Poem of the Week: “How to Write About Sand” by Jessica Wiseman Lawrence
For this installment, I’m going to highlight a poem that was published just last week in Jersey Devil Press: “How to Write About Sand” by Jessica Wiseman Lawrence. As the title suggests, the poem is concerned with how one might convey an experience through poetry.
“How to Write About Sand” is structured into five couplets. The first two couplets present ways of talking about sand that the speaker rejects, while the last three couplets present options that the speaker finds more compelling. The speaker does not state explicitly, however, what distinguishes the one group from the other, or why that distinction matters. Finding that out is an exercise left to reader.
So let’s run through that exercise, shall we?
The ways of talking about sand mentioned in the first two couplets are all clichés. Sand is routinely connected to “time,” “sunsets,” and “sinking” (lines 1-3). These are connections that are made so often that they don’t impart any strong emotions onto the reader. They aren’t striking visuals or witty turns of phrase; they’re just overly-repeated words. If the speaker wants to use sand to convey an emotional message, such commonplace tropes will not serve her purpose.
How then should one write about sand? I see two threads running through those last three couplets. The first is an emphasis on sand as a tactile substance: it is “in her hair, on her scalp” (line 5). In fact, the poem keeps returning to sand’s relationship to the body, how it gets beneath your nails and past your lips. Getting a feeling from sand almost requires actually feeling it.
The second thread is the notion that sand a substance that refuses to leave. The speaker finds the sand in her nails and bed “a week later,” and she “will never forget the sand in [her] mouth” (lines 7, 9). Sand stays with a person not just physically but also mentally, as memories, as ideas of a past impressions.
So now we have two aspects of sand the speaker wants to draw out: it is tactile, and it is constant. We just need to determine to what end these aspects of sand are employed.
The most likely answer is that the speaker is using sand to express her feelings about a past relationship. For one, relationships tend to both be physical and have lasting emotional impressions. For another, it helps explain the “her” in the third couplet, a figure distinct from the speaker’s “I.”
What are the speaker’s specific feelings regarding this past relationship? Those are harder to pin down–and, given the title, perhaps not necessary to know. However, the final couplet might offer a few clues.
For one thing, sand in the mouth is an unpleasant feeling. It dries your tongue and tastes terrible. From this we can guess the relationship left a bitter impression. For another, after biting on the sand, the speaker “remembers that it is not a fragile thing, at all” (line 10). Biting sand suggests resistance, but sand–the memory of a relationship–does not give way easily. This is a relationship that the speaker wants to move past, but the nature of the relationship will not permit her.
