Tanya Adèle Koehnke

Undertow

I am obsessed with swimming pools, which have fascinated me since I was a child. Swimming pools levitate my curiosity, but their deep ends have always terrified me even after I learned to swim. 

Although I have not swum in a swimming pool for many years, I have done a lot of thinking about taking the plunge in the future.

I also love to swim and drown myself in words, a pleasure that I have expressed in “Undertow.” In my poem, I break through the barrier of not being able to swim at present. I reach “new depths” by diving into an alternative swimming pool of language where the deep end is not a place of fear, but a place of self-discovery.

A poster for the 2012 London Olympic Games by British painter and printmaker, Harold Hodgkin, inspired me to write “Undertow.” I purchased “The Swimmer” for a song at an online auction that was held by a church in Toronto earlier this year. I am smitten with the image in the poster, which reveals abstractedly in powerful brushstrokes a swimmer in hues of blue pushing off and undulating in the wavy water. 

When I wrote “Undertow,” I may have been thinking subconsciously about one of my favourite poems, “The Swimmer’s Moment,” by Canadian poet Margaret Avison. I wrote an essay about that profound poem during a Modern Poetry class at university. The aquatic diction and philosophical imagery in “The Swimmer’s Moment” are stunning. That poem forever haunts me.

I wrote “Undertow” in four stanzas of free verse. Each stanza metaphorically pulls me into the deep end of the swimming pool where I “drown… myself on purpose / in words,” not water. 

The second line in the first stanza is intentionally the longest line of my poem. That line creates a visual pun of the length of a swimming pool as seen from the shallow end to the deep end. “… the sudden / drop / of the cement floor” is also seen and felt via my literal dropping and isolation of the word “drop,” which I placed directly below the word “deep” that appears in the phrase “the deep end” above.

I capture the unrelenting undertow of the deep end by employing active verbal phrases—“sucked in / towed under / swallowed whole”—in the second stanza. I cast the alliterative rhyme of “crystalline” and “chlorine” to emphasize the ironic purity of the terrifying “water.”

The third stanza is where I drown in words that are no longer ineffable—words “that (rise) to the surface” and “float… on (my) tongue / in splashes, ripples, and waves,” which create the movement of water.

In the final stanza, “I emerge from the plunge / Drenched in a buoyant alphabet” that spells out the mystery and joy of language that leave me breathless and searching for meaning. There I am re-oriented full-circle back to the first stanza, which allows me “to swim again / to dive into the abyss.”