As we move into the poetry unit, I’d like to open a similar discussion to the one we had when transitioning between the genres of nonfiction and fiction: What are your fears / anxieties / excitements about writing poetry? Please share. What is “poetry”?
Here is Emily Dickinson’s definition of poetry: If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry. In Robert Frost’s beautiful essay “The Figure a Poem Makes,” he writes of the poetic form: It begins in delight and ends in wisdom. For Marianne Moore (see “Poetry”), a poem contains imaginary gardens with real toads in them. What poetry requires: the cultivation of a gift for listening to language before you make language listen to you.
How do we read poems differently or come to poetry differently than we do other genres? Does poetry require a different state of mind / different expectations? What must a poem do to make it a poem?
Look at a prose poem such as Robert Hass’ “A Story about the Body” and consider how it gets categorized as a poem rather than a story? Check out his other poems listed on the syllabus (“On Squaw Peak,” a narrative poem, and “Meditation at Lagunitas,” a lyric poem) to see how one poet experiments across different styles of verse. My hope is that by the end of this unit, you’ll have tried out several poetic forms.
Let’s also use this space to post reading responses for the unit — select poems that especially resonate with you. If you read a poem, or a line in a poem, that you love, please share it, and tell others why they should turn to it too.
Finally, look at Marianne Moore’s original and revised versions of her poem “Poetry”: Poetry (1967) / Poetry (1919) to see the long life a poem can have, its evolution 48 years deep…one’s work is never finished or perfected…
Response to “Po’ Boy Blues” by Langston Hughes
In “Po’ Boy Blues” Langston Hughes creates this unmistakable rhythm; reading it you can almost hear it being spoken by some elderly gentleman huffing and puffing. Well as it turns out- you have. Maybe not these words exactly, but the rhythm in this poem comes from 12 Bar Blues, the way almost every blues song in the history of ever is played. Therefore it feels so eerily familiar. Some hallmarks of the 12 Bar Blues include 6 line stanzas, and repeating the first two lines in them. When I read the poem, I did a double take and grabbed my guitar. I read it aloud over the 12 bar blues melody, and it fit perfectly.
Hughes’ use of the rhyme and rhythm schema of such a culturally ingrained song structure is a really cool way to convey mood and tone in a poem without paying attention to the words.
On “My Brother My Wound” by Natalie Diaz
Natalie Diaz left me awestruck with this poem. It seems so nonsensical at first – as a reader I felt clueless as to what was going on- but it moves and breathes so that each sentence has its own weight, its own meaning, fitting together as a whole even though one could not draw the connections between them. Her images evoke emotion, her language ties to nature, and her words fall profound, though I could not tell you why. When reading this, you feel as though you are a part of something, some myriad of experiences, all hinted to in one piece.
Diaz’s dynamic movement in the piece is incredible. Every sentence feels connected to the one before it, yet wildly new and unexpected at the same time. While some poems are circular, hers shows the power a linear poem can take. It grows and changes, somehow building the impact of its words as it progresses. This poem illustrates that a seemingly nonsense poem can take on form and build its own meaning.
On “Drawing for Absolute Beginners” by Monica Youn
I’m obsessed with the way Youn uses form in this poem. It’s like outlining a hurricane. So often with form, I think, it’s easy to fall into a pattern. Either a pattern in rhythm or in syntax or just the way the lines look on paper. But here, the structure is neither arbitrary or dominant. In #7, bullet points a and b are used as extensions of the topic:
7. Thus, we see that commodification is a function of local necessity.
a. As Angelenos collect percolating shade in shallow pans, to
leach the arsenic out of the light.
b. “And then I buried it.”
“Where, exactly? And when?”
“In the chest. Insertion point at the base of the throat. You
were still asleep.”
“But what is it, exactly? I mean, I can’t figure out its precise
extent. I mean, I can feel it there sometimes, like stitches, or
sometimes like a flanged or branching bone.”
while in #4, points a through c are presented as entries in a dictionary:
4. osculation:
a. The act of kissing. A kiss.
b. Math. A point where two branches of a curve have a common
tangent and extend in both directions of the tangent.
c. To the ankles. Or to the knees. Or just unzipped enough.
I love using repetition and anaphora in my writing, maybe even to the point of fault. But, like this poem displays, there are so many starting points to a great line: verbs, infinitives, quotation marks, made-up words. There’s really no wrong answer, and there are different ways to carry a connection without leaning on a pattern. This poem reminded me to stop worrying so much about making sense and to listen more for what sounds right.
On “so you want to be a writer?” by Charles Bukowski
I read this poem every so often to keep myself in check. It is in all aspects the direct opposite to a call of action, it inspires people not to do something, except for those who are chosen. I think about this poem when I’m sitting in front of my computer staring at words that fade into phrases. I think about this poem when I watch movies and think I could do better. I think about this poem when I listen to music and know when better choices could have been made. I think about this poem when I’ve become too full of myself or too empty. To me, this poem is the great leveler, it takes me from my peaks back down to a safe groundedness and keeps my head above water when I feel like I’m drowning. I think, and have always thought, that everybody can be good at a great many things, but we only have time in our short lives to be great at a very few things, mostly ever one. This poem to me, provides much the same as what college does: it tells me what I want to do by helping me avoid that which I do not want to do. Whenever I find myself in the slog of doing something disinteresting, I think about this and wonder if it’s worth it. Is this my thing? And that is not to say that it has dissuaded me from doing everything, it just helps me reevaluate my choices. I find that when I love something I’ll lose track of time and get sucked into it, much like anyone else would. This poem to me, in its simplicity, helps me guide myself through life. There is a similar sentiment from Martin Scorsese in his Masterclass on filmmaking wherein he says something to the effect of “if you think you want to do it for money or fame or anything else, don’t do it, but if you need to do it, this is the class for you.”
On “Everything’s a Fake” by Fanny Howe
What I find so striking about this poem is the shift in the middle. It seems, for quite some time like the poem is going to be one of place, of describing one’s surroundings in such detail that the reader feels a sense of place, but with the introduction of the woman it seems to be quite the opposite. The opening drew me in with the precision of its description, “coyote scruff” and “palm trees clack” provide beautiful little images of Los Angeles. There is a certainty to the poem that I admire, the way in which the narrator makes use of such deliberate finality in her claims, that the smell of sage and rosemary is followed by “now it’s spring” and that the hills appear impatient. The prose structure of the poem belies any suggestion of the shift that comes partway through when the woman is introduced. There doesn’t appear to be any questions or doubt in this poem, just claims and assertions. And the final sentence, referring the woman’s quest for a “perfect place” followed by the connotation of “infection” and its description of being a disease seems to make this “quest” less holy and virtuous. I’ve also been thinking a lot about the title, “Everything’s a Fake,” which changes the entire tone of the poem. The beautiful idyllic description of the rolling hills and canyons of L.A. seem to be a facade, withholding their true nature. I just truly appreciate how this poem’s apparent simplicity opens the door to so much exploration.
On “Lying in a Hammock at William Duffy’s Farm in Pine Island, Minnesota” by James Wright:
I really enjoyed reading this poem because I find that a lot of the poems I write are about nature and I love reading poems about nature. The first image Wright introduces is a bronze butterfly (consonance) asleep on a trunk. He also talks about cowbells and last year’s horses and a chicken hawk. The only mentions of “I” in the poem are: “I see a bronze butterfly”, “I lean back”, and the last line “I have wasted my life.” I think Wright chooses to do this so that the poem is not only focused on him, but also on the other animals he observes. The last line surprised me and made me think why the narrator thinks he/she has wasted their life. It appears that the butterfly (that is asleep) and the hawk (that is looking for home) are not doing anything especially active. The narrator also isn’t active, but rather laying still in a hammock. I think the last line might suggest that the butterfly and the hawk have not wasted their lives, even thought it might not appear so, and that the narrator is questioning how they are spending their time in relation to the animals. It also makes me feel like the narrator is nearing the end of their life, and sets them up as an equal to the butterfly and the hawk; human or not, every creature will eventually reach the end of its life. Also, just because different species or different people spend their lives differently, it doesn’t mean any one of those lives is wasted. Each life should be appreciated. Just laying still in a hammock and observing nature might be the greatest use of one’s life.
I was drawn to the poem “Ode to a Large Tuna in the Market” by Pablo Neruda since I really like fish; I find them fascinating and I try to reduce my fish consumption and advocate for sustainable fishing. This poem makes me feel like I am in the market looking down on this tuna fish, thinking about where it came from and how it got here. Each stanza is made up of extremely short lines (some only a word). I think this serves to make the poem more powerful and effective. The last word in the first stanza is “dead”, and Neruda’s choice to place that word on its own line and isolate it, surprises me and is so straightforward and simple that it makes me accept the fact that this fish is dead. I love all the startling and fresh metaphors Neruda uses to describe the fish: “missile”, “torpedo”, “dark bullet”, “grieving arrow”, “sea-javelin”, “oiled harpoon”. Listing all these metaphors also makes me realize the fish is being compared to a number of human-made weapons. This tuna fish is not just dead, it was hunted and killed.
The ending of the poem is my favorite:
“the only
true
machine
of the sea: unflawed,
undefiled,
navigating now
the waters of death.”
I feel like the poem is conveying that nature’s machines, like this tuna fish, are perfect and pure creations, whereas the weapons and machines humans make and use are flawed and defiled.
On “I Go Back to May 1937” by Sharon Olds:
I read this poem last week and I think I have thought about it every day since. It is written from the perspective of daughter who has gone back in time and is witnessing her parents in their youth, about to get married. Their marriage would that would turn out horribly and the daughter sees herself in a position to prevent all of their fighting and horrible behavior from ever starting. She decides, however, that she cannot interfere because she wants to be born. It is such a unique premise. There are countless poems about young, naive love or about a messy relationship/marriage, but to write about the two simultaneously is very powerful and makes the image of both their innocence and their subsequent hatred more powerful. The decision of the speaker to not interfere is almost unexpected although it suddenly seems obvious. The last sentence in my favorite. She writes,
“I take them up like the male and female
paper dolls and bang them together
at the hips, like chips of flint, as if to
strike sparks from them, I say
Do what you are going to do, and I will tell about it.”
The act is so brash and intense, with the banging and sparks flying. And I love her saying she will tell about it, almost as a means of justification.
On “Fourth Grade Autobiography” by Donika Ross Kelly
The reason I picked this poem is because of the writer’s style. It’s direct, it’s simple, it’s descriptive, and I really appreciated that. I like poems that describe events, set a stage, create a scene. This poem does that well. Sometimes while reading poetry, I find the poems to be too deep, too difficult to understand. Of course, some of those poems are extremely special when you take your time with them; especially, because they can be read again and again, with the possibility of you learning something new every time. But at times, they feel unnecessarily confusing. This poem didn’t feel confusing, and I’d say that’s what made it stick out for me i.e. it was simple yet beautiful.
My favorite parts:
– “We lie in the grass and wonder who writes
in the sky. I lie in the grass and imagine
my name, a cloud drifting.”
– “I believe in the devil.”
– “Sometimes my dad dances with me. I am
careful not to touch. He is careful
to smile with his whole face.”
On “As I Walked Out One Evening” by W.H. Auden
I thoroughly enjoyed this poem. I loved the verse, it read like a beautiful song. It’s hard for me to reflect on what I learned from the way this poem is written since what I loved about it was the beauty in its lyrical nature and the way each word in each sentence came together so perfectly. I’ll try to go through some of them one by one.
“‘I’ll love you, dear, I’ll love you
Till China and Africa meet,”- a great way to say forever.
“‘O let not Time deceive you,
You cannot conquer Time.” – capitalisation of Time, almost makes it seem like Time is God; also just beautifully written.
You shall love your crooked neighbour
With your crooked heart.’ – this creates the opportunity for so many different thoughts and reflections, loved it.
On “If You Are Over Staying Woke” by Morgan Parker
This poem did all the things. It brought a shiver down my spine and made me tear up (and I don’t even know why!!). I think in our society, and especially at a place like Middlebury, there is so much pressure to be “woke”. And while it is obviously important to be aware of the world around us and our responsibility as global citizens, this poem reminded its readers that it is OKAY to just focus on your own worries and your own world and do they thing that YOU want to do sometimes. I think it particularly stood out to me in the context of our current circumstances. There is this weird pressure on social media to use this quarantine time to read new books! Pick up a new hobby! Exercise and get fit! Stay updated on the news! And I have to remind myself that it is okay to not do any of these things if I do not want to.
“Be honest
when you’re up
to it. Otherwise
drink water
lie to yourself
turn off the news”
Do what YOU need to do, not what everyone else wants you to do. Besides this powerful message, I loved the unique style, where most lines were only 1-3 words. Her use of repetition also kept the reader evermore entranced in the poem.
“Even the Gods” by Nicole Sealey sent shivers to my stomach. The essence of the poem is that Gods are not perfect. The implications of this are enormous. I interpreted this poem as reasoning for the imperfections in the world that the poet observes/experiences. Whoever the speaker is addressing reportedly admires the gods, and hopes to enjoy “what is left of their ambrosia,” as only a mortal could. But it is clear to the speaker that “even the gods misread the windflower’s nod.” A speck of the gods’ essence is magnificent to us, yet magnificence is not perfection, the speaker is trying subtly to convey this to their addressee.
As the poet is a black women, I imagine she is talking to a younger nephew, cousin or son; this poem is an effort to heed warning to them. “It is rumored gods grow where the blood of a hanged man drips. You insist on being this man.” Her nephew’s seemingly passionate admiration and honoring of the gods could get him killed, but he “still, rather live among the clear, cloudless white,” because it is better. “White” here is not only representative of the clouds, but of people. The poet alludes to the fact that white people’s lives are easier than those of blacks, and there is a certain tone that suggests that the poet too longs for what whites have; but she still tells her nephew to “Pray the gods do not misquote your covetous pulse for chaos,” because the gods punish chaos.
The poet still leaves a notion of hope. She claims that the gods are conceived in the black, and grow from the blood of the hanged man, who is presumably black. She is using the color black as a symbol for strength, but she claims “even the eyes of gods must adjust to light. Even gods have gods.” This is auspicious phrasing suggests that it takes time for things to get better. There is a chain of imperfection that is slowly corrected or adjusts as the poet phrases it.
I clicked on Audre Lorde’s “Poetry is not a Luxury” as a skeptic. Poetry seems to be an expenditure of the fortunate. An art form that is regularly recognized for abstractness and obscureness is not striking as universal, but there is more to poetry than intricate structure and intangible comparisons. Poetry is an expressive art form, that allows writers and readers to convey and understand feelings that are distant in physical. Lorde uses black women to exemplify how poetry can help “predicate hopes and dreams”. Black women are one of society’s most marginalized groups, constantly told their aspirations cannot be. But poetry is an expressive form that helps to identify hopes, dreams and aspirations through seemingly magical combinations words. For that reason it is not luxury, but a necessity of survival. Of course, one does not have to be marginalized to use poetry in this way, but if one is marginalized, using poetry in this way is a mode of resistance.
Absolutely…love this.
I think in my mind, I’ve always associated poetry with being free. Free to experiment, free to play, free to confess, free to not worry about meaning just yet and instead give yourself over to feeling, free to wave at the author on the shore and make your own meaning, arrive at your own conclusions if that is what feels true, if that is what you need. I’ve found poetry to be incredibly forgiving. Not to say it can’t be violent. It’s also very violent. Violent in a sword-through-the-stomach, punch-to-the-rib, hand-squeezed-around-heart kind of way. I completely agree with Emily Dickinson. Reading “Fourth Grade Autobiography” by Donika Ross Kelly felt exactly like someone blew the top of my head clean off.
The simple sentences, the listing, the sandwiching of something horrifying between the mundane:
“The sunset of flames ringing out block, / groceries and Asian-owned storefronts. No one / to catch me. Midnight walks from his room to mine. / I believe in the devil. / I have a sister and a brother / and a strong headlock. We have a dog named / Spunky”
The fact that the poem captures the voice and inflection of a fourth grader exactly makes it all the more haunting. You believe the voice. The way children sometimes throw out beautiful sentences like they’re nothing (“We lie in the grass and wonder who writes / in the sky. I lie in the grass and imagine / my name, a cloud drifting.”) You believe in the voice so much that when it hits you with something gut-wrenching it makes you want to cover your ears (“Sometimes my dad dances with me. I am / careful not to touch. He is careful / to smile with his whole face.”)
The poem transported me to a train of thought; it sat me down right next to the speaker. And then it put me in front of the train.
One more post from me today–
this one’s about “On Squaw Peak,” by Robert Haas.
I really admire the trailing continuity of this poem. It is one long, complicated thought, interrupted with dashes and periods by other people and competing memories, but it retains such a strong current that I cannot help but be pulled along. It is the speaker figuring out what they think and feel, but it is also formatted as an address to “you.” I’m struck by the how much Haas’ words accomplish. There is a lot of power in how he snakes the reader through physical landscapes, family portraits, and devastating memories with such ease. I aspire to write poems that don’t limit themselves in scope. I want to try encompassing this much into my writing and worry less about narrowing to an overly specific moment or scene. Haas demonstrates how effective it can be to go big. Here’s a section that speaks to me:
“I tried not to hate my life,
to fear the frame of things. I knew what two people
couldn’t say
on a cold November morning in the fog —
you remember the feel of Berkeley winter mornings —
what they couldn’t say to each other
was the white deer not seen. It meant to me
that beauty and terror were intertwined so powerfully
and went so deep that any kind of love
can fail. I didn’t say it. I think the mountain startled
my small grief. Maybe there wasn’t time.”
On “Dance Russe” by William Carlos Williams:
I’m a sucker for writing that’s relatable in its mundanity while also reaching toward uncomfortable truths. This is how I feel about William’s poem about a man dancing around, naked. It is a beautiful moment of recognition for his overwhelming loneliness and confusion despite the love and comfort we can assume are all around him. His wife and baby and Kathleen are all sleeping, settled in other rooms of the house. And the speaker knows this–acknowledges his place. He can’t help but examine his unsettledness, though. I love the clarification that the speaker “was born to be lonely, / I am best so!” The simultaneous burden and freedom of loneliness is difficult to articulate, but we readers understand. We, too, can relate to the feeling of being a “happy genius” when we realize we are capable of holding two sides of ourselves at once–multiple emotions, duality of purpose, opposing desires. This poem is one of coming to terms with discomfort and incongruities, but embracing them instead of letting them destroy you.
Focusing on poetry right now feels like the right thing to do, given the current uncertainty that threatens my sense of comfort and security. When I consider my trajectory as a writer, I have the longest relationship with poetry. I’ve written poems since middle school and found in the form a unique ability to express what I actually mean without needing to analyze and “left-brain” it too much. Poems are these self-contained, digestible vitamins that move me without giving me time to ask where I’m going.
A good poem steeps you in a feeling, a place, an identity… I look to them not necessarily for answers, but as a way to quiet the stream of narrow, linear thinking that my brain falls into when I am confused or lonely or unsettled. They allow me to slow down, dive into the sound and texture of words, notice how my body responds, and swim back up to the surface with a tiny bit more clarity.
One of my favorite poems of all time is called “At Burt Lake,” by Tom Andrews. It’s actually about how we wield language itself, and the way words can be so insufficient and so essential all at once:
“To disappear into the right words
and to be their meanings. . .
October dusk.
Pink scraps of clouds, a plum-colored sky.
The sycamore tree spills a few leaves.
The cold focuses like a lens. . .
Now night falls, its hair
caught in the lake’s eye.
Such clarity of things. Already
I’ve said too much. . .
Lord,
language must happen to you
the way this black pane of water,
chipped and blistered with stars,
happens to me.”
(Sorry, but I had to share the whole thing.)
I am very excited to move into the poetry unit, as I am hoping to challenge myself in this genre of writing in particular. I pondered over the question, “What is poetry?” and decided that poetry is anything the reader wants it to be. It can be a shoulder to lean on or a source of anger. It can be a light at the end of the tunnel, or it can be a fountain of confusion. In some poems, readers might find deep meaning, while in others they cannot find any meaning at all. I think that sometimes I find myself reading a poem and pulling my hair out to determine the “message” that the author is trying to deliver. In doing so, I ignore the beauty of the poem as it stands by itself. While it is fascinating and wonderful to search for the meaning the author was trying to communicate, it is just as fascinating and wonderful to discover your own interpretations.
On “Summer” by Robin Coste Lewis
This poem really stuck out to me for several reasons. Firstly, the line
“And cursed God—His arrogance,
His gall—to still expect our devotion
after creating love.”
practically took my breath away, and that was before I even began to wonder what Lewis meant by that. While it is common to see authors cursing God in their writing, it is seldom that I see Him described as arrogant. Lewis seems to cement her angry and bitter tone in that line alone. It is also fascinating for her to suggest that love, the very thing that many Christians claim to be the very foundation of their religion, is a practice that actually turns humans away from God.
Lewis repeated use of the number two also fascinated me. All of her stanzas are two lines long, “two snakes”, “two mornings in a row”, “shows up at your door– twice”. The poem (in my interpretation) seems to be about denial, but also the acknowledgement of denial. I thought back to the famous quote, “Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me.” It is as if the author willingly sees her own denial, and knows that she is to blame for said denial. Something so odd, such as the snakes, shows up on her doorstep, not once but TWICE, and she still ignores it. One of my goals for this unit is to write a poem with a message hidden in the number of stanzas/lines (Like Sylvia Plath’s “metaphors”). This poem has further inspired me to do so!
I’m worried about losing my voice during this last unit. I think with everything happening during this time I have felt really fragmented in my identity and purpose. And in my poetry, I usually do a lot of identity searching and unpacking. Beyond that, I think that poetry is a communication. With the self, the community, and so on. I think that it is a language of emotion and a freedom of language. I think that poetry is a representation of the sheer power of language. We can reach so many, or sometimes a select few, with the extent our words (which often in poetry can be the most vulnerable arrangement of our personal language.
I think that I read poetry with a bit more softness than I do other writing. I look to poetry for answers, sometimes finding answers to questions I didn’t know that I was asking. I recently read an Andrew Hudgins poem about faith and praying. He wrote,
“I’m sorry for the times I’ve driven
home past a black, enormous, twilight ridge.
Crested with mist it looked like a giant wave
about to break and sweep across the valley,
and in my loneliness and fear I’ve thought,
O let It come and wash the whole world clean.
Forgive me. This is my favorite sin: despair¬–
whose love I celebrate with wine and prayer.
It’s quite a long excerpt to include but this passage answered a lot for me recently. I am in a reoccurring state of despair for everything happening in the world right now. How to I reason with all of this hurt? Well, wine and prayer, but also forgiveness.
Now I am thinking about the Elizabeth Bishop poem included in the poetry curated for this week. I feel like the fish not fighting much right now, especially from the quiet confine of my living room. How does Bishop make a fish relatable? Is that poetry? I am not quite sure. What I do know is that I follow the lines of her poetry like a lesson. I actively learn from her metaphor, even if I don’t know what exactly I am writing. It is a progression and much as it is a journey through writing.
My understanding of what poetry entails has changed a lot throughout my life, mainly in response to one particular friendship. I used to write poetry a lot in the beginning of elementary school, then again in phases in middle and high school when prompted by arty school assignments or creative friends. My first poems always rhymed and always followed a rhythmic beat, no word off tempo. I though this was what poetry was, just music without words. I hated free verse when I was young because I thought it sounded like music-less, formless screeches compared to the lulling legato of metered, rhyming poetry. I had never heard anyone read free verse out loud and found it hard to connect to on paper.
Then, a friend of mine completely changed my understanding of poetry as a genre. Her name is Rose Devika and she was a grade above me in school. I remember hearing her perform one of her spoken word poems at an assembly one day and being mindblown that she could string words together so beautifully and powerfully without following a rhyming scheme. Her work was like a story, a play, and a song all rolled into one, and she began to compete in (and win) prestigious poetry competitions. Whenever I heard one of her pieces, I was inspired to write my own poetry.
Years later, after a period of writing and releasing music, she has now turned back to poetry in a unique way that is completely her own and that transcends the dimensions I had previously considered to define poetry as a medium. She blurs the boundaries between poetry and music in incredible ways; for an example, see her latest release, a spoken word poem/song(????) called “the car says crash” ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r2vDPP9EfBM ).
While I have since read and heard the works of many other poets and even broadened the styles of my own poetry, when I read the “what is poetry” question, I immediately thought of Rose. I don’t know where the boundaries between poetry and other genres lie; perhaps there are none and writing as a whole is some kind of multi-dimensional continuum. But all I know for sure is that when I think about what poetry is, I listen to Rose’s work and think “this is it.”
Thank you for sharing Rose’s spoken word; I truly enjoyed watching/listening to it.
When it comes to reading poetry, I think we owe it to ourselves as readers to slow down. To bask in the beauty of each individual word itself and not to speed to the ending. It’s important to bask in the imagery, the deliberate words strung together and what memory they might be representing for the author. Poetry, to me, is a lot of about rhythm, and musicality and pace. Poetry is incredibly intimate. It’s a window into the author and some of it soemtimes may not make sense for us as readers but we have an obligation to at least steep in the beauty of whatever might speak to us. At least in my experience, I think poetry is internal dialogue. It’s wrestling with the self, discussing, debating, but also doing so in a way that makes the most sense to the person writing. It may not be grammatically correct, or easily understood, but it represents the poet. In my experiences writing poetry, I’ve really only ever used it as a journal, a way to remember. How do I use words, things that are inherently fragile and malleable, to try to etch my life into stone? To make sense of it? How do I remember something perfectly? Words are my best bet to try to capture a moment’s essence. I really liked Mark Strand’s Keeping Things Whole. It’s so simple and so eloquent an idea. Something about it just feels really comforting to me, as a way to move about existence. Meditation at Lagunitas by Robert Hass also really struck me; “a word is elegy to what it signifies.” I’ve spent a lot of time basking in the beauty of words and celebrating the flexibility of them, the way they stretch and twist and give meaning to what we experience. I’ve never thought about the other side of things though; that the word wind doesn’t really encompass the breath of rattling cottonwood tree, or my hair twirling. It reminded me of the concept of Edenic language, something I find incredibly interesting; that Adam named everything in the garden of eden with words that perfectly encompassed their essence. A language lost after being kicked out of the garden, of course. I suppose I love Hass’ line so much because it encompasses why we have to write poetry; because a single word (except for nothing at all, according to Ammon’s A Poem is a Walk, which I also really liked) will never be able to encompass the fullness, the tragedy and joy of the memories of existence. ‘a word is elegy to what it signifies,’ but also in some ways, it might be a new life? I’m excited for the unit and was glad to have the readings that discussed why poetry is important. It’s an internal dialogue I often have with myself; what’s the point of writing poetry in an age where less and less people are going to care you wrote it?
Beautiful response, Aria, thank you. I love the idea of a word as both elegiac and vibrant/vital.
I’m really excited for the poetry unit! I mainly only wrote poetry in high school, and I think I feel more comfortable sitting down and writing poetry compared to writing fiction or nonfiction. Maybe it’s because I feel like I can write an entire poem in just one sitting. I think one of the main things I struggle with regarding poetry is knowing if I’m being too explicit or implicit. I think this also carries over into fiction and nonfiction for me actually; I tend to tell when I should be showing. I also am interested in all the different structures and stylistic choices of poems; how does the writer choose? I’m glad I’ll be exposed to more poetry and have a chance to get feedback on some of my own. Also, I can’t believe we’re already in our last unit 🙁