“On Poem Writing and Bow Hunting” by Alexander Shalom Joseph
Editor’s Note (September 2024): The author has published an addendum to this piece, which can be read here.
Bow hunting has taught me a lot about writing poetry, or maybe it is the other way around, with poetry preparing me to hunt before I even stepped foot out the door. Either way, they complement each other. The struggles of a writer are similar to that of a hunter. The stages of each craft are very much the same: the call to act, the patience, the failure, the reliance on chance and endurance, the eventual love of the process more than the end result, the yearning to return to that space of edgeless presence once it has left you or you it.
In order to bow hunt, like to write poetry, you must venture out into some wild – often alone, often uncomfortably – and wander that wilderness until you come upon an animal or a good line. You walk into the forest like Dante at the start of his Inferno, finding yourself at the midpoint of this mortal life, astray in a gloomy wood, and you have no idea what you will find. Like looking at a blank page, in entering the dark wood, you hope to walk away with something but like the blank page, these gold-lit stretches of trees and ridges give what they will only on their terms and you enter knowing you may walk away with nothing, yet you enter knowing this entering is as important as coming away with something, perhaps even more important.
Maybe it is simply happenstance when you run across something, whether it is in the forest of your mind or of this earth. Maybe it is a miracle. Maybe it is a gift from a higher power. Maybe there is no reason to anything at all. After years of trying to both write poetry and bow hunting, I am unsure of what makes a deer pause broadside at 16 yards or a poem pop in my head. I have given up guessing, instead opting for hoping these things will happen to me and trying to put myself in the right positions to do so, and feeling immensely grateful when they do, and a great longing when I am apart from the empty page and the mountainside.
See, like bow hunting, in poetry you can have all the best gear: the paper, the pad, the MacBook, the Masters in Fine Arts. You can have the new compound bow with the multiple sights and the silencer and the finger trigger and the triple-razor, broadheads sharpened till they shine like teeth and cut even deeper. You can scout and you can plot out and you can listen to podcasts and lectures. You can have your little rituals and no scent laundry detergent and you can say a prayer to the sagebrush and the pink, spilling dawn, but there is still no guarantee of anything. The only guarantee is that nothing will happen if you do not go. You must go, you must wake and walk and write and wander and then maybe you will find what you’re looking for or a splinter of it big enough to make you keep going back and you must keep going back, despite the rejection letters, the missed shots, the broken arrows, the great successes.
You may get lucky your first time or many times in a row but eventually – or in my case right away – you will find yourself up at pre-dawn in the woods, with nobody else around, with seemingly nothing else living besides pines for miles. You will find yourself in the loudest silence you have ever heard. You will find yourself with a rejection in your email inbox almost every day. There will be no birds. The sun will be coming up without sound like a movie on mute, painting the sky shades which most people would take pictures of or selfies with but which for you brings only the dread of the coming heat of another morning in which you go home empty-handed. And it is in these moments after days of seeing nothing, after countless “we are sorry but this doesn’t fit our press at this time”’s from journals and presses you hoped to be published by, after sweating and walking and aching from carrying the bow up and down these valleys, you will have to dig down in yourself to keep going, like you will years into trying to be a poet after all the rejection, and falsity, and nepotism and isolation, and dissuasion. You will have to find a fire somewhere in you, even if at times it wanes to just a spark, and you will have to use it. Like with a good poem you have to pull something up from the pit of your own being to make it, to get the chance to take a shot that is clean and true, to write a group of words that will make somebody cry.
And worse yet let’s say you encounter a deer like a flash of a good idea in your head, you are not guaranteed to catch it or set it down on the page. Hell, even if you shoot a deer, cleanly, through the liver or the heart or lungs, it may run off never to be found. This has happened to me and it broke my heart. And poem may come to you in the night or at work or in the middle of a fight with your lover and if you don’t have a chance to jot it down, it will be gone even though it was just there and should be able to be found. It has moved through your hands like an arrow through the open air soaring so perfect and lethal and right on but which still disappears into the underbrush never to be found. Like a poem written and perfected but sent out and rejected time and again, taking the shot is not the end of your challenge but the beginning, a piece in the forever collage of days and loves and struggles and fleeting attempts at great art that is existence, that is how hunting, that is poetry, that is living.
Perhaps this is the point of all this: to say it blatantly, poetry and bow hunting are all about failing and learning in time to come to love the failure as much as the success. Both of these disciplines take lifetimes of work to reach even a basic adequacy. These sacred acts, long practiced since before the dawn of industry and history and capitalism and climate change, will remain like our breathing lungs at the core of humanity as long as there are words to write and animals to live amongst and because of.
This is it. This is the path. Through the woods and the blank pages. Despite it all, despite the sweat and just missed shots and piles of rejections on the desk despite the humiliation of reading something it took you six months to write to five people in a near-empty room, we are pulled out of bed, into our boots. We are pulled to put the pen on that page. We are pulled to walk into the thin darkness of words to come or the peach breaking of the day over the edge of the world. There is something bigger than us, something unseen, but felt and heard that calls us out and in. There is something that draws us to the foggy mornings when the clouds rest on the very tips of the peaks and the air bites our faces. There is something that calls us to scribe our troubles in ink, to get back to a connection with the food we eat, to the words we speak into the humid air, to live with intention and care, to catalog the world with all its hurt and it’s beauty in a way only poets can, to walk with death beside you. There is a call and we follow it, and in that following we find a peace and a purpose not felt most anywhere else. This is the call. Go forth into that dim light of potential. Go forth, there is so much wonder to find.
About Alexander Shalom Joseph
He/Him/His
It's said in the Talmud that there are three ways to be a good Jew: study, prayer, and acts of loving kindness – Alexander Shalom Joseph thinks of his writing and work as a teacher as a mix of all three. His published books include the story collection: American Wasteland, published by Owl Canyon Press, and the poetry collection Our Mother the Mountain, published by Middle Creek Press. His novella, The Last of the Light, is forthcoming from Orison Books in Fall of 2023. Alexander has an MFA from The Jack Kerouac School, and an MA in English Education. He works as a carpenter and lives in a cabin in rural Colorado.