Alaska Quarterly Review Vol. 40 No. 3 & 4, Summer & Fall 2024

“Poem Beginning with a Text to My Neighbor” began just as the title discloses: as a text to my next-door neighbor. (Look, I really hated to send that text, because no one wants to be that guy, but I’m an insomniac as it is, and wind chimes right under my bedroom window made sleep impossible. My neighbor was incredibly gracious. No more wind chimes!)

The first two sentences of the poem are the text nearly verbatim. The assonance and internal rhyme—night/mind/chimes/right outside, and windy/bring in/wind—happened naturally without much massaging, and the wording is just smoothed out a little to make it more concise and rhythmically appealing. Then the poem continues to unspool the ideas by using repetition and variation. In the handwritten annotation below I’ve noted the images and phrases pulled from earlier in the poem and used again in different—and more surreal—ways later. Thank you for doing your best to read my half-cursive-half-print scrawl.

Looking at “Poem Beginning with a Text to My Neighbor,” I see that the form is sonnet-esque, as I write on the annotation, and that’s reinforced by the end rhyme of the final couplet: night/light. I can also see how I broke the lines with tension and suspense in mind, so that the reader might have the same disorienting experience reading the poem as the speaker had waking to the sound of wind chimes on a windy, snowy night. I was in that liminal state between sleeping and dreaming, and the musical sound in the dead of night was unexpected, even eerie.

For example, “would you bring in” at the end of the second line makes the reader ask “What?” before reading on to get the answer in the following line. The lines that end with “It sounds,” “I thought,” “I thought it was,” and “where” have a similar effect, leaving the reader hanging—suspended—in the white space at the end of the line, unsure about how the rest of the sentence will unfold or what information resides there. I think of these line endings as suspenseful because the full meaning of the sentence is not yet available to the reader; the reader has questions that they must read on to have answered.

The poem is built on repetition and variation, and the variations also allowed me to enact that disorientation and then the subsequent grasp at understanding. In this poem, I think of the repetitions in the poem as distorted echoes: the original phrase is called out early, but the echo—the call back—has been twisted, changed, made strange. It reminds me of the game of telephone I played as a child: You whisper a word or phrase to the person next to you, and they repeat it to the person next to them, and so on, until the last person says it out loud, and it very rarely matches what the first person said. In the annotation I’ve marked the pairings by drawing lines between them.

What is that popular definition of insanity? Doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results? Forget that. One of the tricks of repetition in a piece of writing is that you can do the same thing over and over with different results. You might deploy a line, word, phrase, or image, then redeploy it again and again. Perhaps the phrasing is slightly different: A statement might become a question; a noun might become a verb. But even if you use it again verbatim, the results are different. The piece of writing has advanced; the context has changed.

There’s a craft essay on pattern and repetition in Dear Writer: Pep Talks & Practical Advice for the Creative Life, which comes out April 1. If you haven’t preordered a copy yet, would you take a second to do that from your local indie, Bookshop.org, or wherever you buy your books? Thank you, and thanks for reading, sharing, and subscribing to For Dear Life. I’m glad you’re here.

Thanks also to Debbie—for delivering the beginning of a poem one snowy night with her wind chimes, and for so kindly taking them down.

It’s good to be home, and despite our vacation being cut short, it’s been a wonderful summer. The new school year starts in a few days, and I’ll have the house to myself again during school hours. Writing time! I’m ready.

With gratitude,
Maggie