Today, as I write this, is my Pop Pop’s yahrzeit, the anniversary of my maternal grandfather’s death on the Jewish calendar. Before lighting the ritual yahrzeit candle, which burns for a little more than 24 hours, I dug into one of the containers of photographs I brought back to Asheville after my mother, may her memory be for a blessing, moved into an assisted living facility. In one faded, 3 ½ x 3 ½ black and white photo, he’s standing in a robe, knotted at the waist, outside his rowhouse in Northeast Philly. In another, he is gently taking my right hand in his as my Nana holds me, a few months old baby, in her lap.

For decades, while my kids were growing up, I mostly refused to listen to the music of my youth. I wanted to listen to what my kids were listening to—well, at least some of what they were listening to: Vampire Weekend, Dirty Projectors, Hiss Golden Messenger, Bon Iver, Courtney Barnett. I also found some music on my own: Pharaoh’s Daughter, The Sway Machinery. Make it new, someone once said. But in the last couple of weeks, I’ve listened to Jackson Browne’s “For Everyman,” released in 1973, five times. “These days,” sings Browne, “I seem to think a lot / About the things that I forgot to do for you / And all the times I had the chance to.”

These days, I’m not regretting “things I forgot to do” for any “you” in particular. But I am looking back. Not to recover the past, nor to recover from the past. Rather, thanks to “The Road Not (Yet) Taken,” a workshop I’m preparing to teach, I’m looking for a bend in the story I’ve been telling myself and others for decades about my past. When I find that bend, I’m going to take it and see where it leads.

In “The Road Not Taken,” Robert Frost recalls considering two roads that diverged in a wood. He writes,

…sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveler, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth;

Then took the other, as just as fair…

In my workshop, we’ll look at the roads taken in a few poems. We’ll pay close attention to how the poems move from line to line, phrase to phrase, word to word, syllable to syllable, phoneme to phoneme, letter to letter. We’ll linger over a line—or, because we’ll also consider an excerpt from a short story, a sentence—and consider the many different lines (or sentences) that, suggested by some feature of the original, could follow it. Call the move from one line to the next a bend in the road. As I hope we’ll see, the poet or writer chose one road to follow. She could just as easily have chosen another, taking a bend that would lead to… Well, the destination remains to be discovered!

Having made his choice of roads through the woods, Frost writes,

Oh, I kept the first for another day!
Yet knowing how way leads on to way,
I doubted if I should ever come back.

That’s how it may go for those of us who write. We draft and revise, revise and edit, gradually advancing our work until it has arrived at a finished, fully realized poem or story.

Victoria Redel’s “You Called It Paradise,” one of several in her recent collection Paradise that reimagines the Garden of Eden story, is one such fully realized poem:

The gate had a broken latch,
a thin curved deer rib
fastened it shut.

Every day we walked out
to the mossy edge. We were restless.
It is not true that we fled

at the end, or that it was an end.
When we found the gate,
of course, we opened it.

Here Eve, speaking for both herself and Adam, offers a surprising insight into why they left paradise. They were restless! Restlessness: that condition, too, is part of God’s creation. How does “You Called It Paradise” bend? To address this question, I invite you to imagine how one phrase might give rise to another, and how these phrases, the movement from one to the other, might lead to the poem’s original insight.

Let’s say you had written the phrase “broken latch,” an adjective and a noun. You might choose to repeat the pattern but bend it a little in the next line like this, “thin curved deer rib,” three adjectives (“deer” is a noun acting as an adjective) and a noun. “Thin curved” not only adds specificity to the generic image “deer rib,” it also expresses a bit of restlessness. Would the poet not have arrived at the characterization of the speakers, Eve and Adam, as restless if she had kept this phrase simple, spare? I don’t know. Might she have characterized Eve and Adam as “curious,” a more conventional way of representing them? “Restless” is the key insight in the poem. “Thin curved deer rib,” itself a kind of bending of “broken latch,” could also be seen as the gate through which the speaker moves toward such a rich insight.

To be clear, I don’t have a clue what Redel’s process is, not for this poem nor for her other work, poetry and prose. However, not long ago I engaged in a rich conversation with Redel about Paradise as part of a book club hosted by Yetzirah: A Hearth for Jewish Poetry. (You can watch a recording of the conversation and reading on Yetzirah’s website.)

I aspire to write fully realized poems. I also aspire to live a fully realized life. So, I’m looking back now at stories I’ve told myself and others for as long as I can remember. Stories I thought I’d finished. Here’s one. You’ve probably heard me tell it before. I never met my biological father. He and my mother divorced a few months before my first birthday. I was born with some serious health issues requiring medical care. William Rosenblum, my biological father, was a Christian Scientist. He wanted my mother to leave my fate in God’s hands. My mother refused. She made sure I received the medical care I needed to survive.  Before I could say the word “dada,” I had no “dada” in my life. Before I knew the word “abandonment,” the experience of abandonment entered my life, transmitted in part, I’m sure, by my mother, a divorced, single mother in 1953.  That’s a core story I’ve lived with most of my life. It manifests in many ways, including a nearly incapacitating fear of not being good/smart/talented/healthy enough to deserve love.

Because I hadn’t even turned one when my biological father left, I can’t zoom in on the apartment door through which he departed. But, thanks to my thinking about the roads taken as well as roads not yet taken in poems, I now see the gate, the bend not yet taken in the story I’ve been telling. William Rosenblum gave me a gift. He left to make room for my mother’s second husband, Alvin Chess, a man who loved, supported, and encouraged me throughout his life. My mother gave me a gift, too. She was courageous, brave enough to take a road not taken by many women at the time. Thinking about her gift to me now, I’m hopeful that I will no longer be driven by a need to please others, lest I risk being rejected, abandoned by them. It’s time for me—in my life and work–—to take the road I didn’t even see was there until today.

Richard Chess has published four books of poetry, the most recent of which is Love Nailed to the Doorpost. Professor emeritus from UNC Asheville, where he directed the Center for Jewish Studies for 30 years, Chess serves on the boards of Yetzirah: A Hearth for Jewish Poetry and Black Mountain College Museum + Arts Center, where he co-directs its Faith in Arts project. You can find him at www.richardchess.com .