A Lapful of soft resilience

Poems about making, unmaking, and remaking

Photo by the author (with thanks to M. Graham for technical help). Knittings-in-progress by the author as well.

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I learned to knit as a kid, then lost track of it for decades. I’m so grateful it found me again — for many reasons, one being that knitting makes me a better poet.

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WHY THE POET PREFERS TO KNIT                                 2013


Because yarn loops to yarn
more easily than word to word,
one strand’s fibers friendly to the next.

Because wool and the click of needles
bind sense to experience between your hands
in ways words only describe.

Because the result
is sure to keep someone warm,
and if there is no result,

if everything accidentally or on purpose 
unravels, well, instead of tense lines
rubbed thin, frayed to tangles

on the page, you have with a tug
a lapful of soft resilience, happy 
to be wound and looped again.

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UNKNITTING, EDITING                                                               2024


Stitch by stitch shifting slowly backwards, this needle-tip to that — 
words sharpen, a sentence disentangles and grows taut —
when a mistake is new, is easy still to fix,
lets you feel smart for having caught it.

An inch or more tugged free, each stitch to be caught up again —
chapters, stanzas, paragraphs erased, notes raw in the margins —
when it was shaping wrong, when you decide offhand
to add new colors or more texture, because you can.

Every stitch undone, the yarn reskeined, the needles bare —
a slash across the page, notebook slammed shut, the draft deleted — 
when your choices are, Start over or Start new.
Or, Not. Not is a choice. But not for long.

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If you spend any length of time knitting, you get used to taking things apart — hours’ worth of work, sometimes — and starting over. It can be frustrating, sure, but mostly it’s information: okay, that’s not working, go back and try it another way. It’s hardly ever an existential crisis about whether you’re Really A Knitter; it’s just, aha, there’s where I got distracted and lost track of the pattern, or, h’m, this would work better on needles that are two sizes bigger. So you sigh, and slide the yarn off the sticks, and start tugging. All part of the process.

Imagine my surprise when I found the same undramatic patience creeping into my approach to writing poems, and especially to editing them. How’s the texture — do you need to tighten that line, or loosen it? Should those words repeat somewhere, to complete the pattern you’re making? Remember the way you shaped the lines in that other poem, maybe something similar would work here. Stops and step-backs and start-overs, not as signs of incompetence but as information, steps and stages in craft.

And yes, I regularly get exasperated with my knitting and overwhelmed by my poetry, and vice versa. The yarn itself, though, the lines themselves, are so patient. Always ready to start over.