How Far You Have Come by Morgan Harper Nichols doesn’t go far enough.
There’s something that attracts us all to writing and art that promises the open road. The literature of travel is as American as rest stops, McDonald’s hamburgers, Coca-Cola, and Jack Kerouac’s On the Road. (It’s no surprise that Nomadland won the Oscar; we love the allure of the highway, its promise of freedom). Morgan Harper Nichols, in How Far You Have Come brings all the anticipation of a family road trip to the opening sections of her book, reminding us that there is a “longstanding literary tradition of looking to the natural world to communicate our emotional and spiritual experiences.” She says she has drawn her inspiration from her childhood family road trips, and in her introduction she explains how the journey has a way of “shaping us and awakening us.” Nichols had me sold and eager to read on.
What followed was somewhat disappointing. Nichols is an Instagram poet. And much of the poetry on offer here is as bland as the empty silos one passes while driving through the prairies of South Dakota. I could play poetry cliché bingo on just the first few poems alone: “memory,” “dreams,” “doubts,” “faithful path,” “head west:” BINGO! Don’t take those words and make a new poem, I dare you.
The thing about all this is that Nichols has some poetic and literary talent. It’s just buried in a book that’s mostly made up of content that is better suited for the ephemeral Instagram post. In a book where the reader isn’t just mindlessly scrolling along, Nichols’s work often falls flat. The reader expects the author to shape the experience, but there is no shape to the experience of reading How Far You Have Come. An hour into her book I felt the same general ennui I feel when I’ve spent too long on Instagram.
I wanted to read Nichols’s line, the “many roads / we do not take” generously. Perhaps it had been influenced by Robert Frost’s “The Road Not Taken?” But the similarities and influence ends there, and I don’t see much else of Frost in this work, so the argument falls apart, like a summer rainstorm on the prairie that looms and then sometimes dissolves with sunshine or tornado.
I found myself relieved when Nichols presented the image of an orange barricade in one poem. It came as a relief, because, for a book that promises the open road, there was so much early navel gazing the speaker might have well as been in line at a Wal-Mart when she wrote the book.
I quietly begged Nichols to give me more orange barricades. She did not.
I don’t quite understand how an “arctic sky” made it into a section on “Georgia,” but perhaps “arctic sky” was meant to be read metaphorically.
All this makes me sad.
I found something of a kindred spirit in Nichols. When I was a child, my family would take elaborate road trips every summer, driving thousands of miles with the National Parks as our destination. In a prose section that arrives abruptly in the book, Nichols writes about the impatient excitement a child feels before the family hits the road, and I found myself nodding along, and remembering driving at night through Jupiter, Florida, the stars so close overhead I imagined our van had indeed blasted through the troposphere and out into outer space. My brother and I convinced our baby brother that we had indeed gone to Jupiter, and he cried.
I remember hikes in the clouds in the Great Smoky Mountains, bears digging through garbage cans at the top of mountains, and the Joyce Kilmer tree, where my dad taught me that poetry was important on a day I only wanted to be in Gatlinburg buying Beanie Babies.
We slept through the prairies and woke up at Dinosaur National Monument—from the 90s to the Jurassic in 24 hours. I got a stomach virus at the Black Canyon of the Gunnison, where I was so sick, I puked over the fence into the canyon below. My memories of Hollywood are hazy. I know I cried hysterically when I finally met Mickey Mouse in Disney Land. My parents should have saved the little money they had and taken us to the beach instead. I remember Old Faithful, and when I returned as an adult years later, I found myself moved to tears to see it still faithfully doing its thing.
Travel can indeed be transformative. My childhood travels left a mark on me that is only clear now, some twenty years and more later. Our parents teach us what to value based on their actions. When my parents maxed out their credit cards every summer to drive me and my brothers to the forest, they were teaching my brothers and me something, something about the importance of the natural world, something about privileging experience above material possessions. We weren’t rich. We were poor, by many standards—my parents often slept in the living room when we were growing up, right next to the dining room table, because we never had enough rooms. But my parents put a value on taking us to see natural places, on taking us on hikes that would push us physically and mentally, on showing us other cultures, and other ways of living, as if to help us understand that there were possibilities beyond our little apartment in Miami, Florida, beyond the mallrat lives of our friends, beyond the movies and television version of America. In those travels, I saw possibilities for myself that only came to fruition years later when I found myself living out of a van, climbing cliffs, surfing waves, doing my thing, unafraid as my parents had been when they’d load up the van with three kids and the last pennies in their bank account.
The best moments in Nichols’s How Far You Have Come are the places where Nichols leaves poetry behind and writes in prose. Nichols finds beauty in watching the scene of the Atlanta Olympics pass by from her car window. Her observations are good: “What a gift it is to be inconvenienced,” she writes, noting that she might not have seen the Olympic torch had her parents not taken the detour. “I almost missed this scene of beauty because I was too busy racing toward the next one.”
I was disappointed when the book shifted back to bad poetry.
***
When I was in high school, I started taking poetry seriously. While reading Nichols, I was reminded me of an old composition notebook of poetry I had kept when I was a teen. I had written in it on one of the last road trips my family took together before I left home for college.
On the trip, I also carried with me one book of poetry, Stephen Dunn’s Different Hours.
I didn’t really know where to start when it came to reading contemporary poetry, and my first thought was to read all the recent Pulitzer Prize-winners—which I still think is a good plan for any contemporary young poet seriously contemplating a career in poetry, or seriously thinking about publishing a poetry book. This is not because I think Pulitzer Prize winners are all inherently good, but because I feel the prize winners can give young poets a feel for the pulse of poetry in America.
I flip through that notebook now. How long ago it was. We drove from Miami, Florida to Roanoke, Virginia. I don’t remember Roanoke, Virginia at all, but I remember sitting in the back seat of the van, writing.
One of the first poems I wrote in that composition book is called “Big Sky.” It goes: “Today we escape the small town / where church steeples point heavenward / thin white antennae probing / for intelligent life up there,/ trying to poke God in the eye.”
It relieves me to see that my early poetic sensibilities were good, if only half-formed.
Here’s another: “Angels are clichés. / Tonight I’ll write about the murderer / who lurks invisible / behind small-town windows.” I revised that poem to death in the dozen composition book pages that follow, but if I could go back to that state of mind, I’d be a better poet today.
I was 17 years old.
If Instagram existed back then, would I have become an Instagram poet? Maybe an Instagram poet for the Goth kids.
Did we make it to Colorado? I ripped out several pages in the notebook. (I still have this tendency. When learning how to paint last year, I ripped out the pages in my sketchbook I didn’t like, too.)
Here’s another: “Last Chance” it goes: “Last Chance, Colorado, / Another American town / where no one denies / the coming of death, like Jesus.”
I could also be political back then. In “Fighting the Killer” I wrote about how Elmo hugged Big Bird on public television so that the kids wouldn’t become high school killers. These were the days after Columbine, when high school shootings were still a new thing. I observed the way civilization encroached upon the natural world: “pavement slices scars into mountain forests.”
Mysteriously, many of these poems have been crossed out with a purple Crayola marker.
On that trip, my dad almost got struck by lightning, giving birth to my lifelong phobia of thunderstorms. I wrote: “Daddy saw God / when the lightning almost hit him, / but like death, we won’t talk about it.” We didn’t talk about it.
***
I return to Nichols’s poetry. I fear many of these poems were written while literally staring at an Atlas. It feels there are more vivid poems of maps than poems of actual places.
She writes: “When you look at the map / and trace your fingers over / hundreds of routes / you will find no finish line” and later “There are over / a hundred million lakes / on this map.”
This is her better stuff. At least there is evidence of a poet recording her world as she sees it, even if she’s only really looking at a map. I wish Nichols did more of this, rather than slipping into the navel gazing vagueness of “you trust that there is a way forward.”
And yet, there are some poems here better than others. A good edit and more prose might have saved How Far You Have Come, and taken it further. The abstract paintings that seem to want to become floral representations serve as backgrounds to gems like: “I will not let / the pulse / of the clock / dictate the / pulse of / my life.”
And her prose has some moments of luminosity: “Nature doesn’t speak in highway signs or sonnets. And I realized I didn’t have to either.” Maybe nature is a better essayist, too. I’m not sure.
Nichols observes that we can go back in time when we cross a state line.
***
I write this essay from Honolulu, Hawai’i. We are always further back in time than everyone else. It’s only four o clock here. Back in New York, it’s ten p.m. It’s seven on the west coast. I open my teen notebook and go back further.
“America at 70 Miles Per Hour: A woman in a Mercedes smokes her last cigarette.”
The vacation ended. We returned home. I wrote a poem called “Cleanliness.”
“My grandmother would scrape away the dirty marks / on her white ceramic tiles / with a plastic cake knife. / An arsenal of medicines, disinfectants, and alcohol-based wildflowers / made her eyes red. / She sacrificed her Sunday service / to listen to me cry.”
***
Youthful poetry is uneven. It needs a mature eye or editor to draw it out. Nichols has some good lines, like “I am learning to trust / light’s song / here in the dust.”
Nichols writes about walking on the shoreline in Alabama in beautiful prose. “I watched all the footprints of where I’d been, knowing that I could walk for miles, and by the time I made it back around to where I’d started, the water would have washed away all memory of me.” The idea is so good, she repeats it again later.
Her minimalist paintings are often quite stunning, especially the early ones in the Mississippi section of her book.
Sadly, Nichols’s How Far You Have Come is another example of a youthful poet pushing out work too quickly, without really taking the time to understand what works, what doesn’t, and why.
Yet, I always found myself relieved when Nichols returned to prose. She is a prose writer at heart. It is in the expansiveness of prose that she does her best work. While driving through Mississippi, Nichols asks her mom when they’ll reach the Mississippi river, and she imagines the children of freed slaves traveling into the night, not knowing when they’ll get there.
There are brief moments when the poetry, pressed close to the stronger prose, vibrates with more life. I wish the poet had spent more time developing this.
The problem with How Far You Have Come is that it doesn’t go far enough. This artist, poet, and writer doesn’t know her own strengths well enough to develop this work sufficiently to make it a fully-formed book. She isn’t able to weed out the weaker cartoony artwork that feels like it was sketched out on Adobe from the transcendently fine art that seems to form half-abstracted cityscapes in pitch black night. This is a poet unable to edit down her poetry to its essence (“think of the Kallima butterfly/ folding her wings to resemble a leaf”). This is a poet unable to differentiate between her Kallima butterflies and the one-off jottings she posts on Instagram. And she’s unable to extend the prose into an interwoven theme. It’s half formed. It’s unfortunate. But maybe the next book will be better.
About the Writer
Janice Greenwood is a writer, surfer, and poet. She holds an M.F.A. in poetry and creative writing from Columbia University.