Maura Stanton
October 2006

Maura Stanton’s first book of poetry, Snow On Snow, was selected by Stanley Kunitz for the Yale Series of Younger Poets Award, and published in 1975.   She has also published Cries of Swimmers (Utah 1984), Tales of the Supernatural (Godine 1988), Life Among the Trolls (Carnegie Mellon 1998), and most recently Glacier Wine (Carnegie Mellon 2002). She has published a novel, Molly Companion, and three books of short stories, most recently Cities in the Sea (University of Michigan Press 2003), which won the Michigan Literary Award.  She has been awarded two fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, and her poems have been selected for Best American Poetry in 2003 and 2005.  Her poems have appeared in Ploughshares, Poetry, American Poetry Review, The Paris Review, Tin House, PN Review and many other magazines.  She teaches in the MFA Program at Indiana University in Bloomington.

 
Looking for the Shine

Down in Arkansas, at Murfreesboro’s Crater of Diamonds State Park, you can go into the fields and dig for diamonds.  The most flawless diamond ever found in the United States came from the volcanic mud there.

When I saw an article about this park in a recent issue of Home & Away (July/Aug 2006) I stopped thumbing the pages and began to read.  The advice from Don Mayes, a man who has found 270 diamonds over the last 27 years. was simple and straightforward, and made me think immediately of writing poetry.

“Look for the shine.”

Once I have a bunch of words on a page, a few images, some sounds, a sketchy notion of a subject, I’m in the same position as a diamond hunter.   I have to sift through the piles looking for something that glitters, something that catches my eye and makes my heart beat.

When I spot it, or think I spot it, I’ve just begun.   I’ve got to wash away all the dirt and obscurity until I get down to the solid lump and begin to work on it, cleaning, cutting, and polishing.  I don’t know how many carets it’s going to be until I’m finished, or whether it will be a sparkly blue-white diamond, a pale topaz-brown diamond or a vivid lemon-yellow diamond.  It might crumble into a clod of dirt, or I might end up with something marvelous.

The regular diamond hunters enjoy the hunt for the diamonds as much as they do making a find.  They like the diamonds for their beauty and elegance. There’s a picture of Don Mayes in the article displaying a case of diamonds.  He finds an average of two diamonds a year.

Two diamonds a year!  That’s a comforting number.  I write perhaps 10 to 20 poems a year, depending on length (and depending on a million other factors) so if 2 poems a year turn out to be as hard and elegant and perfect as diamonds, I can allow myself to be happy.

But I won’t find those two diamond-like poems unless I keep on looking for the shine, sifting, washing, weighing, and cutting.  I’ve got to be patient, and when it turns out, as it often does, that the shine in my pan is only an agate or a nugget of fools gold, I’ve got to pull on my mud-stained jeans and go back out there and get to work, just like “Diamond Jim” Archer, another regular diamond hunter who dug in the park every day until he “died on the field with his boots on.”

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