Poetry!
Time for a little scrawled check-in about being a poet. Or really just a moment to be grateful that I’ve stubbornly held onto poetry despite its difficulties, and begun to hold on even tighter this year. Because when poetry is my active companion, it is a balm even in the worst times. And this month has been among the worse times. Judging by what I hear from my larger group, most of us are feeling it in one way or another. For my family, February has been a slog through big and small difficulties. Unprecedented (for me) snow and cold weather, crisis in my immediate family, lingering (non-covid) colds, seasonal depression, a scary but ultimately fine trip to the ER. Pack on poor eating and exercise habits (due to said cold weather, colds, and SAD), and I just feel like I’m walking through mud. A slog, a fog, a muddle, lead limbs and slow head.
Snow is pretty, but it sure is cold
This morning I attended a zoom workshop and was genuinely horrified by my face in the screen. Like, no haircut for 6 months (and it was unbrushed yet), bags under my eyes, new sags and wrinkles seemingly overnight. Couldn’t stop myself from pulling faces, for some reason, either. And forgot the miracle of “hide self-view” until too late. But lo, physical vanity evaporated when we read and discussed the ekphrastic poems we wrote for the week, and so did some of my muddled slowness.
I’m in another zoom group, this one generative, with more wonderful, talented women, many of them farther along on the poetry “career path” than I am (in what we could kindly call my perpetual emergence). One of them a few weeks ago, because this group too is a balm and we often sigh gratefully as it comforts us, said “why do we have to teach all the time? Why can’t we just keep learning?” And I had the unhappy thought then, “I don’t teach, and I wish I did”. But today, I feel my own luck, the luck of the amateur, who gets to learn and learn without end.
Now a list of poetry things I thought about today, based on conversation among the (honestly) brilliant workshop leader Sandra Beasley, and my fellow poets in the group:
In an ekphrastic poem (one responding to another piece of art), we can consider how to mimic the making of the originating piece in the making of our poem. How can we think about enacting the way the painter’s brush moves, or the composition of the piece?
For example, Kimberly Johnson’s “Fifteen” replicates some of the ‘commotion’, the undifferentiated and distracting detail, of a Breughel painting by using bracketed words (with exclamation points! Note – learn to use exclamation points in poems!) and the staggered stanza.
In avoiding direct mimesis of the piece you’re responding to, consider whether the title can first give us access to your own slant on it—even if much of the poem is spent directly describing the piece.
Ekphrasis requests balance – how much do we want to describe, versus respond? One way of interrogating this balance is to consider the moment you first mention the other piece. In my own ekphrastic poem for the week, I waited till the final lines of the final stanza to overtly mention the figure in the painting, and this worked fine because it’s a piece that many people have already seen and written about (“Christina’s World”, by Wyeth). In this case, the epigraph provides enough ‘framing’ for the reader to understand the poem’s occasion. For a less well-known work, you’d perhaps want to describe at least some of the visual (or auditory, if music) reality of the piece earlier on.
A qasida or qassida is a poetry form that is entirely new to me as of today. I don’t yet have a full understanding of it so in part, this is a note to myself to read more about it. Here’s Khaled Mattawa’s “Qassida to the Statue of Sappho in Mytilini” And here’s a recording of him reading it. If you need enticement to click on the links, here’s a passage.
Be careful in stacking mid-line caesuras, in case you’re forming unwanted hemistichs (while I very much enjoy the foreign look of both terms here, I’ll say it more simply too for any readers who aren’t familiar with them – if you have obvious pauses in the very center of multiple lines of your poem, it can create the sense of a series of half-lines, and readerly confusion as to why you didn’t just make the lines shorter. A small thing, but one I’d never thought about so directly).
Attention to poems charges me with life even when I feel at my most lifeless.