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Tag: modern life
IPM 2MXI – Una Selva Oscura
Dante’s Divine Comedy took him thirteen years to write. I’m not a Dante scholar so I don’t know, but I think he probably revised, crossed things out, rewrote and re-composed over the course of those 13 years and the poem still sings, still makes me blush, and cracks my heart with fear. Dante’s work is, in part, my answer to Charles Bukowski’s so you want to be a writer as it was my answer to two young Latvian poets that I met while living in the hills outside of Florence who asked me: You’re a poet, tell us, it all has to come out in a burst of passion that burns onto the page, yes? Well looking at Dante, and Shakespeare, and William Carlos Williams…no, in part.
The other part of the answer is yes: this is how poetry is: blood and fire, especially when you’re a young poet. Some poets write like this for a lifetime. I am not such a poet, nor am I bound to become a titan of World Literature. I’m about 13 years younger than Dante was when he died, incidentally – just as he finished up Paradiso. I may yet have a Divine Comedy somewhere in me but I doubt it.
I can say that in my life, words have become dense and encrusted with associations over the years. Sometimes I need a poetic structure to bear their weight, to keep them from collapsing in on themselves so that the song of each word can be heard. Other times they do fly out suddenly, as light as startled birds and I have to stop in a parking lot or in the middle of cooking dinner and pen them down, sometimes I don’t and I lose them. Sometimes I write down a bustling crowd of dense images and a year later begin the process of picking the poems out, finding that what I thought was one poem turns out to be three. It is work; but what joyous, intense, full work.
So I write, other poets write, each with their own motives and methods. You read and the poem sings to you, or it doesn’t. We’re all trying: poets to give you, the reader, the gift of an image that cannot be offered in any better way, that cracks you a bit and frees something; you readers are giving us the gift of your searching, your curiosity, your attention. This month we have a proliferation of gifts to offer, I hope that you will find something in the next 28 days that sings to you.
Buona lettura e grazie,
Bonnie M. McClellan
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IPM 2MXI – Rhyme’s Reason: the lure of form
Since my tumble for the Romantic poets in high school, I had been writing in Free Verse, not the kind that gives poetry a bad name:
“a kind of free verse
without any special
constraints on it except
those imposed by
the notion – also
generally accepted – that
the strip the lines
make as they run
down the page (the
familiar strip with the
jagged
right-hand edge) not
be too wide”
– John Hollander from Rhyme’s Reason: A Guide to English Verse
But the kind that any poet with half a wit will recognize as taking a bit of work: with internal rhyme, intentional rhythm, and subtle resonances within the meaning of words from line to line. I wouldn’t own any of it now, but that is more because of the subject matter: painfully romantic and introspective… impossibly beautiful loves, broken hearts left, battered and beating in lonely silence. Not that one shouldn’t write about those things; it’s just that one has to do so really well in order to overcome the built-in triteness waiting to clog up the poetry with a nasty mix of sugar and blood. I wasn’t that good.
I abandoned Byron and found a new love: William Carlos Williams. I scrawled out his poem This is just to say on part of a paper grocery sack and stuck it to my boyfriend’s refrigerator knowing that he would understand it as the passionate expression of affection that it was. I flirted with Dylan Thomas, Rilke, and Neruda while maintaining an abiding respect for the acid bite of Dorothy Parker and the amazing craftsmanship of Edna St. Vincent Millay. When the same young man left both me and his refrigerator to go off to art school on the east coast it was her : “Not in a silver casket cool with pearls,“ that I gave him (along with my broken heart) as a parting gift.
I got older. I kept writing. I turned 30.
Somewhere in the late 90’s I got bored with my life (work, eat, watch TV, shop, do the same things with the same friends: repeat); so, I started taking ‘extension courses’ at Southern Methodist University. I signed up for: Introduction to Philosophy, Intermediate Conversational French, Organic Landscaping. The classes were at night, after work; there were no grades. It was another way to use the only reward that I got for working so hard at my job: money.
It seemed like a good investment. For $74.00 I got a few hours of interesting information and conversation two or three days a week for six weeks. Introduction to Philosophy was fascinating, exhilarating; Organic Landscaping helped me cure the bald patches in the lawn of my rental house and left it smelling of tropical islands and pancake syrup. I had though I might have been overreaching with Intermediate Conversational French but found that none of the other students even knew the passé composé and I ended up both bored and feeling a bit sorry for the professor.
A new brochure for the next round of courses came out: Writing Poetry in Metered Verse. I was excited, I would learn how to construct a sonnet: then if I wanted to I could. I would meet other grown-ups who were interested in doing the same (an audience!). We were in 14, the professor was Martha Heimburg. She helped us work through the text: John Hollander’s Rhyme’s Reason: A Guide to English Verse and shepherded us into the world of the Deep Ellum poetry slam (a profound disillusionment for me) and submitting our fledgling work to literary journals. More importantly for me, she introduced us to the work of Sharon Olds and Wallace Stevens. I looked at the poems of these writers not with adoration but with curiosity.
I wrote my first sonnet, my first roundel, my first shaped poem. I met with a firey-haired fellow student at the Inwood Bar and drank martini’s while writing exquisite corpse poetry on cocktail napkins. I sent envelopes full of poems off to prestigious and not so prestigious literary journals and in due time got them back with polite and not so polite rejection slips. I switched the poems out and tried again. I kept writing. They came back again. I took a class in book-making, compiled my own work into a small book, made 14 hand-bound copies which I gave away to friends and family. I fell out of love with poetry. I still liked it but who needed the heartache? Occasionally I rearranged the words from my magnetic poetry kit on the refrigerator.
Then, in the middle of the road of my life, I met HIM…I mean, I’d run across him before but I’d been too young to see how attractive he really was: charmingly fragile and filled with self-doubt, bitterly intelligent, and he’d built this huge, fabulous thing, designed it and tied the words to it…and it SANG, and then something inside of me broke and sang back; it hurt. And then it made me blush with the pleasure of reading language tied so intimately to form.
It changed me, unhinged the order of things, made me stop trying to force the language to ‘do what I wanted it to do’ and to start forming an intimate relationship with words and structures in which publication and attention were no longer a goad/goal. I was overcome with desire, a desire and a curiosity as real and as visceral as that one kindled by a lover’s first kiss…
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TENDER: for Paul Squires (in memorium)
“I miss you and I wanted to write / you a letter to tell you I miss you / but there is no silence / like hello unanswered”
TENDER
What is paid?
What is offered?
How is that spot
when pushed?
What are we looking after?
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Caulonian Suite: II. Caulonia Supriore
CAULONIA SUPERIORE
for Matthew
The sky roils;
swallows knit webbed gyres
among the baroque sag of rooftops.
Across the way they’re fixing one;
new russet barrel tiles sealed over
old timber bones.
I hear a sound like the pounding
Of a battering ram or the cleaving
Of an immense stump
Contrapunted with a loud HUP.
My daughter sleeps with the abandon
of an unfettered shutter swinging in a stiff wind.
A woman in her fifties climbs the stairs
to the house where she and my daughter
were both conceived.
We regard each other with
that part of the eye
which admits an alternate aim.
The pounding stops.
The church bells go off
with the percussive invective
of a fire alarm
DANGATIDANGATIDANGDANGDANG.
They say it’s peculiar to here:
someone sounds the bell
not with the pull of a knotted rope
but with the unlevered force of arms.
This is the second in a suite of poems about Caulonia Supiore
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Series I : Polyvalence : context is everything
Series I : polyvalence* : context is everything
1.
Burial at Sea
WAKE
2.
Speaking Truth toPower/The Admonitions Scroll
STAY
CURRENT
3.
Morning Shift
CHANGE
SIMPLE DRESS
MOVE
*pol·y·va·lent (pŏl’ē-vā’lənt)
adj.
- Acting against or interacting with more than one kind of antigen, antibody, toxin, or microorganism.
- Chemistry
- Having more than one valence.
- Having a valence of 3 or higher.
3. (fig.) having many different functions, forms, or facets.
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IPM 2MX…Where have all the poems gone?
International Poetry Month 2010 is now closed. The marauding hordes left the library ablaze, the flood washed away the ashes, the caravan carrying the last copy of the precious poetry collection has vanished in the desert.
What remains is the oral tradition; I have made audio files of each poem available where the poem used to be posted. There is also the possibility that a copy of some of these works still exist in the archives of the poets themselves. Anyone who is on my e-mail list has a ‘fragment’ of each work. Perhaps, like the poems of Sappho, this is all that will remain.
I would like to extend my profound thanks to the following guest poets for their contributions:
Anonymous 21st cent. Italian Poet
Adina Richman
Jere Schaefer
Several of these poets have blogs where new poetry may be encountered. I encourage anyone suffering from poetry withdrawal to visit these sites by clicking on any of the names that appear in colour.
Thanks as well to everyone who has stopped by to read and comment on the posted work. It has been a real joy to present so much fine poetry this year. Now I have to start thinking about next year, and as my sweetheart reminded me this morning, get back to writing.
A presto!
Bonnie McClellan-Broussard 