“Finding Another Way Into the Experience” by Susan Okie (poetry ’14)

This essay appeared on the blog of Little Patuxent Review

I’ve written three poems based on the memory of a single evening during the years when my family lived in western Kenya. Each is different.

The first version, “The Rainy Season Begins in Western Kenya,” captured what I saw that day when the sky opened and the hot, punishing dry season ended, but not the feeling of what happened. The third poem, “The Rains Begin in Western Kenya,” which appears in this issue of Little Patuxent Review, exposes the emotional currents beneath my response to the thunder, the cloudburst, the sudden appearance of giant toads sitting open-mouthed in our yard.

The middle poem was the midwife. It moved my mind away from familiar vocabulary and habits of style, forced me to focus on word choice, grammar, line length. Its title is La saison des pluies commence au Kenya. Since I’d never written a poem in another language, I had low expectations, but the new draft, in French, surprised me: it got a stuck poem where it needed to go.

Read the rest of the essay here: https://littlepatuxentreview.org/2020/03/04/concerning-craft-susan-oakie/