[Ella Shively]

Fire Assignment, Happy Camp, California

under the flimsy green Forest Service tent,
we absorb with bland punching bag faces
the town’s complaints and questions,
gratitudes and screaming rants
and tales of close escape in fires past,
and the smoke grows tired
and sinks down on the sun-crisped lawns,
the weathered porches
with their empty rocking chairs,
really settles itself in like a cat
on a pillow somebody wants to sleep on

and every day we explain
how this smoke blew in
from a wilder fire
a hundred miles away.
our fire is a gentleman!
look how carefully he steps
through the underbrush
instead of racing to the canopy.
see how the sprawling manzanitas
wither and curl beneath his fingertips,
the dark, fertile ash
he spreads in his wake?

every evening over our muddy encampment,
the moon rises, red as our eyes
and fat, each night dwindling smaller
and smaller still,
like a clean flame that burns itself out,
leaving only the purest black substrate
in which to reseed the sky



***I'm not planning on publishing this one because I mention a government entity by name, but I am including it in my MFA application manuscript.

[Jim Ramsey]

Hi Ella,

I really like the punching bag metaphor but think you could expand it...

we hold our faces as steady as punching bags when hit by their frustrations...

when some of them hug us it feels like a clinch so they can rest before they have to take the next punch...

they feint with left jabs meant only as questions but we hear the fear...

they talk of old fights with this raging foe, old scars that cut and bleed easy ...

Also, I wonder how the poem might morph if the narrator was a little less emotionally involved. What I think i mean by that is you could try a version with the N as more of a neutral observer of the residents and the details of their plight. i think this has great potential but that it doesn't yet have some of the holding power I've seen in your other pieces posted here so far.
Probably, just your normal revision process will carry it through the fight and hopefully better ideas than mine will come from our more accomplished members. And, good luck with that MFA application. I like the voice I have heard you putting on these boards and I look forward to hearing it grow.

All the best,
Jim

[Ella Shively]

Hi Jim,

Thank you for the suggestions. (And I saw your message with more clarification, that helps!) I know that I don't really want to linger on the reactions from folks in town. I'm not sure I entirely follow your comment about reducing emotional involvement, but I could see taking out/altering the first line of stanza two so it's less about the narrator's exasperation and more about what's actually going on.

Application's due on Friday (already somehow?!), so this is all good stuff to know. Thanks for your help!

Ella

[John Boddie]

Ella -

My reading of this piece is colored by my experience of working with the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation, which manages thirty six fire camps as part of its conservation and training program.

After reading the poem several times, the impression that the second stanza is a poor fit has solidified and I suggest you consider removing it. The idea that an fire might be in some way genteel in the eyes of a forest firefighter seems ridiculous.

Another inconsistency is the muddy camp in a landscape of "sun-crisped" lawns. Consider replacing the mud with a drier surface.

You've chosen a subject that has a high level of tension built in. You need to find a way to use this tension to your advantage.

JB

[James Midgley]

Hi Ella. Nice to meet you.

Does mentioning a government entity preclude a poem from publication?

But anyway. I found the poem convincing in its style and, as I look at it more, fairly convincing in its material too.

A few fairly brief points: consider cutting 'bland', 'screaming', 'really' and 'itself' from S1.

The conceit which begins in S1 and is carried into S2 -- the relative harmlessness of this particular fire, which is developed into the fire's ability to renew as well as destroy, and further (in S3) into (as I take it) a broader decentering of humanity in climate change (life will indeed go on, with or without us) -- is handled well, I think.

That said, I think a different encapsulating conceit would work better than the gentleman fire -- perhaps something, again, animal-like (to match with the smoke of S1)? Or perhaps this fire is some kind of gardener, given his pruning interactions with the flora.

I always feel a little let down when a poem retreats to a pastoral image of moons and skies. That said, it works within the poem's logic fairly well here. One nit here: if mentioning the moon's rotundity, perhaps a beat is needed before its diminishing: 'fat at first, each night dwindling'. But perhaps it's just as good to remove its fatness in favour of its dwindling.

Thanks for the read. Good luck with the MFA application.

[Julie Steiner]

Sorry to be late to comment, but I'm sending good vibes toward your submitted application.

Your government entity comment confused me, too. I would hesitate to invoke the NSA, FBI, or CIA in a poem. But the Forest Service?

Between S2LL4&5, I thought it might be helpful to mention something like "not our innocent backfires," or perhaps to italicize "our" in L5. I was slow to figure out what was happening there.

I loved the "bland punching-bag faces."

[Ella Shively]

Hi all,

My apologies for the delayed response! Thank you for all your comments. I thought I'd address the question of why I don't want to publish this one first. To my knowledge, there's no rule explicitly prohibiting me from publishing poetry that mentions the government. But I try to draw a line between my creative writing and my day job to avoid any suggestion that I'm misrepresenting my employer. That's why I've only shared this one with this private group and the small group of people who will read my MFA application.

My background is in ecology, with some fire work sprinkled in. The goal with this one, loosely, was to show the restorative power of fire. (James, you were right on the money.) I think John and James are right that "gentleman" isn't quite the right word. I'm definitely not going to villainize this fire, but a gentleman implies a lack of flexibility and feels a bit colonialist in retrospect. My first thought was to change "gentleman" to "kind old wizard/out for a stroll," but a Gandalf reference probably wouldn't be the right choice for this particular poem. I like James' suggestion of an animal or gardener.

Julie, I like your idea of italicizing our. And maybe adding some other clarifying details. The memory is so clear inside my own head that it's good to see where the picture gets muddy from an outside perspective.

Thanks again! Hope you're all having a lovely week.

Ella

[David Callin]

Hi Ella. Your smoke in S1 seems to be a close cousin of Eliot's in Prufrock.

I like the image of fire as a gentleman, and the way you go on to characterise him from there, but maybe that's because I don't know fires well (or, perhaps, gentlemen).

I really like S3.

Cheers

David

[Ella Shively]

Thank you, David! I just had an enlightening read of Eliot's Prufrock. I remembered the opening lines, "Let us go then, you and I/When the evening is spread out against the sky/Like a patient etherized upon a table," but the rest was new to me. Wow, he really brings the smoke to life. ("The yellow smoke that rubs its muzzle on the window-panes," yes!) Gorgeous poem. Thanks and happy new years!

Ella

[Bill Dyes]

Ella

Perhap naive on my part, but I quickly trust the voice in this poem. Mainly because it begins with the concerns of the citizens but quickly gains an intimate knonwlege of smoke and flame. Others, I suppose, may distrust the voice for perhaps the same reasons. But the knowledge that allows the narrator to apply such elegance to smoke and flame seems intimate enough and honest enough that I would be assured of my safety.

I especially like how the last stanza is both an aknowledgement of the damage wrought but at the same time a comforting nod to the power of renewal. The moon imagery serves this well. I can find nothing I would trim in any of the stanzas. It was altogether a pleasure to read and reflect on.

Bill