In Their Own Words
Anna Zumbahlen on “Vignette”
Vignette
Designating the season imposes a timeline. For reproducing
weathering, or weather. Vision in the deep freeze.
How things thread together: a domestic scene, wide open.
Last night the room was scenic. Then in the hour between
sleep and waking, an invented snow. A countable
bit of rain, she wrote from California. I held a narrative
throughline, or an image next to a question.
Then three types of taking as consequences of silence.
Cold, a dry flurry. Kettle spitting on the hotplate.
I hadn’t even read the text in full—only drawn
conclusions from paragraphs, particular paragraphs. Sun,
ice, juice. A swimmy feeling in my head.
That a scene has transpired, but an uneasy sense of surety.
Ob-scene, in the sense that something’s bent.
Reprinted from Surety (Inlandia Books, 2026) with the permission of the author.
Last week, I gave myself my favorite treat: I bought a book from Skylight and then took it to the neighboring restaurant to read with a glass of wine. The Moomins and the Great Flood was facing outward on a staff picks display, and I chose it for its colorful cover. Its title implies disaster, but the way I knew the Moomins to be tender with one another made me think the book might be a balm.
Reading it reminded me that I had read Comet in Moominland while writing Surety. I was influenced by its sense of precarity, by its intimate movement through and within landscape, by the mechanics of its understanding of the way things thread together. What I admire most about Tove Jansson is her mode of admiring the world. Her characters and the prose itself will observe things a certain way, and then that way becomes reality. I think of her as a situational romantic, a person who was receptive and attentive but also self-sufficient and self-realizing. In a letter to a dear friend, she wrote, “He’s never told me he’s fond of me – and I’m sorry about that. But the important thing is what I myself am capable of feeling.”
The events and relationships gathered in Surety happened ten years ago in northwestern Iowa, but this poem was written in 2021 in Colorado. I began this poem in my usual way, with language overheard or addressed to me, which I’ll place next to an immediate seasonal impression and shape until something catches. With proximity, correspondences between people, places, and textures cohere around borrowed language.
The form of this “Vignette” is a holdover from an earlier process. In grad school, I was preoccupied with thinking and feeling, the why of the feeling and the directional how of the thinking, and how these things conspire to generate one of many possible narratives about experience. I was less interested in form in the prosodic sense. I liked a space I could situate within the larger space of the Word document, a room with squeezed margins and a particular font and spacing, which I could fill with language and shape within boundaries but without a defined border. I thought of them as windowpane sonnets, with language clustered around feeling and its volta, fitted to fourteen lines. Still with an attention to musicality, though not necessarily to measuring.
Making this poem fixed a version of the afternoon of its writing in my memory. Vignetted it. Tonally, it matches the fictive narrative of Surety, but when I was writing it, I wasn’t sure it would. It's about a letter I received in a Colorado January, and about a conference paper about Proust that I was failing to write, and about when the light changes, which you understand as the weather changing, but then you wake all the way up and there isn’t any snow. Something has shifted but you can’t articulate exactly what, and taking is not talking, and silence is silence, but bent.
