Poet Johnanna Emeney: how saving an eel becomes poetry

Johanna Emeney. Photo / Supplied

Johanna Emeney describes the process of writing one of the poems from her new collection, Felt

POEM

On Charity

Some creatures are a pleasure to save.

A small rabbit, delivered back to grass

after the cat's unsubtle inquisition;

a finch, stunned by the trickery of glass,

recuperating in a punctured shoebox

lined with an old tea towel and some straw.

These dolls of nature soon reanimate

after easy human kindnesses.

Not so the eel. She hangs on in this drought,

a survivor from dinosaur days,

buries herself in the last mud of the pond,

her thick body matt-grey with dehydration.

She never has relied on the kindness

of strangers who balk at her dark swiftness

and mourn the disappearance

of ducklings, one by one, each spring.

No — mercy is for the silken,

the prepossessing. One must not rise again,

muscled and supple, with the first rain.

Such resurrection invites suspicion. Yet, still,

she slows her breathing and awaits the circles

of disturbance on the pond's untroubled surface

that will see her return to this world on her own.

PROCESS

First, something happens to catalyse a poem: it was summertime and our big pond had dried up. In among the mud and debris was a large, still eel. She looked desiccated and weak. As someone who is frightened of eels, but innately an animal lover, I knew I had to find a way to transport her to our smaller pond, which was still at a good level.

My husband and I tried using a plastic rake to manoeuvre her into a bucket. She popped back out, mercurial and vexed. We attempted to net her. Again, the saying "as slippery as an eel" was enacted before us.

After multiple slapstick attempts that were probably depleting her further, I made the decision to "simply" pick her up and do a 100m dash. I shouted bad words as I ran. She was ghastly to touch. There was still a rippling power to her that scared me.

But we made it and as soon as I released her she swelled with renewed vigour and thrashed her way around the new environment.

Now, that was not the time to write a poem about her majesty and my heroism. The resulting poem would have been awful. I had to wait for an idea, an image, or a set of words to collide with my experience. It's like making fire, writing poetry; you need two things to rub together to start it going.

A few months later, something came along to help strike the sparks. I was looking at photographs of the controversial bronze sculpture by Timothy Schmalz, Homeless Jesus. Now in locations all around the world, the life-sized piece is a figure shrouded in a blanket, lying on a park bench in a huddled position, as if seeking warmth. Its head is covered by the blanket in the manner of a hood.

If you were to take a seat on the free end of the bench and examine the figure's feet — the only parts of the body that are visible — you would see a great hole in each, running through the intermetatarsal space, corresponding with where they would have been put atop one another and against the stipes of the cross.

The eel and the sculpture together started me thinking about how we tend to like our charitable acts to be simple and pretty, and conversely, how difficult it is to be confronted with the cold hard facts of suffering. Art is where we can examine these ideas. Art allows us to be challenged by problematic ideas in a safe space.

I started my poem with the easy things we are used to helping, often as children — the "dolls of nature" that we don't even have to think about saving, and then I went on to introduce the eel in the second stanza, like a shock. I tried to include the negative things about the eel, like her ugliness and the unpleasantness of her actions as judged by a human who perhaps doesn't contemplate her drive for survival while observing her pick off straggling ducklings.

Finally, I tried to inflect the final stanza with the eel's own "voice". I wanted to show the eel's cognisance of her own loathsomeness and her resignation to self-reliance. I also wanted the last lines to sound triumphant, as though she knows that the rain will certainly come and allow her to continue — and, ultimately, to make her final epic journey. There is a Christ-like quality to the eel here, as she will "rise again" — not on account of any heavenly help but entirely on her own. I desired her to remain very much her own being: self-sufficient, powerful, "a survivor" — and, of course, female.

Felt
by Johnanna Emeney
(Massey University Press, $25)