Visiting with Nancy Pearson

by Claire Guyton, Art + Life Editor

What inspired your poems “Blackwater” and “Opening Day”?

Passenger Pigeon, Plate 62 Birds of America

Both poems were inspired by Audubon’s drawings and notes. In Birds of America, Audubon writes of the now extinct Passenger Pigeon, “The air was literally filled with Pigeons; the light of noon-day was obscured as by an eclipse, the dung fell in spots, not unlike melting flakes of snow; and the continued buzz of wings had a tendency to lull my senses to repose.” This felt like something inside us. And then you have Audubon’s description of the mass-scale extinction of these birds. It’s haunting. “Blackwater” was also inspired by my cousin, who is currently a guard in Iraq. The poem isn’t about him personally, although it speaks for many people I know.

Tell us about your writing process—either generally or specifically with regard to the birth and development of these poems.

When I wrote “Opening Day,” I began playing with a single image, the Passenger Pigeon migration. I imagined the sky as a great, big “slurry” of birds and this eventually led me to think about processed meat and war and absent fathers and what happens to the soul when there’s both. All of this came slowly. “Blackwater” began as a poem about the first settlers on Cape Cod. I wrote both poems during a very cold spell here on the Cape. The marsh was brittle and gorgeous. I was trying to picture Corn Hill before the Pilgrims took the Native Americans’ stash of corn. The first drafts of “Blackwater” were about past wars. Perhaps I could have connected the wars.

My poems are built from scraps, from words or lines cut and pasted from older poems and notes. I arrange and re-arrange these lines like puzzle pieces. I think I find my voice (or the glue) much later. Sometimes I put the poem together while I’m running. I sing it.

Do you remember when you decided you wanted to be a poet?

I decided I wanted to be a poet the first time I saw the television show The Waltons. I wanted to write like John-Boy, to be able to describe the autumn leaves the way he did in the voice-over at the end of the show. I watched a lot of TV growing up.

What’s the best title you didn’t use?

The best title I didn’t use was the title of an untitled memoir I’ll never publish.

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Kitwana May 30, 2010 at 11:30 pm

I have an ancestor named Nancy Pearson and we have family reunions regularly and our family is from the Carolina’s. I wonder where is Nancy’s family from?

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