Poetry from Daily Life: When words hint at something out of reach

My guest this week on Poetry from Daily Life is Jo Van Arkel, who lives in Springfield, Missouri. Professor Van Arkel is a Teaching Fellow in Writing, Department of Languages and Literature, at Drury University. She started writing poems and stories when she was a child, inspired by the many books she checked out from her local library. She likes to write both poetry and fiction and is currently at work on a novella in flash about life in the Ozark Mountains. She has a letterpress studio where she makes prints and etchings that sometimes illustrate her words. ~ David L. Harrison

For me, the desire to write came early. It might sound strange, but I fell in love with words — not only their meanings, but the sound of them, the feel of them in my mouth when spoken aloud. I love the way they bump up against one another in a sentence, the gait of language, the way we create rhythms when we talk.

These rhythms are like heartbeats in a sentence. But beyond sound and structure, I’ve always been drawn to the way words can do something even more marvelous: they can catch a moment and hold it still. They can express sorrow. They can tell a story. And sometimes — when we’re lucky — they can reach toward something that can’t be easily explained. The ineffable. Many poems I admire manage this trick: they glimpse what’s just out of reach, then gesture toward it.

The poem below is my attempt to describe what it feels like to write in this way — to sit quietly, listening, trying to catch what just slipped past. It’s written in quick tercets — three-line stanzas that move lightly across the page. The quiet scratch of the nib anticipates an ending where something disappears before we quite know what we saw.

Wordsmiths

They sit on

high stools

in back rooms

only the sound

of nibs on paper

the scent

of inky fingers

for comfort

and Scribble

and Scratch

to catch what’s

already around

the corner of

the next room—

a mouse of

a moment that

just slipped past

without being noticed.

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Learn more about Jo Van Arkel’s writing and art at her website: https://jobethvanarkel.com.