Tuesday, January 28, 2014

I spent much of yesterday working on a poem about the 1889 Johnstown Flood; and though I came into this project hoping that I could incorporate the "young Chaucerian professor" voice that we were talking about a few days ago, I ended up being unable to find my way into a poem through that angle. Instead, my opening was a contemporaneous recollection that appears on NOAA's Historical Weather Service site. The site quotes only bits and pieces; and I have no idea whether this writer, Willis Fletcher Johnson, was a survivor or a reporter or an outsider involved in the rescue effort or none of the above. But he published his account during the year of the flood, and his word choice and syntax caught my ear.

The poem, of course, follows its own course. Not much of the real Willis Fletcher Johnson remains, though his biblical cadence and imagery became increasingly important as I reworked the drafts. And that process was tiring. The Johnstown Flood is not a cozy subject to revive, relive, or rewrite.
A dark day, and a day of storm,
and amidst the darkness
the angel of death spreads his wings over the valley.
I don't often feel comfortable using a phrase such as "the angel of death"; but that was the image that Willis Fletcher Johnson chose to evoke, and I think it was the right one. It's a prim, ministerial sort of cliche; it's a terrifying metaphor for earthly chaos and human helplessness. So the angel of death spread his wings and flew into my poem, and he was difficult and demanding company.

You may not be surprised to hear that I also found myself required to reread Milton's evocation of the battle between Satan's fallen angels and God's faithful angels.

It was a hard day.

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