G: Ghosts That Need Reminding

by Dana Levin (1965— )

Photo credit: mimicry from morguefile.com

Through shattered glass and sheeted furniture, chicken
wire and piled dishes, sheared-off doors stacked five to a
wall, you're walking like cripples. Toward a dirty window,
obstructed by stacks of chairs.

And once you move them, one by one, palm circles through
the grime and cup your hands round your faces, finally able
to see through—

Charged night. Sheet-flashes of green, threaded with sparks,
the pale orange pan of the moon—

Finally, what turns the wheel: the moon ghosting a hole
through a rainbow, the rainbow's rage to efface the moon,
which the moon sails through slow as a ship, in the shape of
cross-legged Buddha...

Lotus-folded, a figurine. The kind you once found in the
Chinatown markets, for a dollar and a dime—

Saying you're dying, you're dead. You can withdraw from this
orbit of mirrors.

Source: poets.org

I was first drawn to this piece because of the way it engages with everyday objects and has such a lovely melodic flow of sound and rhythm--"pale orange pan of the moon."

But when it came to interpretation, well,  I admit I was rather at a loss for some time. It's easy to let these sorts of interpretive puzzles scare one off of poetry entirely. But some of the most interesting ideas have layers, and the best way to express them is through figures of speech including allusion and metaphor.

With that in mind, I examined the poem again, looking for recurrent images and themes, as well as references to larger ideas or works (allusions). A few recurrent images are of mess/ruin, night, and things that mediate our views (dirty window, mirror). I think the key to unlocking the set of symbols here is the Buddha figure, and what he represents.

My knowledge of Buddhism is limited to an undergraduate comparative religions course. But I do know that a core concept is the idea that this present world is an illusion and that to attain enlightenment, one must enter a state of oneness with the universal life in which there is no division, no individual. This piece is a meditation on finding enlightenment--understanding "what turns the wheel" (of Dharma) and knowing that "you can withdraw from this / orbit of mirrors." I'm sure far more could be said by someone who's well versed in the teachings of Buddhism. (If you are, please chime in).

I'm sharing this poem with you, and my rudimentary process for puzzling it out, to illustrate some important things about poetry. First, if you don't immediately "get" a poem, don't despair. Poets' networks of symbol and meaning often can be "decoded," at least a little, if you're willing to take the time. Second, it can be very helpful creatively to read outside your own intellectual and religious tradition. Levin's approach to expressing big ideas is an intriguing one.

How do you approach a piece of art that's initially not easy to understand? What's your take on this poem? Which lines or images stand out to you?


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F: Freeing Your Life with Words

Excerpt from Poemcrazy: Freeing Your Life with Words
by Susan Wooldridge

photo by Linzi, morguefile.com

I have a strong gathering instinct. I collect boxes, hats, rusty flattened bottlecaps for collages and creek-worn sticks to color with my hoard of Berol prismacolor pencils. When I was a kid I’d lie in bed imagining I was a squirrel who lived in a hollow tree, foraging for acorns, twigs and whatever it takes to make squirrel furniture.

Most of us have collections. I ask people all the time in workshops, Do you collect anything? Stamps? Shells? ’57 Chevys? Raccoons? Money? Leopards ? Meteorites? Wisecracks? What a coincidence, I collect them too. Hats, coins, cougars, old Studebakers. That is, I collect the words. Pith helmet, fragment, Frigidaire, Quarrel, love seat, lily. I gather them into my journal.

The great thing about collecting words is they’re free; you can borrow them, trade them in, or toss them out. I’m trading in (and literally composting) some of my other collections—driftwood, acorns and bits of colored Eater egg shell—for words. Words are lightweight, unbreakable, portable, and they’re everywhere. You can even make them up. Frebrent, bezoncular, zuber. Someone made up the word padiddle.

A word can trigger or inspire a poem; and words in a stack or thin list can make up poems. Because I always carry my journal with me, I’m likely to jot down words on trains, in the car, at boring meetings (where I appear to be taking notes), on hikes and in bed....

When I’m playing with words, I don’t worry about sounding  dumb or crazy. And I don’t worry about whether or not I’m  writing “a poem” word pool. world pool, wild pool, whipoorwill, swing. Words taken out of the laborious structures (like this sentence) where we normally place them take on a spinning life of their own.

Exercises: 

• Toss words, say them, sing them, chant, notice and let yourself get excited about them 
• Collect nouns and verbs especially. We want the heart and guts: blood, sweat and tears. We want the action: lure, slink, release, trickle, churn 
• Label things strangely. Put lightning on a shoe, trigger on a stone. Label a car, spoon. This turns everything upside down and loosens us up. 
• Pair verbs with nouns. You might wind up with a tarantula spin or table exiting the long room 
• Collect words for things you love. Mix these with your verbs. 
• Create a word ocean for your classroom 
• Create your personal universe of language that includes at least one word that’s an important abstraction, like truth.

Source: Poemcrazy: freeing your life with words. Chapters 3 and 4.

If you were to start collecting words today, what are some favorites you'd add first? 


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E: Eye and Tooth

by Robert Lowell (1944-77)

photo by Sebastian Ritter, wikimedia commons

I chain-smoked through the night,
learning to flinch
at the flash of the matchlight.

Outside, the summer rain,
a simmer of rot and renewal,
fell in pinpricks.
Even new life is fuel.

My eyes throb.
Nothing can dislodge
the house with my first tooth
noosed in a knot to the doorknob.

Nothing can dislodge
the triangular blotch
of rot on the red roof,
a cedar hedge, or the shade of a hedge.

No ease from the eye
of the sharp-shinned hawk in the birdbook there,
with reddish-brown buffalo hair
on its shanks, one asectic talon

clasping the abstract imperial sky.
It says:
an eye for an eye,
a tooth for a tooth.

No ease for the boy at the keyhole,
his telescope,
when the women's white bodies flashed
in the bathroom. Young, my eyes began to fail.

Nothing! No oil
for the eye, nothing to pour
on those waters or flames.
I am tired. Everyone's tired of my turmoil.


Lowell's use of sound patterns assonance really makes this piece sing. Note the assonance (repeated vowel sounds), like the a in flash...matchlight and the oo in tooth / noosed. I also admire the ch, j, sh consonance repeated in the stanzas (blotch, hedge, sharp-shinned, reddish) and the textural interplay of dryness and wetness in the imagery.

What lines or images stand out to you?


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D: Dash it

Arranged by Annie Dillard (1945 —)
from Mikhail Prishvin, Nature’s Diary, 1925

Photo by messy cook at wikimedia commons

How wonderfully it was all arranged that each
Of us had not too long to live.  This is one
Of the main snags—the shortness of the day.
The whole wood was whispering, “Dash it, dash it . . .”

What joy—to walk along that path!  The snow
Was so fragrant in the sun!  What a fish!
Whenever I think of death, the same stupid
Question arises:  “What’s to be done?”

As for myself, I can only speak of what
Made me marvel when I saw it for the first time.
I remember my own youth when I was in love.
I remember a puddle rippling, the insects aroused.

I remember our own springtime when my lady told me:
You have taken my best.  And then I remember
How many evenings I have waited, how much
I have been through for this one evening on earth.

Mornings Like This: Found Poems.  New York: Harper Perennial, 1996. 1.


Today's poem comes from a poetic genre that unapologetically makes borrowing its raison d'être [reason for being, a very handy French phrase when you want to sound cosmopolitan :-)]. As the byline says, this piece is "arranged" by the living poet Annie Dillard. The raw material from which she built the piece, however, is someone else's writing. This kind of poem is called "found poetry"

Found Poetry, as the Wikipedia article defines it, is "a type of poetry created by taking words, phrases, and sometimes whole passages from other sources and reframing them as poetry by making changes in spacing and lines, or by adding or deleting text, thus imparting new meaning. The resulting poem can be defined as either treated: changed in a profound and systematic manner; or untreated: virtually unchanged from the order, syntax and meaning of the original."

Found poems, in other words, take other people's texts and jiggers them into poetry, either by simply altering the line breaks and such, or by mashing together snippets.

This is clearly one of the least intimidating types of poetry to try yourself. Gather and cobble, and voila, poetry.

Is this something you'd be willing to try? Where might you find inspiring source material? 

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C: Constantly Risking Absurdity

By Lawrence Ferlinghetti (1919 —)

Photo by Quinn Dombrowski, wikimedia commons

Constantly risking absurdity

                                             and death

            whenever he performs

                                        above the heads

                                                            of his audience

   the poet like an acrobat

                                 climbs on rime

                                          to a high wire of his own making

and balancing on eyebeams

                                     above a sea of faces

             paces his way

                               to the other side of day

    performing entrechats

                               and sleight-of-foot tricks

and other high theatrics

                               and all without mistaking

                     any thing

                               for what it may not be

       For he's the super realist

                                     who must perforce perceive

                   taut truth

                                 before the taking of each stance or step

in his supposed advance

                                  toward that still higher perch

where Beauty stands and waits

                                     with gravity

                                                to start her death-defying leap

      And he

             a little charleychaplin man

                                           who may or may not catch

               her fair eternal form

                                     spreadeagled in the empty air

                  of existence

This piece is what's called ars poetica, "art of poetry," a poem that explores the nature poetry as an art. Here Ferlinghetti compares a poet to a tightrope circus performer or one of the fearless welders who assembles the beams in high rises.

The way the lines are precariously balanced on the page further reinforces the ideas Ferlinghetti is exploring, visually recreating the balance pole tightrope walkers use.

What lines or images strike you?

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B: Belly Good

by Marge Piercy (1936 —)

A heap of wheat, says the Song of Songs
but I've never seen wheat in a pile.
Apples, potatoes, cabbages, carrots
make lumpy stacks, but you are sleek
as a seal hauled out in the winter sun.
I can see you as a great goose egg
or a single juicy and fully ripe peach.
You swell like a natural grassy hill.
You are symmetrical as a Hopewell mound,

photo by Karpati Gabor, morguefile.com

with the eye of the navel wide open,
the eye of my apple, the pear's port
window. You're not supposed to exist
at all this decade. You're to be flat
as a kitchen table, so children with
roller skates can speed over you
like those sidewalks of my childhood
that each gave a different roar under
my wheels. You're required to show
muscle striations like the ocean
sand at ebb tide, but brick hard.
Clothing is not designed for women
of whose warm and flagrant bodies
you are a swelling part. Yet I confess
I meditate with my hands folded on you,
a maternal cushion radiating comfort.
Even when I have been at my thinnest,
you have never abandoned me but curled
round as a sleeping cat under my skirt.
When I spread out, so do you. You like
to eat, drink and bang on another belly.
In anxiety I clutch you with nervous fingers
as if you were a purse full of calm.
In my grandmother standing in the fierce sun
I see your cauldron that held eleven children
shaped under the tent of her summer dress.
I see you in my mother at thirty
in her flapper gear, skinny legs
and then you knocking on the tight dress.
We hand you down like a prize feather quilt.
You are our female shame and sunburst strength.

source: PoemHunter.com

This piece by living poet Marge Piercy is a form called apostrophe--poetry addressed to an absent person, or to an idea or object; in this case, a belly swollen because of pregnancy. Many of Piercy's poems focus on female experience and feminist causes. She uses lots of sound devices, like off-rhyme (curled /... skirt), consonance ("ripe peach") and assonance ("sleek / as a seal"). In free verse like this, the words sounds poetic together without the sing-song feeling you can get with strictly metered and rhymed formal verse of ages past.

I admire Piercy's ability to mix humor with a deeper meditation on female embodiment. These lines speak to the pressure put on women to be model-thin that's at odds with motherhood, and the natural changes that accompany it: "You're not supposed to exist / at all this decade. You're to be flat  / as a kitchen table, so children with  / roller skates can speed over you." The irony here is quite pointed. How can children exist to roller skate if it weren't for mothers with non-flat bellies?

What lines or images strike you?

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A: An Almost Made Up Poem

by Charles Bukowski (1920-1994)

Photo credit: alexfrance from morguefile.com

I see you drinking at a fountain with tiny
blue hands, no, your hands are not tiny
they are small, and the fountain is in France
where you wrote me that last letter and
I answered and never heard from you again.
you used to write insane poems about
ANGELS AND GOD, all in upper case, and you
knew famous artists and most of them
were your lovers, and I wrote back, it’ all right,
go ahead, enter their lives, I’ not jealous
because we’ never met. we got close once in
New Orleans, one half block, but never met, never
touched. so you went with the famous and wrote
about the famous, and, of course, what you found out
is that the famous are worried about
their fame –– not the beautiful young girl in bed
with them, who gives them that, and then awakens
in the morning to write upper case poems about
ANGELS AND GOD. we know God is dead, they’ told
us, but listening to you I wasn’ sure. maybe
it was the upper case. you were one of the
best female poets and I told the publishers,
editors, “ her, print her, she’ mad but she’
magic. there’ no lie in her fire.” I loved you
like a man loves a woman he never touches, only
writes to, keeps little photographs of. I would have
loved you more if I had sat in a small room rolling a
cigarette and listened to you piss in the bathroom,
but that didn’ happen. your letters got sadder.
your lovers betrayed you. kid, I wrote back, all
lovers betray. it didn’ help. you said
you had a crying bench and it was by a bridge and
the bridge was over a river and you sat on the crying
bench every night and wept for the lovers who had
hurt and forgotten you. I wrote back but never
heard again. a friend wrote me of your suicide
3 or 4 months after it happened. if I had met you
I would probably have been unfair to you or you
to me. it was best like this.

source: PoemHunter.com

It's day 1 of the A-Z challenge, and in honor of National Poetry Month, I'll be talking poetry, from the wry and colloquial to the deep and sublime, and everything in between. I'll share some of my own work, some favorite writing tools, and introduce you to poets and forms you might not have heard of.

Today's poem is by a German-born poet who made his home in Los Angeles and wrote about the ordinary lives of poor Americans. This piece is a wonderful example of his style, how he captures the cadence of ordinary speech through repetition, dialect (like the dropped-out endings in possessives and contractions) and colloquialisms. His image of romantic stability is so very ordinary, so visceral--placidly rolling cigarettes, hearing your beloved use the bathroom.  There's a lovely sadness here, of possibilities never realized, as the persona considers this woman he knows about but never met, who wrote "insane poems" and "got sadder" until she took her own life. This piece, though not particularly fancy-sounding, is a poetic from called an elegy--a poem that honors the dead--using a figure of speech called apostrophe--addressing an idea, object, or absent person.

Poetry doesn't have to rhyme, and it doesn't have to be difficult to understand or full of SAT vocabulary. What it does require is densely-layered images and meaning. Bukowski achieves this, oddly enough, by evoking ordinary folk through imitating their speech patterns. My favorite line is "I loved you / like a man loves a woman he never touches...."

What lines or images stand out to you?

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