As early as last summer, I began noticing that I was collecting water imagery. It showed up in notebooks, in my journal. And this year, as I pulled some poems from my manuscript and began re-visioning the collection, I saw echoes of it in the older poems. A new thread had surfaced in the book, brought out by time and a bit of emotional distance probably. If I back up even further, I began dreaming intensely about flooding water and rivers and currents the summer before I moved to West Lafayette–a river town–in 2004.
When I began drafting new poems this summer, I became more and more interested in rural Midwestern landscape and, specifically, the flooding that ravaged it earlier this year (and back in 2008 too). Floods not only alter physical landscape but change how we interact with it, making everything suddenly foreign, unnavigable.
So one night, I was up late, feeling restless, and I decided I would follow the rabbit down the hole. it turns out that research can, in fact, be an integral part of the writing process and not simply a way of avoiding it. At worst, perhaps it is productive procrastination. I began by reading articles and searching for maps, photographs, and interviews about the floods, which yielded a surprising wealth of imagery and, something I didn’t expect, motivation to continue the project, even beyond the boundaries of what I initially thought I wanted to tackle.
Below, I’ve included a link to an interactive on MSNBC that allows the viewer to click on towns along the Mississippi and learn more about the flood and the damage it left behind:
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/25193213
What’s your rabbit?
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