What Paddleboarding Taught me about Poems
I learned to paddleboard over the summer—and it taught me so much about writing poems. Every time I went out on the lake, I found myself coming home with a renewed sense of focus and experimenting with new forms, new themes, new subjects. Now that the season for water sports is drawing to a close, I’m reflecting on just what paddleboarding taught me and how I can bring those elements to the page all winter (even if I can’t bring the herons and turtles home with me).
I loved from the beginning that paddleboarding requires me to be fully, intensely present in my body and the world—that it is the opposite of skimming around the internet on my laptop. It draws my attention to the “surface-level” in a new way (a nice contrast to years of writing about submarines!). From a paddleboard, the water’s surface—its texture of ripples, waves, and currents, all buoying and tugging at the board—feels as richly complex as any ‘depth’; it keeps reminding me of the way that words and sentences can be nuanced experiences at the level of tone and sound, even before we dig around for their deeper meaning.
The most vital piece for me, though, was learning how to stand on the board. My initial instinct was to stand rigidly on the board, to muscle my way into smoothness as I tried to keep the board moving in a straight line. This was exhausting because I was fighting the board, the waves, the wind, and my own body as I paddled; after 20 minutes, my legs gave out and I toppled into the lake. It was only when I learned to stand with my knees a little bent and my feet active but not over-gripping the board that I stopped falling off. I found a stance in between relaxed and rigid and learned to move with the board and the waves; when I let go of trying to control (i.e. prevent) wobbles, I found paddling fun. The more attention I paid to the wind and the waves—as forces to work with, not against—the more I could actually steer the board.
Poems are the same way—I need to let them wobble and react. If I sit down with a very specific statement that I want a poem to make and try to write a poem that goes straight there, I wind up with a draft that flails and splashes and ultimately gets crossed out. But if I treat the poem (or my idea for it) as a surface made of words encountering the world, if I study and work with its impulses (images, sounds, etc.), if I allow a little bounce and wobble, I get a draft that moves forward. Some wobbles I revise out and some become integral to the piece, but they all help me understand how to get a particular poem moving and what it has to say.
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