Prompt: Guidebooks

A field guide is a book designed to help the reader identify wildlife (flora or fauna) or other objects of natural occurrence (e.g. rocks and minerals). It is generally designed to be brought into the "field" or local area where such objects exist to help distinguish between similar objects.

My first field guide was a Boy Scouts' Handbook which was a guide to many things from camping skills, to survival in the wild and survival as a proper young man.

I bought a new book of poetry in 1989 by Robert Hass titled Field Guide. It is full of things about nature and the world that surrounded him in the California landscape.

A person can also be a field guide if they have the knowledge of a field guide book and are willing to take others out in the field or through a field of study.

There of plenty of guides to insects, mammals, trees, birds, fossils, and other things. There are also reader's guides to novels and poetry. How about a guide to metaphysical poets or surrealism? Or a guide to Wallace Stevens' poem "The Emperor of Ice Cream."

Howard Nemerov has a poem titled "Beginner's Guide" which is a broad kind of guide to guides.

They stand in the corner, on a shadowy shelf,
Field Books of This, Beginner's Guide to That,
Remainders of an abdicated self
That wanted knowledge of no matter what...

Our model poem for this month is "Survival Guide" by Joy Ladin.

No matter how old you are,
it helps to be young
when you’re coming to life,
to be unfinished, a mysterious statement,
a journey from star to star...

When you think about it, you realize that almost all guides - field or otherwise - are survival guides.

I read Ladin's poem and then looking for more poems and some bio notes, I found this essay where Ladin writes:

"I am not not me. When I lived as a man, I was not me. My 'I'–the leafless tree of my public pronoun–referred to a man I knew I wasn’t. Since I stopped living as a man, my 'I' refers to me, myself as I know myself to be."

I reread her poem thinking about what advice on survival is being given. For example, "Learn to love / the awkward silence you are going to be” and “Turn yourself into / the real you / you can only discover by being other”?

For those who are newly dead and don't know
 it or refuse to accept it - a Beetlejuice edition

For our September issue, we call for submissions of poems that are a kind of guidebook. We suggest that you might want to title your poem with a guide's title. A few other guidebook poems with intriguing titles include "Guidebooks for the Dead" by Cynthia Cruz, and "Guide to Avian Architecture" by Megan Snyder-Camp.

  

 

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