{"id":168648,"date":"2024-09-25T10:15:16","date_gmt":"2024-09-25T14:15:16","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=168648"},"modified":"2025-09-22T11:42:15","modified_gmt":"2025-09-22T15:42:15","slug":"making-of-a-poem-sara-gilmore-safe-camp","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2024\/09\/25\/making-of-a-poem-sara-gilmore-safe-camp\/","title":{"rendered":"Making of a Poem: Sara Gilmore on \u201cSafe camp\u201d"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"

From Ernst Lehner\u2019s Symbols<\/em>, Signs and Signets.<\/em><\/p><\/div>\n

For our series Making of a Poem, we\u2019re asking poets to dissect the poems they\u2019ve contributed to our pages. Sara Gilmore’s poems \u201cMad as only an angel can be<\/a>\u201d and \u201cKnowing constraint<\/a>\u201d appear in the new Fall issue of<\/em> the<\/em> Review, no. 249<\/em>.\u00a0The poem she discusses here, \u201cSafe camp<\/a>,\u201d is published on the <\/em>Daily.<\/em><\/p>\n

How did this poem start for you? Was it with an image, an idea, a phrase, or something else?<\/strong><\/p>\n

Originally this poem began with the lines \u201cDelay and pressed the reeling available \/ Would-be constant down this inhabited suddenness.\u201d It never troubled me that the words together didn\u2019t make sense or that I didn\u2019t yet know what they were pointing to\u2014I thought of them as an assembly of beautiful raw material to work with.<\/p>\n

As I continued to work on the poem, the image that rose to mind was a ditch along a narrow country road I often strolled down with my son near Mairena del Aljarafe when we lived in Spain. It was filled with trash and reels of unwound VHS tapes. We walked by it hundreds of times. The poem began to grow around the word \u201creeling\u201d\u2014the \u201creal\u201d along with everything the real is not, the dizzying motion of \u201creeling,\u201d Anne Carson\u2019s notion \u201cunder this day the reel of another day.\u201d This figure of reeling gave into the poem\u2019s circuitry as a whole\u2014the way it shorts out as if its webbing could open to reveal layers underneath, suggesting a kind of sinkhole that either delivers us from or constricts us into a frame of reality that runs along our lives eternally. For me, these sinkholes are dangerous and fascinating.<\/p>\n

This is one of the poem\u2019s anxieties\u2014the possibility of a circularity of circumstance or time in which what I\u2019m living today could be the actual present, or a day I lived long ago, or a day I haven\u2019t lived yet at all.<\/p>\n

The poem surfaced into clarity in the lines that, in the version published here, appear first. \u201cI was still but tried, in a burst it\u2019s all lit up by.\u201d I like to think the original lines are still there\u2014what my friend Timmy calls the rungs of the ladder that we\u2019re no longer standing on but got us here.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

What were you listening to, reading, or watching while you were writing?<\/strong><\/p>\n

The day I started writing, I read Wallace Stevens\u2019s \u201cA Rabbit as King of the Ghosts\u201d for the first time, my son\u2019s stepbrother was born an ocean away, and I went on a walk with my son in Hickory Hill Park in Iowa City. It was April Fools\u2019 Day, a year into the pandemic. My son made a set of cardboard claws to wear. That\u2019s the day the poem emerged, but of course many other days and markers are also embedded into it. I date all the poems I write, maybe to have some anchor in what feels like a sway. I take pictures with my phone of the passages I read, the places I go, people I\u2019m with. With all this underneath, the finished poem can seem like a little white flag waving surrender over a frighteningly infinite and invisible mountain\u2014how do you get at that? I don\u2019t know. I keep trying. What I like about \u201cA Rabbit as King of the Ghosts\u201d is the strength it finds in intimacy. It\u2019s not afraid to say things like \u201cIn which everything is meant for you \/ and nothing need be explained.\u201d In \u201cSafe camp,\u201d I think I got a little closer to conveying strong emotion and feeling outside explanation\u2014strong love, strong belonging, without a tether to fixed place or meaning, the resistance to have those things outside any formal permission.<\/p>\n

How did writing the first draft feel to you? Did it come easily, or was it difficult to write? Are there hard and easy poems?<\/strong><\/p>\n

Writing a poem is the easiest and hardest thing in the world to do. Easy in the sense that it\u2019s a human impulse, like singing in the shower, and difficult as far as the huge emotional and intellectual toll it takes. I wrote \u201cSafe camp\u201d quickly, first in my head and then on my phone. I repeated its lines over and over to myself. Two days later I had my second COVID vaccination in Washington, Iowa. When I drove back home, I had a sense of calm, and I knew the poem was good.<\/p>\n

How did you come up with the title for this poem? Were there other titles you thought about? Why didn\u2019t you go with them?<\/strong><\/p>\n

\u201cSafe camp\u201d belongs to a cycle of serial poems written around the symbols that itinerant communities have historically used in the U.S. After the Great Depression, as people (many of whom were teenagers) moved across the country looking for work, they would leave scratch marks or markings in chalk outside the places they visited, to tell others what those places were like. For many years I\u2019ve had a copy of Ernst Lehner\u2019s Symbols<\/em>, Signs and Signets<\/em>, which includes a catalogue of these visual symbols and verbal descriptions of their meanings: \u201cOwner is in,\u201d \u201cKeep quiet, \u201cBad dog,\u201d \u201cSafe camp.\u201d There\u2019s something flat and solid about these descriptions that contrasts with the way I write.<\/p>\n

So, I would write as I do but title the poems in the order the symbols appear in Lehner\u2019s book. And I knew where I was. Placing any material or element next to one another generates a force field, which can be very unexpected and wonderful\u2014like a safe camp, in fact. But that notion of safety also signals the privilege of authority, signage, the ability to grant permission. I think that bled into the line \u201cIn the quiet permission \/ I took my unit of heart and wondered if it was enough.\u201d<\/p>\n

I was also influenced by Joyelle McSweeney\u2019s The Red Bird<\/em>, which includes many different poems with the title \u201cThe Voyage of the Beagle.\u201d This is something I stole from her\u2014I actually have several poems titled \u201cSafe camp.\u201d<\/p>\n

When did you know this poem was finished? Were you right about that? Is it finished after all?<\/strong><\/p>\n

This iteration of the poem is probably finished. I read Benjamin Krusling\u2019s Glaring <\/em>many times around the time I wrote \u201cSafe camp.\u201d He has a gorgeous poem at the end of that collection that begins, \u201cfirst there\u2019s love\u2026then there\u2019s synchronized time.\u201d And, in Triple Canopy,<\/em> another poem<\/a> that begins \u201cit\u2019s love , but there\u2019s no time.\u201d In both poems, variations on the lines are repeated in different orders. I asked Krusling, during a Q&A after one of his readings, about the relationship between these two poems, and he had this beautiful idea of a poem\u2019s mutability\u2014that it should never become an artifact, closed-off, museum-displayed. And that the most important things must be said many times in many ways. I\u2019m interested in how this idea contrasts with the fixity that the page and publication provide.<\/p>\n

Poems can also gather great force in their immutability, like the transformations produced by the repetition in chant. That\u2019s what I was thinking about in the lines \u201cAn artifact \/\/ Gathered and became immobile, and even so \/ Changed year to year until its recognition fell to wind itself.\u201d \u201cFell\u201d then shifts to \u201cfelt\u201d in the lines \u201cI felt myself. I felt myself inhabiting it so I felt myself.\u201d<\/p>\n

Did you show your drafts to other writers or friends or confidants? If so, what did they say?<\/strong><\/p>\n

I workshopped this poem with ten other poets one week after I wrote it. My notes from that session have fragments like \u201cvoice of poem hears \u2018self\u2019 and is startled outside of itself\u201d and \u201cmemory as we perform it for ourselves, and disintegration,\u201d \u201cwhirring in contained location.\u201d There is something about an \u201canimal mind\u201d and reference to the \u201cweight of mammal body\u201d and the \u201cunderside of gristle.\u201d There are recommendations for other poets, like Wyatt and Petrarch, who wrote poems including deer. Talking about this poem with those poets was like becoming aware of the aliveness of a shared mind.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Sara Gilmore is a poet and translator. She teaches at the University of Iowa and works as a phlebotomist.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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