“My process has always been that I'm writing poems all the time,” says poet Cecily Parks, “and then there comes a moment where I think, huh, I should probably look at that pile of poems I've written and see if there are themes that I can link together or highlight and if placing them in a certain order would draw out something like a conflict, something like an arc, something like a discovery that I've made during the ten years that I've been writing the poems.”
That’s the process that led to Parks’ latest book of poetry, The Seeds, which has just been published by Alice James Books. In the case of The Seeds, the connecting themes started when Parks and her family made a significant life change. “I began this book when I moved to Texas,” she says. “At the time, my twin daughters were 19 months old and everything here was new to us. New also was the fact that we had our own backyard. We'd been living in an apartment before we moved here. So part of learning about where we'd come, where we were, where we're living, was learning about the plants and animals in our neighborhood. And even though I was a new mom and thinking that I should be able to teach my daughters about where we lived, I most identified with their unknowingness, kind of learning alongside them.”
As Parks and her daughters learned about their new home, and the plants and animals they’d be living alongside, she kept writing poems. “This book took me ten years to write, so my daughters are young in the book, but they're 12 years old now,” she says. “But along the way, I think I was always writing poems and still kind of learning what it meant to be a mother, as someone who had just recently moved to Texas and thinking about both of those things in tandem.”
The decade in which she was writing The Seeds included the pandemic lockdown years, and it was during that time that Parks says she knew she was writing not just a series of unrelated poems but a book of poetry. “I think I had a lot of time to think about what I had accumulated so far,” she says. “So maybe 2020 is when I pulled out that pile of poems, but I did feel like there was something missing. I wouldn't have been able to put my finger on it at the time, but I think I needed that sort of intense period of solitude of the pandemic to think about it. I think I was thinking about motherhood really intensely during that time because I was doing a lot of mothering. So it added a new dimension to my feelings about motherhood to be with my kids as intensely as I was during 2020 and into 2021. It was an intensely domestic time for me and I think that's where the focus on all the different aspects of being at home kind of broadened for me. I mean, I think there was a sense that I had been placed into a role that I hadn't necessarily prepared for. It was compounded by the fact that my husband is a family medicine physician and never stopped going to work during that time. So I think it was just a new chapter in my motherhood and very intense, and I think I looked for ways to seek solace in nature or look to nature as a kind of companion or outlet during that time.”
Once she knew she was working on a book, Parks started branching out a bit, writing longer pieces than she usually does. “I think there was a sense that I had some long poems in the works at that point in time, and I had been a little bit nervous about writing a multi-page poem, a really long, almost essayistic poem, but then I decided it might be really nice to have these longer pieces scattered throughout the book, and those longer poems took time for me to write,” she says. “I think one poem in here took me two years to write. I'm a slow writer. But that one in particular was long and involved research. So just giving myself the time to complete some of those longer pieces was, I think, worth it for this book. It made me feel like, yes, this book is representative of a chapter, an emotional chapter of my life. And I think it's stronger for having those longer pieces in it.”
Now that, a decade after she began writing it, The Seeds is complete and has been released into the world, Parks says she hopes it invokes in readers a feeling similar to what she experienced during its writing. “I would hope that people reading this book kind of feel the quality of attention that's possible just in our daily lives,” she says, “a kind of attention that we can use to notice the plants, animals, trees, inanimate objects in our world.”
