Playing Your Cards

“Play the hand you’ve been dealt.”

            I heard this one often while earning my MFA; it was one of Mike Madonick’s informal laws for the writing life, something he said at the beginning or end of workshop. It was one of those sayings that made us nod attentively—the way grad students do when they don’t want to admit that they aren’t sure what something means.

            After a while, I began to understand it as a reminder to write from my own life, from the life I was actually living (with its routine errands and embarrassing mistakes), not from some hypothetically more interesting and writerly life that I wished to be living.

            “Yes,” he said, when I was rear-ended and wrote a poem about it, “play the hand you’re dealt.” He nodded again when I brought in a poem about driving home alone and stopping at a four-way stop. The cards in my “hand” were whatever circumstances and experiences and lessons life threw at me, no matter how mundane or disruptive, and whatever words I could find for them.

            I finished my MFA, moved to Utah, and completed my PhD, thinking that I understood this whole “play the hand you’ve been dealt” business. Then 2020 dealt us all a giant handful of wild cards. Last spring, I moved back in with my parents and wrote about how strange that felt. And I wrote about hand sanitizer and masks and social distancing and fear and uncertainty. Those were the cards I’d been dealt. But a lot of my writing felt stale and effortful at the time. It took me several weeks and a few games of cribbage to realize that I’d forgotten the most important word in the rule: “play”.

            Cribbage is, it so happens, a great game for poets. Winning takes a balance of skill and luck. The math isn’t too complicated (you earn points through combinations of cards that add up to 15, through pairs, and through runs) and you get to use rhymes like “fifteen-four and say no more” as you count your cards. Like a poem, a hand of cribbage has a bit of ritual and surprise baked in; one person cuts the deck and the other turns the card over—if the card is a jack, the one who turns it over earns two points. For me, the game is also full of family history because my dad and I play on a board made to commemorate my grandfather’s 29 hand (the cribbage equivalent of a hole-in-one), which he achieved at age 93.

            The whole give and take, call and response, nature of the game feeds my poet brain. What I really love about cribbage, though, and what really makes a round of cribbage like a poem, is that it requires me to pay two different kinds of attention in close sequence. First, I have to look at the six cards I’ve been dealt and decide which four I want to keep and which two I want to discard into crib (the extra hand that goes to the dealer). This process is like discerning what goes into the poem—which events and feelings I need to write about and how they are related; four-way stop + rain + windshield wipers à slow and careful loneliness, I might think to give myself a general direction as I sit down to write.

Second, as soon as the deck has been cut and the fifth card that will contribute to both players’ hands has been revealed, I have to immediately set aside any and all calculation about how many points my hand might contain in order to focus on pegging. During pegging, players take turns laying down their cards and adding them to a running tally; you can earn points by hitting 15 or 31, or by pairing your opponent’s card, or by creating a run of three or four cards. To peg well, I have to let go of what I think my hand adds up to and pay attention to each card as it lands on the table. This is like the part of writing a poem where I have to let go of what I intend for the poem to say and focus instead on how the words and sounds are fitting together—I sometimes think of this as shifting from brain-thinking to ear-guessing. In both cases, I have a goal in mind (to write a poem or to score points), but to reach that goal I have to focus on the process as it unfolds and respond spontaneously. I can’t just count cards and call them a hand or string images together and call them a poem. I have to play. We all do, whatever we find in our hands.  

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