It’s vivid. It sings. It’s meant to be heard.
“A poem should be palpable and mute, As a globed fruit,” says Archibald MacLeish. Emily Dickinson says, “…if I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry.”
Do I even like poems?
Several months ago I signed up for a poetry workshop. Two sets of five Monday evenings with seven writers and the poet. The poet is having us explore how to construct poems. How to see and hear and taste and feel and notice. Start with the concrete, she tells us. I’ve been listening to the sound of the toilet flushing, the occasional creaks in the heating system, and an unidentified drip outside.
Remember the school term “metaphor”? It’s big in poetry because it packs a wallop of information with very few words. I naturally gravitated to metaphors in my memoir, At the Narrow Waist of the World. (There’s one right in the title.) I employed quite a few: matraca, the galaxy, puzzle of the world, paper dolls, fly paper, helium….. Do you remember?
So I’ve been reading lots of poems—some I don’t like—but I’m beginning to understand the play and playfulness that poets bring to their work. I find myself gravitating to Latin American poets but also discovering other poets from the past who wrote in rhyming verse, and the more typical free verse styles of today. Nuyorican poet, Tato Laviera wrote a poem called “spanglish,” full of music, rhythm and contrast—not unlike jazz. Here are two short clips from the poem. To read the full, fabulous thing, click here.
pues estoy creando spanglish
bi-cultural systems
scientific lexicographical
inter-textual integrations
baraja chismeteos social club
hip-hop prieto street salsa
corner soul enmixturando
spanish pop farándula
I realize now that I lean toward poetry. Without really thinking it at the time, I wrote what might be called a list poem in one of my first blogs. Here it is: “One Week in Transit” And a playful graphic “Birthday Poem.”
My mother’s birthday would fall on April 12. Last April before my new adventures in poetry I wrote this simple verse.
If you were here
I wish I could bring her
a pretty cake
and sing to her
Here’s the math:
She would be 98
if she had lived
past 71
that’s 27
years to become
and un become
If you were here
I would read to you
my peacemaking
memories of you
My plate is pretty full with post publication doings related to At the Narrow Waist of the World, participating in conversations sponsored by libraries, synagogues, private book clubs, and so on. But now I’m like a newly pregnant woman in the subway car who notices all the other pregnant women. Everywhere I go I’m hearing poems.
Do you have a favorite poem? Let me know in the Comments. Maybe poetry leaves you cold. If so, why do you think this is?