"Delay in white corn" is a wish I'd wrote it poem from Camille Ralphs, a poet who continually challenges and fascinates me. The poem's from 2017 and it generally comes up at the top of Google when you search for Camille Ralphs poems. You can read the poem by clicking on Camille's picture above.
No way to do more in a blog post than to point out some highlights of the poem. Let's start with the most obvious feature: the "broken" lines and stanza form. Ralphs wants us to feel like we're looking at a relic, like we're reading a stone tablet that's been cracked, yet all the pieces are carefully preserved. She invites us to imagine this not only as a template for brilliant poetry, but for the universe itself. Despite the broken lines, the poetry flows and flowers as naturally and beautifully as... well, a field, of course! Let's look a little closer at a small sample; say, lines 2-4. They read: flecked thousandly w/ hacked stalks open waves of scrambled sod one uncut corn tract mills & grinds itself pale on the eye engraves Virtually everything here is new. Diction, meter, imagery, punctuation, grammatical construction. The only thing vaguely familiar is the setting, sentiment, and figurative language -- all of which are best described as archetypal. And still it all flows without flaw. These are the keys, I think, the starting keys anyway, to exploring Camille Ralphs's poetry. She's found a way to reinvent things that's quite exciting and inspired. Underneath the novel surface are deep, abiding rhythms of nature, human love, and the soul. I'll be blogging about her more in the future. Until then, let me know what you think of "Delay in white corn" by hitting talk above or below. And check out her book: Malkin.
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Southshore The first sailboat I ever saw looked like an angel floating over thoughts of God. In a recent post I asked if you thought "Southshore" was a poem. The response was a unanimous: yes. I happen to agree. It's interesting to ask ourselves why. The presence of a simile is one obvious aspect, but similes are common in prose and in everyday speech. The stanza shape vaguely resembles a sail full of wind. The meter is irregular and mostly iambic. Let's see what it looks like in prose: The first sailboat I ever saw looked like an angel floating over thoughts of God. Is it still a poem? You tell me. One reader mentioned that they prefer metaphors to similes but they didn't elaborate on why. Can we rewrite the poem with a metaphor instead of a simile? Yes, it's actually quite easy. Southshore The first sailboat I ever saw: an angel floating over thoughts of God. This streamlines the poem and cuts out "looked like," which functions here more like punctuation than diction. I think the poem is improved this way. Notice how "floating over" now actually floats over? Thanks, E.B., for the nudge! What do you think? Yes, I'm the author of "Southshore" and I wrote it as a bit of marginalia to fill up a nook of space on a page in my working notebook. Categories All Click the pic above. Read my Sea Poems. Hit talk to tell me what you think of them. Categories All I consider Sylvia Plath to be one of the greatest American poets of the twentieth century and I promise, if you continue to read this blog, you'll hear a lot more about why. So this post might seem a little weird because I'm going to bash all over one of her poems. No, it's not a pre-Colossus hiccup, or a thesaurus-driven villanelle from her Smith College days. It's a Confessional poem, straight out of her prime, from July 1962. And its a howler. The poem, "Words heard, by accident, over the phone," is an important poem for Plath addicts and specialists because it describes a crucial life-event and the beginning of the dissolution of her marriage to Ted Hughes. Other than that, the poem has a literary value approaching zero. Anyone can have a bad day, that's true. But that's not what happened here. I think the answer's much simpler. Plath developed a method over the years for writing poems and this is an example of her writing without her bag of tricks. She was apoplectic about Hughes's cheating and dashed the poem off like an angry letter. Here's the first lines: O mud mud, how fluid!---- Thick as foreign coffee, and with a sluggy pulse Speak, speak ! Who is it? Gone is the usual Plath inventiveness with conceits, diction, and figurative language. All that survives is the "confessional" theme of adultery, which she dully compares to mud, foreign coffee and ... "the bowel-pulse." The poem goes on to talk about mud for six more lines, then briefly compares the old land-line telephone to a tentacle (as in her poem "Medusa") before returning to images of mud: "Muck funnel, muck funnel". Repeating the drab phrase is another glimpse into how impotent Plath was without her method. I'm not saying Plath was anything less than a genius or that this one poem proves my point. There are others. But blog-time goes quickly. So tune in later for more. What I'm saying is Plath created a métier, a method for writing powerful poetry. This is her not using it. Click Plath's picture above to read the full text of "Words heard, by accident, over the phone." Hit the talk button above or below to let me know what you think of this or any other Plath poem. Categories All Sylvia Plath’s poem, “Mirror,” deftly uses symbolism, figurative language, and imagery to convey a theme of introspection and self-realization. The first sign that this deeper meaning is evident in the poem is the fact that the speaker of the poem is evidently a mirror: an inanimate object that should be incapable of thought, let alone speech. Plath’s use of anthropomorphic language begins in the opening line: I am silver and exact. I have no preconceptions. From this opening line, it's obvious that the mirror is not only conscious; it's almost entirely consciousness. It's rational, but possesses no human emotion. Instead, it demonstrates a knack for speaking in poetic language with metaphor, symbol, and imagery conveying meaning and mood. The mirror asserts: Whatever I see I swallow immediately Just as it is, unmisted by love or dislike. I am not cruel, only truthful ‚ The eye of a little god The mirror is a symbol for a form of consciousness that's larger than anything it observes. It exists on a plane of absolute honesty. In a case of double metaphor, Plath turns the speaking mirror into a figurative eye of a god, showing clearly, that the speaker of the poem is not a literal mirror, but a deep consciousness: the artistic mind, the imagination -- or, if you prefer, the unconscious. The poem’s second most prominent symbol is a lake. Plath writes in lines ten through eleven that the woman of the poem looks into the lake with the purpose of self-discovery: Now I am a lake. A woman bends over me, Searching my reaches for what she really is. The reality that the woman is searching for has already been revealed by the mirror to the reader in the first stanza. Being unable to disguise reality, or to lie about it, the reflective capacity of the unconscious simply sees the searching woman for what she is: a mortal who will age and die. The final image of the poem: that of the woman’s face, aged to a frightening state, rising toward her peering eyes like a fish from the bottom of the lake, is another use of double metaphor. Plath compares the reflected image of the old woman to a “terrible fish.” While time has transformed the woman; the speaker of the poem has been left unchanged. The poetic consciousness lives on while the earthly ego must experience age and death. I think "Mirror" is one of Plath's best symbolist efforts. Do you agree? Categories All Give me your honest opinion. Is this a poem? Southshore The first sailboat I ever saw looked like an angel floating over thoughts of God. So, is it a poem? If so, do you feel it has merit? If not, what should we make of it? I'll give you my opinion later. I'll also tell you who wrote "Southshore." And why. Until then, you tell me what you think by hitting the talk button above or below. Categories All This blog-post is dedicated to a great poet that I'm almost sure you've never heard of but definitely need to know. So, I want to introduce you to her work. But before I do, I'd like to sing out some personal praises for Madelyn Eastlund because she was one of my most important poetic mentors. Mentors are a big part of any artist's journey. I've had many. Some good; some not so good. Madelyn Eastlund is high on my "good mentors" list and there are many reasons for that. The first reason is that, early on in my writing career after publishing a handful of my poems in her Harp Strings Poetry Journal, she invited me to participate in Poet's Forum Magazine. PFM was a print magazine where poets published poems and commented on each others poems. This was an incredible experience and I learned to shop-talk and swap criticism with some of the most talented and ambitious poets around. From PFM I took away two indispensable lessons for any poet: 1) You're never as good as you think you are. 2) There's always somebody better. But, believe it or not, these are good things. Trust me, learning to face robust criticism from your peers (and potential audiences) and learning from that criticism will double your creative power. The second reason that Madelyn is one of my top mentors is because of her native talent and skill. She wrote dozens of exceptional poems and had a clear and consistent knack for setting, image, and theme. Yes, I did learn a few things from Madelyn Eastlund about how to stay prolific, as well as how to access and refine my own skills and I'll happily share a bit now and more in future blogs. But now let's turn to one of Madelyn's many excellent portrait-poems. The poem: "Grandma's Eighty-Fifth Birthday," is from a slim chapbook of Madelyn's titled Portraits. There's not a bad poem in the book, but I think this one's my favorite. The poem is a single stanza, twenty-two lines in irregular meter. When I say "irregular" I mean irregular. Some lines have a single syllable; others stretch out to five or more. Madelyn was an ace with poetic forms. If you click her picture above, it will take you to a page with three of her poems: a Malayan Pantoum, a Roundeau Redoublé, and a prose poem, all executed with precision and panache. So her choice to present this poem in a single stanza with irregular meter is no accident. It is , in fact, a way to represent the rush of time and fragmentation of life that is universally understood as part of aging. The poem starts with the lines: Her voice is a brook babbling on; her hands are the wings of a butterfly fluttering in the air. Note the alliteration between "babbling" and "butterfly." This is important because, taken together, the words make "babbling butterfly" which is exactly what Madelyn wants us to see in her portrait of Grandma. Butterflies are symbols of the soul and of transformation. This gives the stanza a hopeful lilt as it careens on through a depiction of old-age: She gives the street a quizzical look But goes on to cross the street "as quick as a deer" which, for those of you who are familiar with hermetic symbolism, is another symbol of transformation. The old woman has become a "babbling butterfly" and then a deer. Finally, in the final eight lines, her memory is described as bird that flies from the nest and comes back sometimes to sing: of almost remembered things slightly awry. The next transformation is not spelled out, but we can guess what it might be. Since the word "things" is given so much emphasis and it's connected to the word "awry," the obvious conclusion is that the old woman is becoming less concerned with the world of things. "Awry" forms an unexpected rhyme with "butterfly" and lets us know that the "butterfly/deer/bird" part of the woman is starting to lose contact with earthly things. She's becoming pure soul. This is what good poets do. And Madelyn Eastlund was one of the greats. I encourage you to check out her work wherever and whenever you can find it. Meanwhile, if you'd like to discuss mentors, poems, souls, or anything else just hit the talk button up top or down below. I'll blog more on Madelyn and my other poetic mentors from time to time. It's an important topic. One fun form I learned from Madelyn that she was particularly strong with was the haibun. Click the buttons below to see on old example of one of mine and a web article on how to write one yourself. Categories All Marilyn Robertson's poem, "Low Tide," from California Quarterly Summer 2021, is a real gem that just might slip past your eye because it's only ten lines long, tucked in the upper left corner on page thirty-six of this excellent issue of a consistently finely edited and printed journal. What's eye-catching about this poem is the way Robertson gets the most out of every word and every poetic choice. It'd be a really long blog if I pointed everything right in this little poem, so I'll just touch on the highlights and you can tell me what you find that I left out. The first line of the poem is: "I like the moreness of time at low tide." Clearly, the word "moreness" is the flash in the line, but equally as smooth, if not as obvious, is the way Robertson connects her experience to time, rather than to the sea itself. She sees the retreating water as a gap in time where she can "stretch" and "sigh" and maybe build (or not build) a sand castle. She writes: Time for a stretch, a sigh Time for nothing perfect. The repeating of the first word "time" in consecutive lines is an obvious time-like device, like seconds ticking away. The next stanza describes sand, a blue bucket, and a pile orange peels in simple diction that emphasizes that it is the gap in time, not necessarily the particular specifics of place, that define the experience. The poem concludes: The nearness of far away. The sparkle of here and now. Here, the last word "now" forms a delayed, slant-rhyme with the "low" in "low tide" from the opening line. This links the idea of low tide and the freedom from time together in a declarative image: "The sparkle of here and now." The rhyme surprises and cements the sentiment simultaneously. Robertson has described a true transcendental moment. Standing beside the sea, the poet literally moves beyond time to a moment of pure creation and possibility. Further points of interest: the stanza form helps promote s sense of harmony and regularity like the coming and going of the tides, or the passing of time. Two tercets alternate with two couplets to complete a ten line poem that should have won someone's brilliancy prize. Really, I'm leaving out many of the most striking elements. Go read the poem and see what you find. California Quarterly Summer 2021 is a great read with a sixty pages of poems. There's even one by me, "Jar of Flowers," that I'd like your opinion on. Some have called it too sentimental. Speaking of which, watch this space for an announcement about my "Four Sea Poems" due to be published over at Kelp Journal. They should be out any day! Hit talk above or below to let me know your thoughts. Categories All
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