What, exactly, is an Executive Producer?
What, exactly, is an Executive Producer?
Slow zoom
out, two women
walking. From
the impossible bottom
the first names and
the back row
man claps
hesitantly,
then too much,
another joins in
out of time. If
every wing flap clapped —
the bench broiling pigeons,
the hummingbird, the loon
low-flying to flatten
the sea, and
not to mention the dragonfly,
more wings than a hospital —
perhaps then we’d know
this occasion to cheer
as common as breathing,
as loud as a life.
I’m going to share another story of process today. I promise I won’t focus on it every week BUT here’s one I’ve been wrestling with intermittently over the last couple of weeks and, frankly, I haven’t gotten a lot of writing in this week.
Recently, a colleague was discussing how as a cheer coach she would suggest her cheerleaders take a class on football to “know when to cheer.” This was then flagged as a uniquely poetic sentiment and a prompt to write a poem about. The prompt officially was: “life is knowing when to cheer.” The poem above suggests that every moment is due for applause, but in the process of arriving there, I came upon some different endings.
Drills
remember
the agreement
no out
bursts no out
standing cinnamon
rolls outlife
knowing
when to cheer
when not
to
onlynevermind
the cacophony
seeping from
the comedy club
in spite of
war and
weep
This was the first poem I wrote from the prompt but didn’t love the tone, no matter how true it felt at the time. D and I had been at a concert and had, earlier in the day, been discussing some contemporary Palestinian poetry in conversation with war and peace. When a song would finish, the decision to cheer felt weighty and impossibly small all at once.
On a lighter note, shoutout to D for teaching me the cheerleader lore around “big cinnamon rolls” and “small cinnamon rolls.” Apparently, it is code for the direction you’re supposed to face your curled-up fists when cheering … she said it once years ago and now lives in my brain rent-free.
This is your captain speaking
Static - still screen -
“beautiful day up here.
Out the right side window
you can see Mt.RainierTahoma
in all of it’s glory.”Children and
the ontomontopeia
of gasping.“It’s ok to cheer.”
Thundering among
clear sky.
This poem also joined the conversation. I love the small moments when the pilot doubles as a tour guide. To capture it, I was briefly jotting down some thoughts on a plane when “it’s ok to cheer” emerged on the page once again.
In my experience, writing poems “about something” frequently falls short. I found more meaning in this exercise when trying to shape the poem more like a question or painting with the brushes of applause.
With Gratitude and probably some typos,
I like the notion of noting birds' wings as a cue for cheering. And the lines "more wings than a hospital" and "the bench broiling pigeons" were quite magical. It seems appropriate that the flapping of wings is a relatively silent act, and the imagery is silent as well - a loon over water. There's something dissonant about clapping as a form of celebration. In Navajo culture, clapping represented sending away something undesirable. "Cheering", I was taught back in 2017, was done by nodding heads in celebration. A common theme of yours is nature and how it aligns and opposes our societal habits, and the practices of indigenous people often influence a lot of thought in your poetry in its opposition to colonialism, so it felt appropriate to mention my (very limited) knowledge of Navajo performances/celebration.