The Art of Creative Cycling
And other crimes against hegemony
Getting started
There is a mild sprinkling of late afternoon rain, and toward the west I can see darker clouds threatening. So I do what is most tedious for cyclists in winter in Portland: rain pants and a raincoat, wriggling my shoes into waterproof boots. It’s still cold, so gloves and a winter weather band on my head, then I unfold the children’s buggy, lock it onto my bicycle, and I’m off.
I’m convinced on days like this that the hardest part of cycling is the will to put on all the gear. I felt myself falter looking at that sky: it would be easiest just to grab the car keys and drive the three miles to my children’s preschool. For a half a minute that’s just what I plan to do until I tell myself I’ll have more fun on the bike : it’s boring to drive a car in the city, and a waste of gas with the kids so close by. Just pile on the damn gear, James, and get it over with.
Today I’m glad I talked myself out of it. The rain holds off for most of the ride, and although the cold clings onto my shoulders and neck, by the time I cross Woodstock I’m warm enough to unzip my jacket. As my heart and legs do the work pumping me and the buggy swiftly along, I get the endorphin gobsmack, and my mind wanders back to the line I wrote at five o’clock this morning:
Opened up the witch’s oven to see what pies / they made.
Waiting for the prompt
I write poetry. This is how I work to make sense of the world. Since March of 2021 I have been running a personal sonnet series to help me in that response. It’s schedule is grueling: a finished poem every Monday, which most poets will agree is a tough deadline. The perk of that deadline is that I’m always on the lookout of prompts, no matter how silly, and I keep a running tally of the poems in my head, looking out for the real-life symbols that will match up to them.
The night before I had gone to bed with the compound witch’s oven in my head. What this meant for me I hadn’t a clue, just enjoying the sound of it. At five I write that first line, then turn to the sonnet I was currently writing, which was struggling somewhere between lines six and eight, so I had to leave the witch and her oven another morning.
But as I cross Harold, those sounds come back. It’s perfect timing, it seems, because I start to chant “witch’s oven” just as I pass one of the older houses in the neighborhood, a strange house that looks to have begun as a farmhouse and had wings and turrets added throughout the years. The garage is wedged into its side at an uncomfortable angle, and whatever yard there used to be has been taken up by what looks like a sun room that was years later boarded up. It sticks out low into the front yard, the rest of the house (once two stories but now an improbable three) looming over.
A witch once lived here? An old crone with her medicines and potions, working an oven for to bake bread, an oven that was then replaced and replaced and replaced. I think about how spaces change through the years, yet from our daily vantage many things seem immutable. What would a poem be like to try and cram the changes of a century (or two, or three) into the fourteen lines?
Again I’m glad I cycled. It’s not that I couldn’t have had these thoughts while driving, but really I don’t think I could. Not me, at least. When cycling, there’s enough time to let your mind wander, take your grip off the handlebars and just roll by. It gives my mind time to negotiate its ideas in a space where my body is fueling those ideas with dopamine and endorphins. That’s really why I cycle: to find my way over and again back to my writing.
Oh goody goody
I get to my children’s preschool. Picking them up is a lesson in patience, but I’m happy enough to wait them out, load up their backpacks and buckle the children into the buggy. My oldest asks if he can watch an episode of Bluey, a TV show on Disney+, when we get home. Jessica and I have given in to letting an episode happen before dinner, since the episodes are only around 10 minutes long. I say, sure, we’ll watch an episode.
Everett smiles and says, “oh goody.”
Oh goody. The guttural sing-song of it travels with me as I cart those children back in the oncoming dusk. By the time we leave the clouds have made whatever daylight is left disappear, and it’s mostly dark. I pass a house with a beautiful front door : an old number made of dark wood and a oval glass window, a thick pane. The hall light glows out the glass in a bright orange.
Goody was a diminutive of goodwife in Puritan New England. That’s why all the married women in Arthur Miller’s The Crucible are referred to first as Goody. Goody Proctor, Goody Putnam, Goody Nurse. I always got a kick out of thinking of a goodwife whose last name was Goody. Oh goody Goody : like Major Major. And so the second line of the sonnet begins to form.
They made —oh goody Goody
The poem will really start off on line two, in an old Puritan village and play off on old witch-trial tropes. Someone is speaking. But not for long, through the speaking things will shift. A light will glow in the portal of the house.
I’m back to my street again, two more blocks to go. A neighbor moved in recently, to a house that was for a long time vacant. In the first year he’s been here he’s made quite a wonderful garden of his yard. From the light inside his front window I can see his television mounted onto the wall. It is huge. Like, taking up the whole wall huge. I think about the little 12-inch screen we used to watch TV on when I was a kid. Things change.
The porch light glows through the portal, the television / grows against the wall.
Piecing it together
The following week, this is the poem that arrives after that initial first journey. It’s as piecemeal as that strange house, and thunders down through time like bicycle wheels over bad roads, but I like it. The point of it is about change, a lament to change, but the last line is to encourage the idea that an essential part of the world does not seem to change.
The poet Dan Beachy-Quick has written a few insightful essays about poetry, and its purpose in our world. One of them1, “The Nightingale’s Drought, The Nightingale’s Draught”, talks about the metaphorical drought that modern times brings to the world, and the poet’s role in bringing rain. The rain is a symbol, or at best a metaphor, sung out through words, themselves only signs that need to be revived time and again from the drought of content and banality. Each poem written strives to bring rain, and once the magic spell has been recited, the desert dries up again, the next poem begins to form, to bring forth.
Such work for writers! Constantly catching at signs and symbols to bring together water into the Waste Land. It is, of course, personal. That’s why you can watch writers and poets all day long in search of the next song: hiking up to the top of the lookout, they are there with their notebooks, jotting away. They are catching the symbols that had called out to the earlier, and went in search of.
As I write this, it’s looking to be another wet day in Portland. We had just passed through a cold snap where I had to pile on extra clothes and watch out for ice; the return of the rain is more of a relief than anything. Of course, I cannot wait for the days to get longer and the sun to shine a bit more. Still, I’m not a fair-weather cyclist; this isn’t for my health or exercise. I’m cycling for my well-being.
First published in Literary Imaginations, also see Beachy-Quick’s book, Wonderful Investigations : Essays, Meditations, Tales published by Milkweed Editions, 2012.
A lush, gorgeous read.
Very well written insight into a poet's life. Love it. Reminds me of the year I published a poem (on a blog) every single day. It changes how you percieve the world. And how you look at it. More intently and intensely.