Eratosphere - Navy Housing

I was really impressed with the diversity of responses to "Navy Housing" and had not expected that my sonnet would provoke such strong reactions. As many of you may have guessed, "Navy Housing" was written as part of my poetry collection Stateside, a book that explores my experiece of being "married to the military." The collection is comprised mostly of formal poetry (sonnets, blank verse, rhymed couplets, a triolet, some nonce forms) with a little bit of free verse thrown in for good measure.

Having never lived in surbubia, I was quite surprised when some readers interpreted the poem as a snapshot of a prefab community like Levittown. For me, this poem is absolute Navy: my six months in, Covington Cove, a small military housing development in Middletown, RI. My poems aren't usually this true to real life. But, in the case of "Navy Housing," the descriptions of the scene--the houses, the trees and bushes, the garden gnomes--are all just as I saw them. In writing about a place whose aesthetic was so antithetical to mine, I tried to keep my language as unadorned as possible and the meter as unobtrusive as I could manage.

It doesn't surprise me, however, that a lot of people said the dog walks away with the poem; when I was working on Stateside, my wheatern terrier Argos snuck into several of my poems, turned around three times, sat down, and wouldn't budge, not even when I tried to revise him out of the text.

For me, this is a sad poem, but one in which in the speaker tries to be sassy about what she feels: lost, whitewashed, and on the verge of drowning. The hardest part of drafting "Navy Housing" was finding the right tone, a voice both insider and outsider, both confused and completely certain about her place in the world.