The Previous Exercise: So, How'd It Go?

A few posts back, I posted an exercise as a challenge (see June 7, 2013).  As a teacher I always try to do my own assignments, so I thought I would post a sample of my exercise and encourage readers to do the same.  It is rough; I have done only minimal editing.  So here it is.  And please, post your own.

Biking At Night

Riding the bike through the first neighborhood, I disappear into another world.  The houses are lit up from the inside and the outside, a stage set, like Disney World or Santa Land.  I am biking by them but I am apart, part of another world yet.  Deep.  And cold.  The dips in the road hold a cooler air.  I am breathing in the night, lit by the moon or by my Cat Eye bike light.  My mother is afraid.  She does not like for me to bike at night.  My grandfather used to offer to give me a ride (the quarter of a mile home to my own house).  He is dead now.  I am alive.  Alive in the night.  The world holds me.  I am torn: which way to go?  Down Hatcher?  The road is bumpy, crumbling, enacting Earth’s repo plan.  Besides, Hatcher takes me down past St. Joseph’s cemetery, the one where my great uncle used to let the kids loose and disappear.  At night. Or the Heritage Trail?  Smoother, but still a cemetery.  I cannot take the middle way—Hanging Rock—the police officer chastised me last time (after he handed me my fallen bananas).  I decide on Heritage, put my left arm out to signal.  Sirens tell me that there is an officer racing down Hanging Rock.  Good thing I didn’t go that way.  Passing the valley of the white wooden crosses, I hear what at first I think must be another siren.  Soon I realize it is not a siren, but coyotes.  Their cries could be mistaken for neighborhood dogs, almost, but they tangle and wind the way domestication would not.  A shiver runs through my body that has nothing to do with cold.  I pedal harder.  Around the next curve is a deer.  This time I do not jump (as I did last week, knocking the tail light from my seat post as the deer fled, white tails raised in alarm).  No, this time, neither of us flinches.  The doe watches me glide by.  I watch her.  We see each other we are alive at the same time I turn descend the pavement tilts the bike and me with it IdonotrunofftheroadIaccelerateIamcoldIamcolderIamalive.

Gabrielle Calvocoressi’s The Last Time I Saw Amelia Earhart: An Example for How to Use Persona Poems to Write about History and Current Events

I live on the Ohio River, and outside my bedroom window I have been watching the construction of a new bridge. It is the only bridge on this part of the river for roughly 40 miles, so it is significant in many ways to my community. The importance of this new bridge, as well as the old one, has inspired numerous poems lately, and I hope to compile them into a chapbook.

I have mostly explored the bridge from the first person point of view, and all the poems are rooted in my personal experience. I have some familial ties to the history of the old bridge, currently being demolished, and I have personal ties to individuals working on the new bridge. As I dive deeper into this project, I have considered using the persona poem to add depth and complexity to this subject.

Gabrielle Calvocoressi’s The Last Time I Saw Amelia Earhart recently inspired me. In particular, in her cycle of persona poems surrounding the disappearance of Amelia Earhart, Calvocoressi is able to use unique, historical perspectives to explore universal themes.  In poem V. of the “Amelia Earhart” cycle, “Doris Luman, housewife,” a witness poem becomes a meditation on loss from the perspective of a wife and mother. The speaker is responding to the news of Earhart’s disappearance and nonchalantly discusses loss as an everyday occurrence. One immediately thinks of Elizabeth Bishop’s “One Art,” wherein the poet claims loss is not a disaster, although it may seem to be at times.  The first line of Calvocoressi’s poem is similar:

It’s easy to lose someone. Last

week, walking my son to school,

I turned away for a second.

The next thing I know he’s in the street. (1-4).

In this poem, the housewife is clearly more concerned with what is happening in her domestic sphere than with public figures.  Choosing the housewife as one of the personas allows Calvocoressi to take the exploration of loss to an unexpected place: the home. The ultimate human notion of safety revolves around the home, and the speaker in this poem is turning that notion on its head. The poem moves inward, and the meditation on loss dives into the themes of safety and permanence:

           

You can lose a person at home

            In the safest possible place,

            a place you could walk blindfolded.

that’s why I wasn’t surprised

when that woman got lost. (12-16)

The speaker refers to Earhart as “that woman,” a telling detail in the speaker’s reaction to the news of Earhart’s disappearance. Tragedies happen in the sky and they happen inside the home, and it is not the magnitude of the setting that dictates the severity of its effects the human mind.

These poems lend a personal context to the events surrounding a celebrity. By using different personas to look at Earhart’s disappearance, Calvocoressi allows room for truths to emerge that speak to the human condition and go well beyond the historical event. If the poet had only allowed her own reactions to Earhart’s story to be the subject of these poems, they would be missing the depth and diversity of human experience that gives these poems their universal appeal.

I hope that my bridge poems can explore my particular experience with a highly public happening while achieving some kind of balance with those themes on a universal level. Reading Calvocoressi’s persona poems, I was moved to reach deeper into my speakers’ dreams, memories and, sometimes, darkest thoughts. Diving into the subconscious via the persona poems in the style of Calvocoressi seems like a promising avenue to take my “bridge poems” to the next level. 

Angela Elles is a resident of Madison, Indiana. A mom, wife, teacher, and student, Angela teaches at Ivy Tech Community College and is pursuing an MFA in Poetry at Spalding University.

Claire Everett's New Tanka Collection, Reviewed by Haiku Guru Barry George

twelve moons by Claire Everett  Introduction by David Terelinck. Perfect bound; 76 pages. ISBN: 978-1-4781539-5-5. $14.75 US. Available at https://www.createspace.com/3923071.

What is distinctive about Claire Everett's twelve moons is that her tanka do not merely juxtapose the natural and personal worlds; they interfuse the two.

            passing sun

            what of me is flame

            taking hold

            and what of me is timeless

            like this rock, briefly warm?

The poet compares herself directly to the images of nature; she is the sun's flame and the rock. The metaphor is woven into all five lines of the tanka. Indeed, a transmutation is at work, as the following makes explicit:

            transformed

            by the breath of your love

            I am no longer sand

            scattered to the wind

            but the beauty of blown glass

In other cases, the interconnection between the poet and nature involves several images.

            and when my thoughts

            have followed the rosewood grain

            of sunset

            swirling dark from the eaves

            pipistrelles

Thoughts that become one with the texture of the fading sky, and then begin to focus on a darker motion around the eves, suddenly take shape - as bats.

Or, in the poet's contemplation, prompted by a similarity in shape, one image might morph into an entirely different one.

            by candlelight

            watching incense twist and curl

            as shadow

            the double helix uncoils,

            the illness passed down the line

Closely allied with this interfusion of thought and images is the the intermingling of senses, or synesthesia, which Everett sometimes employs.

            in silence

            deeper than the scent

            of pine

            we listen

            for the eyes of the deer

Here sound, smell, and silence work both as separate senses and as aspects of one combined perception.

As the title suggests, twelve moons, is organized seasonally. Each individual tanka takes on added resonance as it is grouped under one of the traditional names for the twelve full moons. The range of subjects includes motherhood, marriage, love, discord, disappointment, injury, illness, and mourning. Time is a persistent theme.

            son of mine

            what's done is done...

            seed by seed, I'd breathe

            back the dandelion clock,

            place its stem in your hand

The foregoing poem also exemplifies the tension Everett achieves with the sounds, rhythms, and pacing of words. So too does this one:

            no greater peace

            than the deep green

            silence of the trees

            when the breeze

            has moved on

Note the long "e" sounds in every line but the last one­­­ - when the (long-e) breeze has moved on - as well as the way changes of pace and even syncopation are used to advantage.

This is a collection to be savored as much for the richness of its imagery as for its finely crafted form. For all the intricacy implicit in their design, the tanka in twelve moons remind us that the best poetry often seems disarmingly and marvelously simple.

            after our walk

            with such tenderness

            you brushed

            the clouds

            out of my hair

Barry George’s haiku and tanka have been published in leading journals and anthologies. His essay, "Shiki the Tanka Poet," appeared in The Writer's Chronicle, and poems from Wrecking Ball and Other Urban Haiku, were nominated for a Pushcart Prize. He lives and teaches in Philadelphia.

Writing Exercise: "Poems and the Body"

Dear Readers,

As one of our regular offerings, we will post exercises we have tried or want to try.  I was skimming through PoemCrazy by Susan Goldsmith Wooldridge, a book I often walk past and wish I were opening, when I came to Chapter 24, "Poems and the Body."  I am working on a series of body poems, so it applies to my current project.  But I also thought I would share it here as a means of challenging myself and our readers to try one of these exercises.

"To reach one of the places poems come from," writes Woolridge, "I need to swim underwater, stay up all night or look at things upside down or sideways to tap both my alert, conscious self and my unconscious.  I need to delve into my sleep; do and see things from an altered perspective.  This not only helps me write poems, it can open up my life" (88).  Summer seems to be a natural time for waking up the body.  We wear less clothing, smell more smells, walk barefoot, swim, hike.  We remember our bodies.

In order to "tap" both spheres-- the conscious and the unconscious-- Woolridge offers a long list of possible prompts.  Here is a small sampling:

Stand on your head for as long as possible.  Notice details upside down.  Look in a mirror. Write.

Dance. Write...

Hang out with a dog, cat, horse or bird.  Feel the animal's fur or feathers and let yourself move into creature consciousness.  A grasshopper will do.  Write from his point of view.

Listen to your breath.  Be aware that it's automatic and that breathing, being alive, is effortless.  Write a poem about your breathing.

Write a poem of hunger or food....

Do anything new.  It will open you up to feel, see, write and be something new.  (90)

So.  I challenge you to try one of these or make up your own body-poem exercise.  As Molly Peacock says, a poet's job is to bring the reader back into her body.  Let's do it.  Feel free to post the results here.  Or write about the process.  Was it easy?  Was it difficult?  Which parts?  Why?

Looking forward to hearing from you,
jk

Sonja de Vries

One of the best things about having a book is the book swap.  At Spalding's Homecoming, I swapped books with Sonja de Vries and came home (this time literally) with a lovely little collection that I am just beginning to dive into.  The chapbook, Planting a Garden in Baghdad, is a book about current conflict, yes, but it begins by looking back.  And it does not speak of war so much in sweeping terms, but on a human scale.  The primary unit of this book is the human body.

In Amsterdam, Hunger Winter 1944, the body becomes a grazer, a forager:

Late at night, everyone asleep,
I stood in the kitchen enjoying
the quiet, nibbling like a mouse
on potato skins and dry root vegetables.
They tasted like nothing;
air with a crunch, wind with a
body, but I liked the feeling of
their flesh in my mouth.
I imagined it was the flesh of
a young soldier, his
upper thighs, smooth and salty
thrumming with blood.  My
stomach rumbled, I swallowed
the last skin, slipped
back into bed, next to the warm
bodies of my brother and sister.

The language of the poem is spare, pared down, as its subject and as life must necessarily be during war time.  The body is an animal but the being (the narrator) is an animal endowed with language.  So she nibbles like a mouse, but since she is aware of her mousiness, she is not a mouse at all.  Though she tastes nothing, she still gives the taste particularity, as "air with a crunch, wind with a/ body..."  Even the air has become a body.  The skins of the root vegetables become the skin of the soldier.  The hierarchy of existence blurs and the barriers between elements and organisms matter less, separation falls away, and the connectedness of everything rises to the foreground.  Just when things seems most segregated-- soldier from civilian, the desire for food from the desire for flesh, waking from sleeping-- the parts come together and the whole, always there, always in balance, is apparent. 

The vehicle for this reunion of dichotomies is the imagination, which is the driving force behind this poem in the first place.  By choosing the first person point of view, de Vries supplies the necessary imagination to bring the reader not into a historical account but rather one that seems more immediate.  Such is the wonder of this book.  The small seed of each poem casts roots down into the dirt of history but also sprouts and branches into the air of the present.  I am looking forward to reading more.

---

Sonja de Vries is a Kentucky-born writer, filmmaker, and radical social justice activist.  She believes that art is integral to creating a deep and lasting transformation of society.  She lives on a farm outside Louisville where she grows food and raises chickens.  She lives with her youngest son Devlin and partner Beth; her oldest sons, musician Shadwick Wilde and Jake de Vries, live in Louisville.

Homecoming 2013 at Spalding University

Today I am excited to be traveling back to Louisville for Spalding's Homecoming events.  First, there is the celebration of recently published works, including the books of David Harrity, Charlotte Rains Dixon, Sandi Hutcheson, Chris Mattingly, Brittany K. Fonte, Ann Eskridge, and Loreen Niewenhuis.  Check out this link for profiles, author photos, and the full schedule: Celebration of Recently Published Books 2013.

Expect a review of one or more of these books very soon!

Also upcoming: interviews (it could be you) and submissions (join the conversation).

As always, thank you for reading,
jk