Monthly Archives: April 2019

Drafty

I have to keep reminding myself that these poems are drafts and just get over their weakness and rough spots and recall that the drafting aspect is part of my April experiment–pushing the envelope, as the saying goes, and allowing the imperfections to go public. Then readers will perhaps recognize that every poem has to start somewhere, and it is not always from inspiration or native talent.

Any of the poems I draft this month that I consider worth keeping around for further work will move into my revision-worthy pile. For me, the revision process engages creativity in a form very different from the initial draft. Just as an example, few of my drafts use rhyme; sometimes I employ a basic metrical strategy (but not always)–and stanza structure almost always occurs during my revision process. Yet my finished poems often contain such components.

This one’s a less-plausible lyrical narrative, and I have no idea why I drafted it.

http://www.thisisnotacraft.com/

“Observatory Box,” Joseph Cornell

~

Experience of the Disembodied

What happened was a bounce
or peak in the field,
a shiver in the multiverse
tearing through cosmic shift

although maybe that is not
what happened because I was
not observing the rift,

I was entering into it with my
physical body per se

although I could not call the action
“flying” yet I did feel earth’s
gravity, that weakest of forces,
loosening until church spires
and pine trees, tall city buildings
shrank beneath me–

and my skin emptied,
a frosty altitude, a gutted sensation,
numbed spine and brain: Where am I?

In this supra-cosmos no light
of the sort my eyes can translate.
Energy vibrating. Loss of myself
while I watch myself,

fascinated, undone. Waiting
for the next shoe to drop.

~~

Re: National Poetry Month –here’s a thoughtful blog post on continuing the conversation through millennia.

Lyric, narrative

I love hearing stories. Telling stories. Inventing stories. Often I choose to create a story using the first person perspective, whether the story is my own, someone else’s, or totally invented. In poetry this gets called the lyrical narrative.

~

A Toast to the Brown Bat

We are on the porch, drinking wine
late in the long summer day, dusk hovering
the way small storms of insects do
the day after a hard rain, and we’re talking
about something not especially dear to us,
no deep discourse, past that, watching
candles glow and the first wink of fireflies
when a brown bat flutters over like
an autumn leaf and my friend asks, “what
is it like to be a bat?” And as I’m somewhat
versed in philosophy I mention Thomas
Nagel, whose essay with that title is
justly famous but who does not really answer
the question; and she responds, “it must be
alternately stifling and soaring.” I think she
means that every flight’s like Christmas—
freedom and feasting—and every day an
imprisonment in the tightly-packed dark.
“But what if colony life is cozy?” I ask, imagining
small bodies light as sparrows breathing
together softly, fur-lined and snuggled,
fingers folded over the bellies, a generous
communion of sleep. “I can’t quite get over,
though,” she says, “that they sleep upside-
down.” “It might cure your migraines,” I say,
and we devote our next toast to the bat.

~

Patience

Okay, day … six? Thanks to Marilyn Hazelton, my tanka expert and today’s muse, for engaging with the idea of patience and suggesting a book that gave me this quote by Rodin (long a favorite sculptor of mine):

~

“Patience is also a form of action” –-Auguste Rodin

Clay. Thumb and fingers pressed.
Coolness and warmth awaiting form
or formulation–chemistry binding
components under heat’s influence.
Here, the potter attends the kiln,
biding her time. Or the craftsmen
check and check again as barley
ferments, as bronze hardens, careful.
The woman holds inside herself
for nine months the evolving child
and every moment is one of multiplying,
expending energy during the wait
which may result in either life
or death. Even the Zen place of repose
requires breath: action, inhalation,
oxygenation, illumination. Notice:
this morning, the plum trees blossomed.

~

DSC100109879

 

 

 

Letters

I have been reflecting on the practice of letter writing and how it improves writing skills because it is, essentially, practice in written composition.

I teach writing, and one thing I notice among students who ‘don’t write well’ (in their words) is that they struggle to develop a voice in their written essays. In the hundreds of years before telephones and tablet devices, literate people learned a voice and style not through school essays but through frequent letter-writing practice. If a total stranger were to read aloud to me letters from my two grandmothers, I could identify which grandma penned which letter by style alone.

The adventurous 19th-c. traveler Isabella Bird, to take another example, once wrote a 116-page letter to her sister, Henrietta! Bird’s letters form the basis of her many travel books, which are entertainingly told with an eye for humor and for accurate, sense-based description–her voice remains intact in her work, long after her death.

Today’s poem draft is a prose poem in the epistolary mode.

~

Entanglement

I think of you so often, especially when weeding the perennials, a task
we have so often done side by side and in so many seasons, you and I knee-deep
in goldenrod and wild aster that invades the irises and wild indigo each June,
or earlier in the season, on chill and drizzling April days, clearing shot-
weed, ground ivy and chickweed from the creeping phlox and daffodils.
You’d be dismayed at the state of my ornamentals this year, your perfectionist
streak critical of the stray wanderers, stands of sedum that need dividing,
the dust on my piano, ottoman replete with cat hair, my cupboards in disarray.
I miss your diligence and vivaciousness, the way you take your coffee scalding
hot, your eye for color, your bold opinions I have so studiously ignored.
Today it is raining and the book I’m reading describes quantum entanglement
theory, “a physical phenomenon that occurs when pairs or groups of particles
are generated, interact, or share spatial proximity in ways such that the
quantum state of each particle cannot be described independently of the state
of the others, even when the particles are separated by a large distance.”

I miss you.

 

~

IMG_5768

 

Poetic naturalism

I have been reading poetry, as usual, and also non-fiction about various aspects that could be deemed scientific, such as Michael Pollan’s Changing Your Mind and physicist Sean Carroll‘s book The Big Picture. 

On my way to work, I posed (in my mind) an argument with Carroll about his use of the word “poetic” in his definition of poetic naturalism, which he defines thus:

Naturalism is a philosophy according to which there is only one world — the natural world, which exhibits unbroken patterns (the laws of nature), and which we can learn about through hypothesis testing and observation. In particular, there is no supernatural world — no gods, no spirits, no transcendent meanings.

I like to talk about a particular approach to naturalism, which can be thought of as Poetic. By that I mean to emphasize that, while there is only one world, there are many ways of talking about the world…

The poet Muriel Rukeyser once wrote, “The universe is made of stories, not atoms” … There is more to the world than what happens; there are the ways we make sense of it by telling its story… The world is just the world, unfolding according to the patterns of nature, free of any judgmental attributes. But these moral and ethical and aesthetic vocabularies can be perfectly useful ways of talking about the world … We just have to admit that judgments come from within ourselves.

Despite my doubts about his use of “poetic,”  it may be that Carroll’s term describes me; at any rate, his definition comes close to my own thinking about the world.

And hence, another draft for my poem-a-day challenge.

~

Brown leaves bouncing across Preston Lane
late afternoon, air currents swirling.

Road shoulder cradles raccoon carcass,
fur shudders, though body’s still, and sun

highlights the gray-white hairs as travelers
speed past. Chlorophyll greens local lawns

and ditches beside the creek, molecules moving,
nitrogen atoms taken up through root and rhizome.

Sudden, yellow, early–narcissus blooms near
the neighboring farmhouse–all of which

recommends itself as The World As It Is.
A reality for at least one universe,

even though there exist other possibilities
in the realm of Undiscovered.

daffodil photo Ann E. Michael

Kisses & Bees

Today, I have opted to use an Osip Mandelstam poem as a prompt. I apologize in advance to his memory and to his lovely poem, translations of which are here, here, and here.

In a blog post some time ago, I discussed this poem and the problems of translation.

~

Kisses Tattered as Bees
–-after Osip Mandelstam

Your claim asserts that kisses
can be tattered
and bees emerge from
floral tussles or hive dances
in a disordered raggedness
so the two are as like—
simile disperses into breeze:
loose petals and torn wings
fail to impress upon your lips
any tactile memory.

But oh, there were kisses once
so fevered they evaporated
on meeting your cool skin
while you traversed the woods
beguiled by honey’s scent–
and kisses that stung,
leaving a trail of the dead,
soft, gold-and-black bodies
in each of your footprints,
beads strung along your path.

~

be-quince

~

Three days, three poems, one tenth of National Poetry Month having passed; I can do this, right? NaPoWriMo has a site that includes daily poetry prompts, if you happen to be interested. It is worth trying even if you do not plan to write a poem a day.

 

Tanka

The second day of my daily poem challenge won’t give me much time to compose. A tanka poem may be in order.

These 5-line poems pose considerable constraints on the writer and, in my experience trying to write them, require frequent revision to get the moment vivid enough. So this one will be a rough draft. An experienced tanka poet may be able to compose tanka rapidly; my attempts usually need eight or ten revisions…well, here goes.

~
Past midnight, silence
4 am, flying squirrels chirp–
maple buds redden at dawn

how sleep eludes
those who mourn

~

 

Other poets working on daily-writing include Michael Czarnecki of FootHills Publishing, who posts a daily poem (usually haiku) on his Facebook page here.

paintdaub copy

 

April experiment

It is National Poetry Month once again. I usually do not take part in poetry month writing challenges, but I thought this year I might try something out of my comfort zone.

My plan: post a poem draft a day for this month. I have never blogged daily before, and I have never tried to compose a poem a day as Luisa Igloria has been doing on the via negativa blog for, I think, more than three years!!

This concept–er, this practice–will be super-challenging for me and scary on several levels, mostly on the level of posting unrevised, often unfinished or awkward material publicly. But I have just about 3,000 followers and only a minuscule percentage of them read my blog regularly, so I have to think of this as reading to a small room.

I can deal with that. At least–I think I can.

We’ll have to see how the month goes. Meanwhile, welcome to my month-long experiment in immediacy.

~

Tom’s Green Field

In your landscape
light exists as waves, not particles

active, roiling
over the placid horizontal planes: sky, treeline,

cropland in wind.
For there must be currents of air, speedy thrill

storm can assume
chopping at clouds miles distant, changing hue

illuminating
the dense grove’s surface so it shines

and no rain’s fallen
and perhaps no rain will dampen the field today–

only luminescence
pigment trapped in layers of oil, bouncing

cobalt, cadmium
iron oxide through your swirling glaze

that gazed once
on energy in patterns, an hour’s moment, waving green.

~

agriculture clouds countryside crop

Photo by Pixabay on Pexels.com