Sheryl St. Germain

Essays

Prelude

     I was born in New Orleans and spent most of my childhood in Kenner, a city that is almost a suburb of New Orleans. We lived about a quarter mile from Lake Pontchartrain, the shallow urban estuary that, along with the Mississippi, links and dominates the landscapes of both cities. I used to walk to the lake frequently as a child because it was so close by, and it is that body of water that first helped shaped my voice and character in ways I could have hardly guessed then. I remember its surface always looking oily and black, as if the bile of some huge beast had been let loose into it. Though the Lake is much cleaner these days, when I was growing up it was always polluted. Gray foam mouthed the shore. Fish floated, belly-up, along the banks. If you swam in the lake, its oily, decaying smell became yours, and you were sure to be sick sometime later in the week from the swim-perhaps just an earache or sore throat, maybe an eye infection, but always some consequence for having dipped your body into its waters.

     I didn't dislike the Lake or avoid it because it was polluted. I grew to feel as close to it as I was to my family. I didn't hate my father because he was alcoholic; neither would I abandon the Lake, poisoned as it might be. We swam in it, skied on it, fished in it, got sick from it, and drank our first alcohol on its shores. I spent many summers as a child on its levees where I could look out on the large expanse of its black body. Sometimes I'd bring a book to read, and was comforted by the lake's brooding presence as I explored all manner of questions in the poems and novels I read lying near it. Sometimes I brought a pen and wrote my own stumbling poems, and sometimes, bookless and penless, I stared into its waters and found a blacker version of my own face staring back. Other times, when winds whipped the face of the lake into a frothing monster I saw in its disturbed surface a reflection of the rage I felt when hurricanes twice ravished our house.

     I remember being astonished at what still could live in that lake: crabs and catfish, for example, scavengers who fed on decaying and putrid flesh, scavengers whose own meat was paradoxically so sweet. I wondered how they were able to transform the shit of the lake into such exquisite nourishment, and I remember the moment it occurred to me that perhaps I needed to learn this transforming act.

     My first poems, bad as they were, were all poems of transformation that searched for insight and epiphany. I was scavenging, like the crabs and catfish, but my meat took the shape of poems. I learned to search for ways to honor even the dirt, to transform it into something nourishing. And I came to understand failures of writing as failures of transformation.

     Years later, after writing a couple of books of poems and struggling with my first job teaching writing, I realized that not all writers care as much as I about transforming experience into insight or epiphany. In fact, for many, it was love of language, rhythmic expression, music, or the desire to express an idea or feeling lyrically that drew them to poetry. I loved language and music too, but for me the poem always failed if some alchemy had not been performed. If shit had not been transformed to gold in some way the poem was not as interesting to me, though I might be drawn to its language or cadence, or admire its form or the weave of whatever linguistic tension might be at its core.