KITH: A REMOTE POETIC

By Emma Aylor

I spent my childhood on a farm below the mountains in Bedford County, Virginia, and now I live in Nacogdoches, Texas, a small city “behind the Pine Curtain” of East Texas, as they say. I’ve lived in bigger cities, but it never took. Rurality seems like a precondition for my writing (as it is for my version of a good life), but it’s possible it’s just what I’m used to.

I often talk with a friend about the ways our upbringings shaped what we notice and how we put ourselves in the world. She grew up in Waco, so to place herself, she looks for I-35. I grew up orienting around the Blue Ridge Mountains to my west—behind which the sun set, on which my childhood bedroom window opened.

My poems tend to scan around them for sensory experience. I hope for each of them—through syntax and emplacing detail—to give the reader a full suite of senses, especially proprioception. I want them to know where they stand in the place I was: where the sun is, what’s in front of their face, what’s in their hands, what they smell, what’s behind their back.

I realize I conflate rurality with some level of wilderness rather easily. It’s not that I think this is what rurality is for everyone, but this is what it is for me, and what makes it good for me: the ability to get somewhere mostly without people in, say, 0–20 minutes, and to do that every day. My poems, too, are informed by an apparently durable obsession with remote place and land. I write them not to overshadow or organize the places but instead to be members of each ecosystem—the poems’ pattern of sound, for example, a gesture much like a live oak’s sweep or the song of a white-winged dove: organic, embodied, fitting for their home places. My aim for poetic technique is to make a place to dwell in an experience, then invite others in.

Rurality is animal chance, to be affected by forces beyond the human, accept them, and adapt. Sometimes this is as simple as being at the mercy of weather, watching the west for a storm you sense coming. Unlike city living, where my center of awareness is the city itself, a rural place diffuses that awareness. I find this quality of being relaxing and creative. Such attention asks a rhythm and attunement different for each place; adapting to it is a pleasure.

I’ve always liked one of the more obsolete senses of kith, branching from the Old English cunnan, to know, and as a result encompassing many of the things we know most rootedly: our kinfolk, our custom, and—in my favorite definition—our home place, a meaning that fell out of common use some five hundred years ago. This originally implied nativity, but though I love the place I was born, I’m not interested in restricting knowledge there. I like to think of several places I’ve chosen to know well, and allowed to let change me, as kith. As in relationships with people, even the places I know best can surprise me. But I come back, over and over, and choose them. This feels especially powerful with a rural place. I’m not here for the amenities, I could joke. And often I’m accepting some forms of lack: access, money, networks. But I choose my rural places—I choose to know them—and I can feel the effects of that commitment, discipline, and love in the work I make there.

I write this from a remote artist residency at the Montello Foundation in northeastern Nevada, down twenty miles of dirt road, among rangeland. My job here is to write and rest, but given the setting, it’s also to watch the wind and weather, tend the woodstove now that a cold storm has blown in, tend myself. My neighbors are cattle, sagebrush, pygmy rabbits, lazuli buntings, sage sparrows and thrashers, sulphur buckwheat, juniper, a few anonymous hills, Ninemile Mountain, desert firedot lichen pasted on roots and stones, the waxing moon, the coyotes I haven’t seen but hear most evenings, my own fear. I haven’t spoken aloud to another person in over a week, though once I heard a cowhand a mile or two off yelling to his herd. For the first time since I was a kid on the farm, I’ve been sure I can go out in daylight from the place I’m living and be seen by no one—so it’s my first time as a woman, at thirty-five. I’ve missed it all that time.

Rurality isn’t only this sense of privacy—in Nacogdoches, for example, it’s very much not (I’m remembering my dad’s delight when I took him around town and ran into someone I knew at every stop). But I am never anonymous in a way that implies not mattering, as I felt in cities. I am either in a remote place, around no one, and thus known to and responsible for myself and the species around me, or I am in my rural city, in contact with the same people every day and responsible for them, too. Either way, I am watched out for, cared for, dutiful toward other beings, and part of the weave, and it turns out—now I’ve left rurality and circled back—I need this feeling as much for my poetry as for my life.

The qualities I find necessary for living in remote and rural places—attentiveness, tolerance for change, willingness to make contact, a sense of place, some measure of self-reliance and self-trust—seem to me identical to those for making good poetry. I’m always telling my creative writing students to practice these skills, though sometimes under names like defamiliarization and negative capability. It took wandering around a few days holding each of those ideas in a hand to realize they answered each other. I don’t mean that you have to live outside the center of things to make poems you love. But I did.

---

Emma Aylor is the author of Close Red Water (2023), winner of the Barrow Street Poetry Book Prize. Her poems have appeared in New England Review, AGNI, Gulf Coast, and elsewhere. She lives in Nacogdoches, Texas, where she teaches poetry at Stephen F. Austin State University.