Poem of the Week | November 17, 2014

This week we feature a new poem by Frannie Lindsay. Lindsay’s fourth volume, Our Vanishing, was released from Red Hen Press in spring 2014 as the 2012 Benjamin Saltman Award winner. Her other three titles are Mayweed (The Word Works), Lamb (Perugia), and Where She Always Was (Utah State University Press). In 2008 she was chosen as the winner of The Missouri Review Editor’s Prize in poetry. She is published in The Atlantic Monthly, The Yale Review, The Harvard Review, Prairie Schooner, Tampa Review, The Antioch Review, and many others. Most recently, her work has appeared in the Best American Poetry of 2014.
 
Author’s note:

Dedicating a poem to a woman with five percent vision presented me with exceptional challenges. As I scribbled the first few images onto my legal pad, I realized I was, in no small way, trespassing. At first, this sense of loitering inhibited me at every turn. I abandoned the piece frequently. Over the course of about a month, I gathered fifteen of the remaining sections into a loosely structured whole. I kept thinking, as I tossed draft after draft into my wastebasket, that 95% is a lot of unseen “stuff” to play with. I wanted to play with it too, if for just a little while. I was jealous. Because of that, the poem felt dangerous.
 
The subject of “To a Young Woman” is herself a poet. Her voice is striking in the way of Emily Dickenson. Both employ gusty, ecstatic leaps. In my own poem, pity and hyperbolic praise deserved no place.
 
But the question remained: could I claim any right whatsoever, as a sighted poet, to write about one woman’s specific blind experience? I kept coming back to the same answer: no right at all. If my poem was to work, I would have to ignore the traditional dictum and write what I couldn’t possibly know. By a sort of lucky default, I found myself treating each small section as the quick figure sketch drawn by a rank beginner: pen never leaving paper, the result neither right nor wrong. Hurry in, dash off a gesture or two, and move on to the next every thirty seconds. My drawings didn’t need to depict literal blindness, just a faith in alternative vision.
 
At least a hundred of my sketches failed. I finally granted myself permission to feel my way along, and that seemed somehow right.