The Plum-Stone Game

Kathleen Jesme

An extended bio from the author

 

For the ten years before I began my MFA, I raised German Roller Canaries. Rollers are bred exclusively for their song, a soft, exotic combination of sounds that have special names like knorre, hollow roll, water roll, schockel, glücke. The names are onomatopoeic. These birds are the most musical creatures I have ever heard—I fell in love with their song.

I had received my B.A. in English Literature from the University of Minnesota and then gone into a career as a designer and writer in the budding industry of computer-based learning. There was no music in it, but it was, and is, good work. Still, poetry continued to press its case. I left the birds behind and got my MFA from Warren Wilson College. You can raise canaries or write poems, I found: both require a dedication and concentration that omit much else from possibility.

I like to think of myself as a keen observer of the natural world. I live in a log house with many windows overlooking five acres of rolling hills and trees. The hills have been here since the last ice age. The trees we planted about 18 years ago. They are now 30 feet tall, but still pliant in the wind. The birds come and go with the seasons. None of them sounds like a German Roller Canary, but they are sweet singers, all the same. My work will always contain at its core a seed of the natural world, which my father introduced me to as a child growing up on Lake of the Woods in northern Minnesota.

I love poetry with music in it. Also poetry that speaks to the silences and liminal spaces at the edges of human experience. First and foremost, Dickinson. Then Hopkins, C.D. Wright, Rae Armantrout, Louise Glück (part German Roller Canary, perhaps?), Anne Carson, Roethke, Bishop—now I have named too many, so must leave out too many more.