Learning What We Know: Michael Hettich on “The River”

I write for a few hours almost every morning, alternating these days between prose and poetry, and I try not to think much before I start, or even for that matter while I’m working. On good days I find a cadence which finds a voice, and I follow that voice and cadence as far as it takes me. If what I’ve done feels authentic, I sometimes look back over it to see what’s there, but I usually try to avoid doing that, preferring to let what I’ve written cool off a bit before I take a good look at what’s there. I may even challenge myself to write twenty or thirty improvisations of this kind before I take a look at any of them. That’s been my method for most of my writing life, which is most of my life, at this point; and that’s what I did in writing “The River.”

I find that what I consider my “best” poems are rarely drawn directly from events or experiences but instead deal with these things in a peripheral way—discovering what I’ve been feeling or thinking about by writing the poem. Finding a cadence that sufficiently limits my choices without boxing me into an overly formal way of thinking is essential for such discovery, as is entering a voice that feels supple, authentic, and not-quite-my-own. 

So when I look at “The River” with an eye to “what was I trying to do here?” I see that I might be writing about the fact that my wife and I both retired a few years ago, and that we moved to a place both familiar and brand-new, similar to where we both grew up but steeped in a different culture and a whole new (and deeply distressing) era in the culture of our country. So we’ve both entered new iterations of ourselves--new people, in a sense—in a whole new yet strangely familiar place. We’ve had to change our sense of who we are in the world. In doing this, we’ve gained the courage—maybe it’s just gumption—to finally let go of those “classics” that have always bored us in all their various manifestations, as we grow into people we hardly recognize sometimes, though we often feel utterly familiar, too, to ourselves--and even to each other.

Also running through this poem, of course, is a sense of the grief so many of us feel at the environmental destruction we see all around us every day and even participate in, however much we try not to: the conundrum and deepest grief defining our time. By moving suddenly into the present tense with the line “So many animals have been swept away,” I think I’m trying to give as much power to that desperate image as possible. 

Having said all these things about my little poem, I think I should also say—again—that the experience of writing it was really more like listening to the possibilities in that voice I heard in the first line, and following that voice where it led. That’s the most honest truth behind its composition, and lies at the heart of why I write anything, ever: to make manifest what I didn’t know I was feeling, to discover what I didn’t know I knew.