Apr 28
MeredithPoetry, Writing jon thrower, Learning to Die in the Theater, national poetry month, poetry out of nothing challenge, yay poems!
Learning to Die in the Theater
the way a poem learns to die is that way she broke up with me:
throwing someone’s sister into the fender of an S-10 Chevy
and turning to kick me tween the nuts with those pointy shoe’s
bizarre popularity in 2006. While said sister’s hair covered a zoysia
swath near the oak’s cloistered Natty can’s conference I just
laid out stiff in the rainbow iris and wildflower patch by the porch
hoping for death. In the morning, Talley shook me awake saying,
“Dude, let’s get a beer.” My hand across the rasp of his shaved
head was soothed by a Bud bottle at the Sandlot where a guy named
Foreskin illustrated, in perfect algorithms, the double-bank.
Apr 27
MeredithPoetry, Reading andrea hollen, guest blogger, isabel fraire, national poetry month, the importance of the absence of words, white space
I love curating these guest poetry posts–it’s thrilling to get a glimpse of the ways in which people I know interact with poetry, because it forces me to step back and look at poetry in new ways. With that in mind, I’m excited to introduce today’s guest, Andrea Hollen, whose life as an engineer grants her a unique perspective on Isabel Fraire’s use of white space. Andrea is the Director of Analytics & Research for Case Commons, a technology startup incubated by the Annie E. Casey Foundation. She served for ten years as a Signal officer in the United States Army, and will always consider leading soldiers a singular privilege. She enjoys urban planning, Civil War history and nature kayaking, and loves living in the Chesapeake Bay watershed. Incapable of reading a novel, she is grateful for poetry, short stories and essays about equations.
I discovered Isabel Fraire years ago when I was searching for the perfect love poem. I found it: Fraire’s “Mi amor descubre objetos” – “My love reveals objects.” I was captivated by her imagery. I set out to learn more about her life and work.
“Pendulum” is from Fraire’s second book of poetry, Poems in the Lap of Death, beautifully translated by Thomas Hoeksema. She wrote the collection, which won Mexico’s prestigious Villarrutia Prize in 1978, with the support of a Guggenheim grant.
I’m an engineer by trade and at heart. I feel at home with equations, not so much literary criticism, so I’ve been struggling to convey why I love this poem. I settled on explaining how it speaks to me in my day-to-day pursuits.
Click on the poem to see it larger.
What draws me to “Pendulum,” and Fraire’s poetry in general, are the intense visual and sonic affects of how she uses white space. Hoeksema sums it up nicely: “All of Fraire’s poems are spread orthographically like bones – intricately patterned verbal ligatures.” I would compare her use of white space to how gifted urban planners use space – plazas, view corridors and solar access, for example – to make vibrant public places. In my experience as a planning commissioner, inspiring and sustainable site design is less about what gets built and more about what gets left out. I submit that poetry is much the same. In The Art of the Poetic Line, James Longenbach captures how the criss-crossing chutes of white space in “Pendulum” remind me of the built environment:
Every poem is based at least implicitly on a choice to do something rather than something else, and, as a result, every poem takes power from its exclusions as well as its inclusions. [p. 120]
“Pendulum” also moves me in the way it explores the oscillation between thought and action. When do we have a duty to act? What holds us back? What should hold us back? What shouldn’t? These questions are central to my work in Analytics. As a data scientist, I help public human services systems visualize and explore their data so that they can more deeply understand what services work best for the families and communities they support. Frontline human services caseworkers make life shaping and often wrenching decisions every day. What tools do they, as expert problem solvers and storytellers, need to share their insights in ways that contribute to a larger statistical narrative and ultimately shape public policy? How can we make day-to-day practice more reflective, even meditative? How can we ground social policy research in “the necessary action” that unfolds minute by minute as caseworkers do what they must to strengthen vulnerable families? As I read “Pendulum” I have an affirming conversation with Isabel Fraire about how my colleagues and I might begin to answer these questions.
Thank you for this opportunity to share the meaning I find in “Pendulum,” and my fascination with what Isabel Fraire does with language.
Editor’s Note: “Pendulum” is and remains the intellectual property of Isabel Fraire. We include a scan of it here for instructional purposes and to illustrate Andrea’s discussion of the white space, which is difficult to convey otherwise.
Apr 26
MeredithUncategorized cranes, Jennifer Boyden, katherine larson, national poetry month, same idea different poem, there is little in life that i love more than poems about birds, think I might go do some origami
One of the things I most love about poetry is the way that writers are tasked with searching for a uniqueness in language. It’s a well-worn adage that there’s nothing new under the sun, but instead of letting that discourage them, poets, in particular, take that as a challenge. The best poets succeed at the challenge, offering up language and observations that are crisp and fresh, that cause the reader to think to herself, “that’s exactly what that’s like–why didn’t I think to say it that way?”
Perhaps the best way I can think of to convey how that feels is to imagine those moments when you want the word for something, it’s on the tip of your tongue, but you can’t find it for hours or even days. You know how great it feels when it comes to you? That’s what it’s like when you write or read a line or poem that offers a truly original rendering of something familiar.
Tonight I want to look at how two poets handle the same image in different ways, the way they both bring readers to that spark of recognition.
As I’ve mentioned here before, I recently read Jennifer Boyden’s The Mouths of Grazing Things. Well, a few days ago I picked up a new book by Katherine Larson, called Radial Symmetry. I flipped to the first poem in Larson’s collection and was immediately caught by her description of a crane. My brain reeled as I tried to decide why this particular image was jumping off the page at me, aside from its beauty. Then it hit me: this poem, “Statuary,” reminded me of the way Jennifer Boyden describes the same bird in her poem “Orectic.”
Each of the Jennifer’s handles this slender bird deftly and lyrically, but each does so in an entirely different way:
From Boyden’s “Orectic”:
Where in our bodies
would they have moored the slender cry of the crane
who calls out that night is closing the sky,
taking away the glinted green
of the frogs’ moist backs, the dazzle the sun makes
of every hair, of every shining wing?
From Larson’s “Statuary”:
The late cranes throwing
their necks to the wind stay
somewhere between
the place that rain begins
and the place that it ends
they seem to exist just there
above the horizon at least
I only see them that way
tossed up
against the gray October
light not heavy enough
for feet to be useful or
useless enough to make
gravity untie its string.
A quick search shows that the crane is a heavily symbolic creature, with varying interpretations across different cultures. For some, cranes are a sign of longevity. For others, of peace and hope. Still others attribute mystical powers to the crane, believing it carries souls to heaven on the great expanse of its wings.
These poems are no doubt influenced by these and other interpretations, with their cranes who become symbols of the in between, of change–we see Boyden’s cranes as heralds of the night (even if they perhaps mourn its arrival) and Larson rather blatantly places the crane “between / the place that rain begins / and the place that it ends.” Both make reference to the long, slender neck of the crane. And yet, despite these similarities, we have entirely different cranes in each poem.
For Boyden, the cranes are tinged with mourning; they bemoan the loss of daylight. They become a symbol of something humans can never be, but not for their grace or ability to fly; instead it is for their very ability to mourn, to make a sound of longing, as she mentions early in the poem.They are solid and right in a way that we cannot be.
For Larson, the cranes are reckless, “throwing / their necks to the wind.” They are ephemeral and distant in that in-between place. Beautiful, perhaps, but locked in to one fuzzy interpretation.
But I wander a bit with this, admittedly rather shallow, analysis. Returning to my original point, what is most interesting to me is that given their similarities, both of these poems struck me differently. At their core, both focus largely on the long, lithe neck of a crane, but they present wholly different images, both of which feel entirely apt within the setting of each poem. Both made me sit back and wonder why I never thought of cranes in that way. It’s satisfying, that feeling of stunned recognition.
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It’s practically time! Time for what? Time for you to submit your poem for the Poetry Out of Nothing Challenge. The deadline is tomorrow, April 27, at 11:59 p.m. EST (that’s a fancy way of saying my version of midnight). A few submissions have already come in, but I can’t wait to see more. I’ll be posting them on April 28, and I promise I’ll have more info on the hows and wheres and whens of voting in the next day or two (this will be determined partly by the volume of entries, hence the delay).
Happy writing!
Apr 25
MeredithPoetry, Reading, Uncategorized, Writing Dayna Carpenter, guest blogger, national poetry month, painting, reverse ekphrasis, sisarhpke, the kind of thing that makes your day, water color
Today’s guest blogger is Dayna Carpenter, a dear friend of mine. She’s amazing in her job at UMBC, which is how we met, but she’s also an incredibly talented artist. It is appropriate then, that her post for today is, at its core, visual. She’s chosen to take a look at poetry and narrative, and when she agreed to guest blog, she told me she thought she’d respond to a poem with a painting. I was entirely surprised, honored, and humbled to find out today that she chose one of my poems. I move beyond my typical guest intro with this next statement, but it must be said: Dayna, thank you. I am so moved by your work and completely honored that you found in my poem not only something worth reading but something that inspired your own art.
Click on the image to see it full size.
Trying To Remember Daddy
Girl, small, clomps
across the room
in scuffed steel-
toed boots
while he sleeps
in his favorite arm
chair.
– Meredith Purvis
I’ve always been captivated by poems that can stir up memories and feelings. This one, in particular, reminds me of well-oiled Redwing boots that my father always owned as I was growing up. Every year, it would be a new pair – with their fresh leather smell and pristinely smooth surfaces. Later, you would find them well-worn and creased sitting beside his reclining chair.
Dayna's father, Bryan, and her brother, Andy.
Apr 24
MeredithPoetry, Reading, Uncategorized books I want to own, books you should read, national poetry month, that new book smell, the most splendiferous poetry ever
I am a bibliophile. If you’ve ever been to my house (or been the caretaker of one of my many boxes of books while I moved from place to place over the years), you probably know this. If you live with me now, you definitely know this. In fact, you probably feel tempted to take away all my money because I can’t go anywhere near a bookstore without toting about 20 books back out with me. I acquire books with greater rapidity than I could ever possibly read them, and I tell people this is because I worry that I will forget I want to read the books if I don’t take them with me.
So, since today is a holiday, and I’m feeling stuffed to the gills with delicious food, I thought I’d give my brain a break and instead do what comes naturally to me: look for books I want to own. Then I figured I’d share a few with you, in case you’re looking for a way to start, or expand, your poetry collection.
Orange Crush: Poems, by Simone Muench
“Train track flutter girl; coriander lips and Prohibition ale. That empty mouth like a bottle on a man’s neck. Marabou soft, doe’s muzzle on a pomegranate split, ultraviolet.”
An Aquarium, by Jeffrey Yang
“You can see straight thru / an X-ray fish to its heart. / We are just as transparent / so be true, gentle, honest, just. . . .”
The Ada Poems, by Cynthia Zarin
“My heart in two / was my own heart / the coal black bird / was my own ear / that heard no sound / nor would come near / that song too dear / for me to hear.”
Lucky Fish, by Aimee Nezhukumatathil
“If a man in China can keep ten thousand dollars worth / of caterpillars in a metal box underneath his bed / for medicine, then I want to collect flakes of light / for those winter months when we go a whole week // without seeing a slice of sun.”
The Little Book of Guesses, by John Gallaher
“You can press / your enormous eye / to their window, and see them / taking it up, // becoming little red birds.”
What books are you looking forward to reading or would you recommend for others’ to-read lists?
Apr 23
MeredithPoetry, Reading, Writing building a poem, cento, danielle pafunda, national poetry month, poetry as architecture, poets and writers, writing poetry
I don’t know about you, but I’ve been following The Academy of American Poets 30 Poets 30 Days Twitter project. They’ve had some great poets guest tweeting for them. One of them, Danielle Pafunda, is hosting a cento (poems composed from the lines of other poets) contest. Throughout her day as guest Twitter-er, she tweeted 75 lines from different poems, then asked followers to compose a cento from those lines in about a day and a half.
I was loving the lines she’d chosen, so I decided to try my own. I’ve never really done this before, but it was an interesting experiment in composition, in order, in arrangement. The spirit of the cento is something new from something old, and so I was free from the stress of the words themselves–I didn’t find myself trapped in the cycle of type, delete, type, delete. Instead I was free to focus my energy on how the poem came together as a whole.
I’m sharing an excerpt from my poem below (you can see it in full here), and I encourage you to check out all the entries over at the official competition blog. There are some pretty amazing poems, and it’s interesting to see all the different ways people worked with the same initial stock of lines and even words. Thanks to Danielle Pafunda for an awesome contest idea, and for picking such great poems to work with.
For six months I arranged museum dioramas;
now I am safe in the deep V of a weekday.
Sewing up the kinks in this film, I’m
sleep-fallen, naked in your dark hair,
sleepily indifferent, because the continent
was clothed in trees, just jars of buttons spilled.
Once you’re done checking out all those awesome poems, get to work on your entry for the Poetry Out of Nothing Challenge. The deadline’s coming up on April 27, but you still have plenty of time. Tell your friends, tell your neighbors! And don’t forget about the cool prizes!
Apr 22
MeredithPoetry, Reading declamation, guest blogger, Jenny O'Grady, national poetry month, the sounds words make
I’m happy to introduce today’s guest blogger, Jenny O’Grady. She’s a dear friend and mentor to me, and one of the first people I met when I moved to Baltimore (I actually met her at a poetry reading for the Little Patuxent Review). A former newspaper reporter, Jenny now serves as director of alumni and development communications at UMBC, as well as associate editor of UMBC Magazine. By night, she teaches book arts and electronic publishing classes in the University of Baltimore’s creative writing & publishing arts MFA program, from which she earned her degree in 2006. She also edits a web-based writing and arts journal called The Light Ekphrastic. You can see more of her work at www.kineticprose.com.
It is a true treat to hear a living writer speak his or her craft.
I have had the privilege of hearing many great poets read: Seamus Heaney revealing his early thoughts on where babies come from; my teacher, Kendra Kopelke, giving voice to the women in Edward Hopper’s paintings; Mark Doty speaking spunkily to the driver of a passing car. In every case, when I later read the words on the page, they leapt from the paper as if the poet was speaking directly to me.
This is no revelation; I’m sure it happens to many readers. What does surprise me, though, is the power of reading older poems aloud, of imagining an unheard voice and connecting to the words in a strangely personal way.
I love to read poems aloud. I love “Poem in Your Pocket” day. I love random surprise recitations of classics to unsuspecting co-workers. (I’m sure they love this, too. Or not.)
One of my favorites is “Oh Captain, My Captain,” by Walt Whitman. I memorized this poem for Mrs. Cutright’s seventh grade English class in the late ’80’s, and it’s been stuck fast to my synapses ever since. I can honestly say that at the time I had very little idea of the meaning of what I was memorizing, and I probably didn’t care. I recited the poem to my class, collected my “A,” and moved on to the next cool thing.
As time passed, though, and the poem stayed with me, it became something more. Each time I speak it, I feel a mix of pride and pleasure. The pride comes from having, in effect, a virtual poem in my pocket every hour of every day; from knowing that I am helping to spread the word (literally) about an important work of art; from being able to surprise people with such an unusual bit of knowledge, and to show proof of my devotion to poetry.
These points of pride bring pleasure all their own. But, more importantly, I draw immense happiness from the physical act of speaking this poem, of feeling the words click against my teeth, the spaces between words vary on a whim. I can’t know how Walt Whitman would have spoken this himself, but I like to imagine he would have especially enjoyed saying these lines out loud:
O CAPTAIN! my Captain! our fearful trip is done;
The ship has weather’d every rack,
the prize we sought is won;
The port is near, the bells I hear, the people all exulting,
While follow eyes the steady keel, the vessel grim and daring:
But O heart! heart! heart!
O the bleeding drops of red,
Where on the deck my Captain lies,
Fallen cold and dead.
I hope you’ll try reading this aloud right now, and maybe even look at the full poem here. There are so many lovely sounds to make, so many turns, so much drama and sadness all at once.
A teenager reads things differently than an adult. When I was 12 or 13 years old, I often focused on the “O heart! heart! heart!” line, thinking it very wild and dramatic. I would flail my arms and land on my knees, acting out the discovery of a corpse. My family found it amusing.
Today, I speak it and I know better what it means. I know the history of this poem, true, but I also have an adult perspective. I have lost people, I have lost faith, I have been disappointed. And when I read it, aloud or silently, I feel these things and love the poem all the more.
Apr 21
MeredithPoetry, Writing I love deadlines and especially that wooshing sound, national p, national poetry month, Poetry out, poetry out of nothing challenge, the most splendiferous poetry ever, tips and tricks for writing
Since April 27th is practically upon us, I thought it might be a good time to see how things are going. Are you taking me up on the Poetry Out of Nothing Challenge? Have you been working on your poems? If you have, a hearty huzzah for you! If this is your first time writing poetry, or even if you’ve published ten books of poems, you deserve a cheerleader. Facing down the blank page is never easy, no matter how often you do it.
With that in mind, I thought I’d try to offer up a few helpful hints and exercises for you as you work on the challenge:
- Before you do anything, I want you to stare down that idea of Poetry (with a capital “P”) say, “I am not afraid of you!” It will feel silly, but there’s something to be said for creating your own truth. (I give myself writer’s block all the time because I get nervous that I can’t possible write a good poem. Giving myself a stern talking to has done wonders.)
- Don’t just write one poem, try writing a couple–it will give you a chance to flex your muscles a bit and take some of the pressure off because you’ll have a few to choose from.
- Grab your rhyming dictionary. Or don’t. (i.e., do what feels right for you).
- If you’re struggling for subject matter, try one of these awesome exercises:
- Think of something you do every day–something you could do in your sleep. Write out instructions for it. Make it thorough. Then break it apart into lines and stanzas–you may find a poem there.
- If lines and stanzas aren’t your thing, give prose poetry a try. Write your thoughts out in paragraph form, then just work on editing that more familiar form into something you love.
- Pick a few words or phrases. Write them down over and over and over again, until they begin to look strange to you. It’s a great way to find the rhythm and sound you might otherwise take for granted.
- Madlib your poem. Find an existing poem and pull out the nouns, adjectives, verbs, and adverbs. Fill the holes with your own words.
- Make a list of your favorite words. Then grab a thesaurus and look up some synonyms for them. Try to build a few sentences using those words you love so much and the new ones you’ve learned.
- Collect words and phrases from things you come across during the day–ads, menus, books, emails–and then jumble them all together to make your own found poem. Take liberties with your materials.
But most importantly, remember that it’s a poem because you say it’s a poem, not because it meets some invisible and complex set of rules and standards. Happy writing!
Do you have any writing tips or tricks you use when you need help getting started? Then share them here–I’d love to hear them, and so would your companions in this challenge!
***Feeling fuzzy on the Poetry Out of Nothing Challenge details? Find out more here.******
Apr 20
MeredithPoetry, Reading, Writing David Orr, don't forget to take the challenge, I think John Donne and Dr. Seuss would be pleased to find themselves thrown together in this post, national poetry month, poetry for breakfast, poetry out of nothing challenge, wearing grooves in my favorite stanzas
I started my poetry blogging tradition for several reasons, but one of the most important was that outside of my creative writing classes, I knew few people who liked or even regularly read poetry. I felt, rather naively, that it was my mission to make people see the value in verse.
But while it’s true that there are plenty of people out there who can’t understand why anyone would bother with poetry, one of the things I’ve learned is that a lot of I know do in fact acknowledge that poetry has value, but they struggle with feeling intimidated or stumped by poetry. And, let’s face it, most of us avoid that which intimidates us. I’ve had several conversations lately that affirmed that for me, and Lizzy’s candid post did, I think, a fantastic job of sharing what it’s like to feel firmly outside of poetry but to find a way in.
Then, today, I started reading a book called Beautiful & Pointless: A Guide to Modern Poetry, by David Orr. In the intro, he said something that felt wholly true to me:
“It might therefore help to change our idea of what learning about poetry should be like in the first place. After all, if there’s one thing that often unites academic treatments and how-to guides, it’s the implicit assumption that relating to poetry is like solving a calculus problem while being zapped with a cattle prod–that is the dull business of poetic interpretation . . . is coupled uneasily with testimonials announcing poetry’s ability to derange the senses, make us lose ourselves in rapture, dance naked under the full moon and so forth. We seem trapped between a tediously mechanical view of poems and an unjustifiably shamanistic view of poetry itself. . . . it’s not necessarily helpful to talk about poetry as if it were a device to be assembled or a religious experience to be undergone. Rather, it would be useful to talk about poetry as if it were, for example, Belgium.”
Orr goes on to explain that what he means by thinking of poetry as if it were Belgium is that we should approach it just like we would a trip to a new place. We don’t plan a vacation to somewhere we’ve never been thinking we’ll know everything before we get there, he posits. Instead, we brush up on some important phrases, check out a couple guide books, pack for a variety of activities. We accept that there will be bumps in the road, that we may get lost a time or two. In fact, not only do we accept it, we strive to embrace it, because we know that in our exploration, we’ll find new and wonderful things.
I love Orr’s metaphor because it made me think about my semester abroad in Spain. When I arrived in Salamanca in August 2004, I had nowhere to stay, I wasn’t enrolled in a single class, and I felt, at best, timid in the language. My first day there, I found myself reduced to tears and begging to come home–I’m sure my mom will remember that phone call. As much as I wanted to be there, as much as I had worked to prepare myself, there was still so much for me to learn, so much for me to do, and it was scary.
But you know what? It worked out: within a week, I had rented a flat, built a full course schedule, and I was already getting better at the language. So, my initial fears and worries out of the way, I spent the next four months immersing myself in that city. I came to love watching the Salmantinos out for their evening walks. I began to feel a certain ownership over the winding, cobblestone street that led to the Río Tormes. I discovered the Casa Lis, a museum with a blue, stained-glass facade that was my favorite place in the entire city. I people-watched in the grocery store and realized that was the place I would really find Spain. I struck up a friendship with the owner of my neighborhood panadería. Even now, I can call to mind the kitchen from my flat, the path I took daily to school.
I think Orr is right, and I know at least a few other people who would agree with him. Although we can (and, perhaps, even should) rhapsodize about the moving, living experience that is poetry or analyze lines and stanzas at the most minute level, mining them for structure and meaning, that’s not how any of us started with poetry, not really. We came to poetry with a little bit of guts, a bunch of trepidation, and, most importantly, the hope that we would find something worth sticking around for. So tonight I wanted to share some excerpts from a couple of my well-worn favorites with you–these are poems that I love without regard for my ability to analyze them or even understand them. I love them not because of the value given to them by society or academia. I love them because I let myself enter them as I would a foreign country–with trepidation but also with excitement–and I found places I wanted to come back and visit as often as I could.
John Donne’s “The Cannonization”
We can die by it, if not live by love,
And if unfit for tombs and hearse
Our legend be, it will be fit for verse;
And if no piece of chronicle we prove,
We’ll build in sonnets pretty rooms;
As well a well-wrought urn becomes
The greatest ashes, as half-acre tombs,
And by these hymns, all shall approve
Us canonized for love.
(read the poem in it’s entirety)
Dr. Seuss’s “Oh! The Places You’ll Go”
You’ll get mixed up, of course, as you already know. You’ll get mixed up with many strange birds as you go. So be sure when you step. Step with care and great tact and remember that Life’s a Great Balancing Act. Just never forget to be dexterous and deft. And never mix up your right foot with your left.
And will you succeed?
Yes! You will, indeed!
(98 and ¾ percent guaranteed.)
Kid, you’ll move mountains!
(read the poem in it’s entirety)
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Poetry Out of Nothing Challenge
There’s still time to enter the Poetry Out of Nothing Challenge! Everyone who participates will be featured on this blog and, even better, we’ll open it up for folks to vote on their favorite poems. We’ve got awesome prizes for the winners! Remember to submit your poem by April 27. Learn more!
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