Poems are like Screened Porches

I’ve been a bit obsessed with screens for the past week—not phone screens, or computer screens, or television screens, but window screens. It’s finally warm enough for me to open the window near my desk and this small change has transformed the atmosphere in my study (and in my mind). My workspace is still indoors, but it suddenly feels much less separate from the outside world.

I’m writing about the sounds (birdsong, sirens, shouts from frustrated golfers on a nearby course, and leaves rustling in wind) that pour in through my window screen as I work and about the sounds (flute practice, arguments, barks, CNN’s updates on the war in Ukraine) that pour out through my neighbors’ windows as I walk my dogs. I’m writing about the smells, and about the warm and cold breezes that filter in. And, of course, in noticing and writing about these things, I’m also writing about my own fear and grief and hope and nostalgia. Because this, for me, is the territory where poems originate—in the interplay between self and other, in the way that moods and thoughts shapes perception and are in turn shaped by new perceptions.

I don’t have a screened porch myself, but I’m a bit envious of all my neighbors who do because it’s occurred to me that, if they were rooms, most poems would be screened porches—places of liminality and permeability where outer experiences and inner thoughts mingle and communicate. Screened porches are contained (they have frames) but also open to incursions of sound and gusts of wind. The very screens that let the world in also let their inhabitants’ words and gestures out into audibility and visibility.