Sometimes a “skinny” poem’s fun to play with. And breaking up the expected in a rather ornery mood.
~
Aviatrix
I get off on
it, scoff at
ground
walkers
down be
lo & be
hold—
sky waves
a big hello.
Nobody drags
me under
no beast nor
man can
tether me
to lack
luster earth.
Wind, cloud
I am a
light o, how
I hate
going back.
~
Photo by Azim Islam on Pexels.com
Another day, another draft!
This challenge has not gotten easier yet. Sometimes, disciplined practice leads to a certain ease or confidence–that’s always the hope, anyway, that I might find amid the drafts something wonderful. My model here would be someone like William Stafford, who sat down every morning to draft at least one poem (and sometimes they were wonderful). The Poetry Foundation’s site says:
Stafford reports that he sits alone in the early morning and writes down whatever occurs to him, following his impulses. “It is like fishing,” he says, and he must be receptive and “willing to fail. If I am to keep writing, I cannot bother to insist on high standards…. I am following a process that leads so wildly and originally into new territory that no judgment can at the moment be made about values, significance, and so on…. I am headlong to discover.”
At the end of this National Poetry Month, I will give myself a reckoning as to whether the NaPoWriMo process has been at all helpful to me as a poet. It may be it proves beneficial in some other way…
~
Lustratio
Her friends died young when she herself
was young and unbaptized in the realm of dying
Yet you would think her better prepared–for there were
car crashes, suicides, fires, the blood plague taking
its long and steady toll
There were the risk-takers certain of their immortality
who drowned or fell from cliffs or grace
through the needle or the drug or drink and those
whose hearts took upon themselves
a need to hurry beyond the body’s balance and
whose breastbones could not contain them
You would think her ready for the news that someone
loved or once loved or otherwise connected
(Milgram’s six degrees of separation theory)
had died however people do when they are young–
embolism, cancer, accident, murder
Slow or sudden–it’s not as if the difference
though there is one, matters
because you’d think, by now, when she is no longer young
the facts of gone and after and remembering
the evidence of dying and grief’s enormous cosmos
would have carved for her a familiar space
A kind of purifying trauma–as if the bulla and procession
could protect her or her community from harm
when harm is what the world offers now and then
and we must bid it enter even if we are young
Even when it is unwelcome.
~
* Lustratio was an ancient Greek purification and protection ritual for children or for cities, farms, and other precious items; in the case of a male child, sometimes it was a naming ceremony at which the baby would receive a small, gold bulla (charm in the shape of a bull’s head) as a blessing or for protection. Ancient historians describe it in several ways, but most frequently mention a procession and animal sacrifice.
Rhyme comes easily to some people. For me, rhyme presents no problem as far as lighter verse, parodies, ditties–which have their place in literature and in culture. In more introspective or reflective verse, though, rhyme tends to elude me and often seems not to mesh with the poem’s mood. Revising toward rhyme often succeeds in assisting the metaphors, imagery, or tone, however. Usually assisted by some sort of metrical strategy.
Today my poem-draft-a-day offers evidence of how rhyme can appear spontaneously in a poem’s first version.
If you are interested, here’s an excellent book on rhyme in poetry: Rhyme’s Reason, by John Hollander & Richard Wilbur–welcome authorities on the subject.
Quite long ago now, I dwelt in cities for a few years. The contrast to my current environment startles me now and then, makes me remember those years.
~
Outmoded
His back aches. It hurts to move.
How did he ever get so old?
The work it takes to walk a block
to buy a paper! Then he’s told
the news is found online, where he
can read it on a mobile phone.
He hates the sound of that idea–
the text so small–and, when alone,
he likes the paper’s rustling noise.
It’s domestic. One of life’s joys.
The work and pain are thus worthwhile.
That, and the newsstand vendor’s smile.
~
Photo by Daria Obymaha on Pexels.com
Last night, I had the pleasure of participating in a Favorite Poem Project reading at my university. I have many favorite poems, but this time I chose to read Audre Lorde’s “Coal”, because of how powerfully it spoke to me when I encountered it as a very young woman in a Contemporary Women’s Literature course in my undergraduate years. Reading it aloud to the audience, I realized the poem speaks to me even now–though in a slightly different way, altered by life experience.
~
My poem for Day 9 seems to evoke Han Dynasty style poetry.
~
Warm Spring Night
I was not drinking wine
alone on the porch
I was accompanied by clouds
two species of frogs
toads whose squeaking chorused
sex and risk–
also the silent predators
awaiting the amphibian
awakening
hungry after winter
among this vast assembly
I had least to gain
and least to lose
I savored the taste
of my situation
under the near-new moon.
~
Photo by Plus Blanc Studio on Pexels.com
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.
“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.
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.
~
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.
~
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.
~
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.
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.
~
~
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.
ann e michael 