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
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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
Almost six decades after her suicide, Sylvia Plath's poetry (and prose) continue to fascinate and inspire. More than any other poet of her generation, Plath captured widespread popular attention and hammered out a personal identity and literary aesthetic that has endured for over half a century. The tragedies of Plath's life and career are well known, and they are particularly germane to a full understanding of her work, given the fact that Plath mastered the Confessional idiom. That said, it is Plath's artistry that gives her work longevity and power. Whether in regard to her bold themes, her incomparable skill with figurative language, her indelible diction, or her metrical precision, Plath was the full-package as a poet. Her insights into nature and human nature, backed by her prodigious scholarship, elevate her work to its rightful place among other literary greats like Yeats, Dickinson, Roethke, or Sappho. Virginia Woolf's "If Shakespeare Had a Sister" was published in 1929 and concludes with this statement: "If ever a human being got his work expressed completely, it was Shakespeare. If ever a mind was incandescent, unimpeded, I thought, turning again to the bookcase, it was Shakespeare's mind." For Woolf, the realization of Shakespeare's genius was bittersweet, but her observation that "unimpeded" was the make or break point for any artist is no less true for Plath. Plath, of course, was never able to express her work completely, but her existing work is a pyrotechnic display of mastery and power that, in every way, rises to Woolf's subversive ideals and makes them as real as Woolf did. Plath's incandescent mind still burns and it is sunfire hot for anyone who dares to read her work. My book The Ariel Method is scheduled for release in May 2022. The book reveals and celebrates the techniques and creative strategies that Plath developed in becoming "Shakespeare's Sister." I've studied Plath's biography and work intensely for many years and I'm finally ready to write about her. Watch this space for updates regarding the book and for glimpses into the mechanics (and mystique) of Plath's poetic idiom. As always, I eagerly await your thoughts. Talk to me about Plath or anything else -- hit the button below or the "talk" link up top. Categories All ArchivesPoems have value. Every poem. Some are famous; some are known only by the poet who created them, but each and every poem is valuable, and some are priceless. I plan to use this space to talk about, explore, and sometimes formally analyze poems of all kinds. If there's a poem you've written or one you've read by another poet that you'd like me to talk about, or just read, use the talk link above or the button below and send it to me. If you want to send me a physical book or chapbook, use the contact form to request my snail mail address. I'll blog about famous poets like Sylvia Plath, Wallace Stevens, Hart Crane, and Gwendolyn Brooks. But I'll also write about poets you may not be so familiar with like Camille Ralphs and Vijay Seshadri. I'll also happily write about amateur and unpublished or seldom published poets. I read a lot of poetry journals, so if you publish your poems, I may happen on them and write about you. But there's always a better chance if you shout them out. I'll kick things off soon with a blog-post on Sylvia Plath, since my book The Ariel Method will be out next spring. From there, I'll go where inspiration leads. Sometimes I might write about my own writing process and my experiences in submitting and publishing my work. Other times, I may talk poetic theory, history, or general aesthetics. In any and all cases I'm as interested in hearing from you as I am in posting my own thoughts. I look forward to sharing the adventure with you! Categories All |