Fall Back to Then

describe one formal realization or change you made during the writing of this poem.

The organization of the lines, which took shape spontaneously, is likely to have been influenced by my intensive reading in the poetry of the objectivists—Lorine Neidecker, William Carlos Williams, Carl Rakosi, George Oppen—and (although not of that movement) the verse of Larry Eigner. Their poems are shaped and cadenced objects on the page. Also of interest and comfort to me is the work of Jane Kenyon, who made poems out of the daily material of her life and, finally, of her dying. Like them, I take note of how words sit and sound on the page, acknowledging that a poem is both an optical and musical construction. “Fall Back to Then” begins with declarations—emphatic, granitelike imperatives, reflective of a child’s initial sensations of the world—until they ripen into a sudden enlargement, which is thought, that of a mature mind.

The final line—“The great trees crowding in [at the window]”—surprised me more than any other in the poem because of the suddenness with which I remembered lying in bed as a boy of nine or ten, seeing—feeling—how the enormous oaks and maples on the railroad’s right-of-way filled, with a kind of violence, my open bedroom window, as if threatening to push inside.