Making Meaning

My business is words. Words are like labels,

or coins, or better, like swarming bees.

I confess I am only broken by the source of things…

***

Your business is watching my words. But I

admit nothing. …

But if you should say this is something it is not,

then I grow weak…

-Anne Sexton, “Said the Poet to the Analyst”

Dear Reader,

Most everything we do is for love. It’s our nature to want to be wanted, to seek acceptance, to reach for understanding and confirm that we belong somewhere in the senselessness of chaotic things where people are simply bumping into each other. Making choices we believe are logical, we justify our subconsciously selfish needs. Language’s paradox is such: to connect us but also to not quite be able to get it, at times. Words are imprecise. Interpretation is even more so. Still this is the medium we’ve made in order to make meaning.

Writing allows me to understand myself. Essayer, the French verb infinitive to try, is precise. We are trying to express what is unknowable, invisible, and otherwise silent. We are bringing it into the light, which brings with it an essential and aweful vulnerability, the very state that allows us to create, connect, and love.

As Sexton remarks, words do label, define, distinguish, but this can also be limiting. Words can be a kind of currency that we use to exchange for other or more currency, or they are a commodity, or as furiously noisy and defensive as those swarming bees. We mouth them with a very focused intent, or they drop from our tongues before we can stop ourselves from spitting sound. Regardless of whether we control and craft or are overpowered by our words, it’s how they are received that further complicates everything.

I cannot know if you’ll get me, but I do know that I need words, and hope that you’ll love something I say. Not that you’ll always agree, but that at least once you’ll feel that pang of familiarity, that I’ve said what you have always felt but could not figure out how to say it yourself.

For Pauline, XOXO

I’m not sure where I would be if I had not taken Pauline’s classes as an undergrad in 1998. As a twenty year old transfer student, I had a lot to find and figure out…as always, I would have felt lost without poetry or a great teacher to guide me. She saw I was serious about writing and encouraged me. She gave me tons of feedback, decisive edits that were excessive (which occurs to me I now do to my students), but she was almost always right. If you didn’t know her or weren’t ready to push your ego out of your own way, these could feel harsh. But her criticism always came from a place of care. She had high expectations, but she always gave you the resources and the support to reach them if you were willing to do the work.

Pauline watched me grow up and made me grow up. In her classes, she pushed me to write better, to think more. For a poor kid who was the first in her family to go to college, the direction was much needed. She suggested I submit my work to Celebration of Writing Day, and I won an award; I sent my poetry for a  workshop with a visiting poet, Martin Espada, and it was selected. She always treated me with respect, as a person who simply did not know certain things yet but who was capable. Countless students have benefitted from her generosity and tough love.  She told me I should apply for a Teaching Assistant position, which made me realize how much I wanted to teach writing. After I graduated and was adjuncting for a while, she made me apply for my current job which allowed me to work with new TAs as her assistant. If not for that I’d likely still be working 3 part time jobs for little pay. Now I am working  2 jobs that I love in the department that raised me, and I can pay my rent.

Pauline’s is a spirit too big to contain. It’s not one to simply dissipate into the ether or go home to some golden place…Its home is everywhere, especially with us. Everytime we read a poem and think of how much Pauline loved it, or would have hated it…see a perfectly potted collection of cacti, or expertly arranged flowers, some cool pattern on a pair of overpriced pants at a boutique in Hudson, a pair of well-loved fingerless gloves, a full backpack on a strong, small frame, elegantly simplistic hand crafted ceramics, a long, metal barrette, a worn flannel shirt, fashionably worn boat shoes or oxfords, we’ll feel her presence. Or when we tell stories about some outrageous thing she said, share wine or a great margarita… Or, reflect on the way she’d unexpectedly pause, and pull out a poem from memory, lean into the lines, conjuring awe. Pauline, even now, is continuing to inspire us to be better, to be as good as she believed, no, knew, we could be, and are, simply from having known her.

If We’re Lucky

for a friend, gone too soon

 

The day I heard your news

the Internet stopped working.

Google waves paused sync mid-air,

the work of a self-proclaimed Luddite, no doubt.

 

It was 2 in the afternoon and I had been sleeping all day,

sick with some bug that left me empty on tile floor.

Head pounding from no coffee, dry inside, suddenly

there was nothing but water and the verb to cry.

 

The body gives so much over to us in need,

pathetic souls that we are without its tender armor–

yet it cannot keep us. All the crutches of love

and caffeine, good wine and food only hobble us

closer to death, perhaps a little happier, if we’re lucky.

 

You ran into the sea and sun, without fins

on the wings and breath of fearlessness,

faster and stronger than most half your age.

You made meaning, concisely carved sense from number-2 pencils

sharpened with surgical precision, hungry for perfection.

 

Your poems were lean, as lithe and

sinewy as your dancer’s body:

condensed energy and grace timed

to the swinging of long, girlish hair.

Stanzas staged with a pop of bright lipstick.

 

Your office teemed with files,

lists of terminology, author background,

artistically arranged collage copies

that you would cut and paste carefully by hand.

 

All I learned from you is here…

 

in the handouts that I still read every semester,

in the hallway conversations about deadlines,

events, funding, home improvements, and family;

in the office talks about grandmothers, lost parents, poetry,

and the empty rooms of the heart we understood

only by filling them with words.

 

My house has never been so empty.

I’m not ready to sell but I feel

its foreclosure and recall you telling me

for the first five years after getting me this job,

“When are you going to buy a house?”

 

Among so many bits of sage advice, this one I refused.

You let it go for a while, understanding the demand of upkeep.

I was not as brave as you. I have always wished for a bit of that–

to risk, and to say what’s true: this line doesn’t work.

No good comes from bullshit most of the time. You taught me that.

 

And how to edit. How to teach better. How to be more generous

than reasonably expected because so many of us don’t see such

kindness in the world, or think we don’t deserve it. You gave flowers

to those unnoticed, maps to those without guidance to make

a way to what’s possible. You gave me the words to write this…

 

I hope you hear me, that what I wish to tell you goes beyond the sea

and above sky, deep into the sands of beaches that warmed your toes

during your childhood and life-guarding days,

into the sun, where there is no time or bad weather,

where you continue to burn bright.

 

XXXOOO

 

 

 

 

 

Life Sentence

Life Sentence

“What I did was deplorable. The world has enough

misery in it without my adding more to it, sir.

I can assure you that it will never happen again.”

–Jeffrey Dahmer, American Serial Killer, to Judge Gardner

 

Do not leave dark loneliness.

My lot in life, my only gain remains loss.

My personhood is a palsied thing, a blood flower

budding between teeth—love cut at its thin, red stem.

 

Stay slender and lean. Flesh veiled sinew must be savored.

I am the bone bleacher, carcass curator,

strange one collecting roadkill alone, a son of science.

 

Still the jogger’s joints…Sedate! Suffocate

strangled sex with Mr. Mannequin.

Embalm mankind! Dissolve this desire

to fornicate and fillet, then deliquesce.

 

I am the headhunter, casting skeletal confetti like stars.

I rest upon godless chests that go breathless.

Death’s beatless drumming pounds my corpse awake.

 

I created this horror from mad gut-hunger:

Skin strips, skull-drippings, beings undressed,

packaged parts, two of hearts—my anatomical exhibition,

a gentleman’s museum.

 

Police piece together life by polaroids

and an aetheist’s altar to absence—

hands cut at the cuff, mouths moaning mute,

memberless roots grow my empty ecstasy.

For what I did, I should be dead.

 

 

 

 

 

 

On Poetry

The final version of this essay appears in Reflecting Pool: Poets and the Creative Process, edited by Laurence Carr.

First, here, is a longer, messier draft of  an essay reflection on what poetry means to me, how it has been a part of my life, and how I bring it to my students… The second is the revised and abbreviated version that will be closer to what ends up in print, as well as some writing prompts and two of my poems.

For Jesse, whose words still sing.

The rendering of a moment as it unfolds in time; the essence of an object or experience in concrete language that makes the familiar and mundane once again new[1]; inhabiting the senses through verse; a literary utterance on the spirit of our time; the pleasure of linguistic and imagistic patterns in rhythmic lines; the quintessential music of syntactical and semantic spheres; the hum and resonance of all that has come before and all that will continue to be: all these and more, are poetry.

There is, of course, no way to impart all of this to students in a short, five-week, one-credit Understanding Poetry seminar, even when we host guest readers/lecturers to embody such elevated abstractions or mysteries. We spend the first class discussing our preconceived notions of the genre, and consider the ways we might define it, asking which of its characteristics distinguish it from prose? For guidance, we look to the great poets’ definitions, noting that even these experts cannot agree though their words offer us some parameters. Ultimately, if the students can come to their own evolving definition of poetry, if they are willing to give poetry the time of day, to turn to it in the darkness, to listen to its buzz and beat, then that is success. If they keep it in mind, confess to it, pray with it, then we might be alright.

All this is too lofty, though, isn’t it? It lays an untenable burden onto poetry’s slight shoulders. How can we affirm this feared and misunderstood genre’s significance within but also beyond university (where even English professors have to defend it to colleagues)? In addition, what use do we have for poetry in a blue age of screens? (Yes, there are poetry apps, but they aren’t that great since the demand to improve upon them is likely low.) We think of poets and poetry readers as a wan bunch, antiquated with feather pens and flimsy livelihoods (see Mark van Doren’s essay about this; don’t take my word for it). Other poet stereotypes such as “a loony, a misfit, a dreamer” don’t entice suspicious readers among us, either (Zavatsky 1-2).

Luckily, I did not know much about it when I came to poetry. Like most children, I had what my mother read to me, then what I read by nightlight after bedtime: nursery rhymes, Dr. Seuss story-songs about green eggs and ham (with tightly knit metrics), Disney books, and the relentless repetition of a children’s Bible. I loved singing along to records, so poetry’s bouncy sounds attracted me. Soon enough, I was reading and reciting poems for a school contest in the third grade; I won a second-place trophy that is now long gone, but one of the poems, Frost’s “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening,” I still know. A poem that speaks to, or for you will often stick to you. Later, I was reading Dickinson, Hardy, Bogan, cummings, Bukowski, Harjo, Espada, et al. I was writing poetry, and joined a group that would read at coffeehouses and bars. I was in a poetry club my first year of college. Then, I met professors like Mindy Ross, Jan Schmidt, and Pauline Uchmanowicz who encouraged my curiosity in artful, polysemic lines. Their classes reminded me of what Anne Sexton, one of my favorite poets, imparted to her students: that poetry is largely shaped by developing selective imagery and telling, imagistic details by intuiting “what to leave out” (Sexton & Ames 335). What’s unsaid, the space on the page, the silence suspends us. There we might reflect and fully feel the currents in stillness.

What is more concrete than a poem, more measured? William Carlos Williams reminds us that there are “No ideas but in things,” (“About William Carlos Williams” ) and Ezra Pound before him warns us to “Go in fear of abstractions” (“A Retrospect” and “A Few Don’t’s”). Pound submits to his own dictum in the 33-line-turned-3-line poem “In a Station of the Metro,” where the blurry commotion of transitory, ephemeral faces in a subway station transform into pale petals stuck to a wet tree branch; this imagist moment of indistinct features, stark contrasts of light against dark, and the juxtaposition of the industrial with the natural creates a striking snapshot. My poem “First Snow” attempts imagistic compactness in short lines: “Storm silence slows/ Slim veins of water, stills/ branch sway, weekend rush. / Banks rise: bodies breathing” (3-6). Archibald MacLeish provides complementary instruction in “Ars Poetica” that “a poem should not mean, / but be” (lines 23-24), placing emphasis on inhabiting description as opposed to offering exposition on the subject. Poetry’s condensed language in compressed space demands that every word works. Samuel Taylor Coleridge asserts that prose is “words in their best order,” while poetry is “the best words in their best order” (Mills). The arrangement and unfolding, the multiple layers of meaning and word play, the furthering of poetic argument through the symbiosis of content and form—all this requires indefatigable revision. Poetry is all in the details and the timing.

What about the visceral, physiological response that poetry has on us? As Emily Dickinson says, “If I feel as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry” (Spengemann & Roberts). There is some suspense as a poem unfolds, and as we love a twist (with the hope of potential resolution), we expect something wild or unexpected to occur. This often brings horripilation, a term one of our distinguished professors, Dr. Robert Waugh, taught me when he lectured on horrific poems for Understanding Poetry. Current research published in Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience by Eugen Wassiliwizky confirms the chilling effect that poetry has on readers or listening audiences, even when it is not macabre; essentially all the study participants experienced internal chills, while forty percent had visible goosebumps (Delistraty). Yet what is more striking than this physiological phenomenon remains that poetry induces a specific neurological reaction—engaging particular parts of the brain not prompted by other mediums such as film or song. Musicality is clearly essential to poetic language, but songs and poems are distinct, even in our expectations of them.

While Wassiliwizky concludes that the “poetic lines that most emotionally stirred people were the most memorable for them later,” poetry “transcends this type of methodical scrutiny” (Delistraty). The very reasons people detest poetry might be traced not to alphabet songs or nursery rhymes of childhood, but to the earliest academic floggings of poems in classrooms. As Bill Zavatsky notes in “Everything You Always Wanted to Know about Poetry,” the “Hunt for the Symbol means the death of poetry. Would you discuss the movements of a ballerina by taking your students to an anatomy class and have them watch leg muscles being dissected? […] but dead parts don’t get up and dance. Neither does the poem after autopsy” (1).   In light of this, my Understanding Poetry class begins with Billy Collins’s poem “Introduction to Poetry”:  the speaker comments on the antagonistic rigor with which we approach the genre, the way we train students to attack the text like a hostage, or “tie the poem to a chair with rope / and torture a confession out of it. […] to find out what it really means” (lines 13-16).  The compulsion to make meaning is common among us. For academics, it is perhaps especially difficult to sit in unknowing, or to admit to those we are supposed to provide answers for that perhaps there are none, or at least there is not a single one—all we can do is imaginatively inhabit the stories/experiences of others and cultivate compassion.

Well-crafted poetry requires us to notice, to listen. A poem unfolding, line by line, is a discovery. Unlike utilitarian writing, poetry creates that indescribable anticipation mentioned in Wassiliwizky’s study:  [Poetry] valorizes the unconscious, opening us up to new perspectives. […] When every aspect of a poem comes together—form, cadence, emotional appeal—it doesn’t just provide the literal chills that Wassiliwizky examined. […] it instills a feeling of a great unknown” (Delistraty). It unsettles us, wakes us from our daily tedium.  Williams’s poem “The Red Wheelbarrow” suggests the significance of a single tool for the sustenance of family, a farm, and beyond; it meditates on an object in slender, specific, ordinary language. The poem annoys many who feel there is no artistry without linguistic or symbolic obfuscation; others distrust its deceptive simplicity. It must mean more, this quick glimpse about a common thing that we would otherwise ignore. Poems make big things small and microcosms immense.

Jorge Luis Borges observes, “Verse should have two obligations: to communicate a precise instance and to touch us physically, as the presences of the sea does” (Ormsby). There is nothing more unknown or vast than the sea, except the cosmos, but that feels farther from us. We don’t feel or fear its weight as with a wave’s undertow, a tsunami, the feel of sand being sucked out from under our feet. Nature attests to how small we are, how little we know, how much we cannot control. Even tidal flow becomes a metronome, an interior reverberation of heartbeat and blood pump.  In a few lines, a poem can soothe us with its rhythm, overwhelm us with existential dread, contest political dogmas, or stir in us awe or the excitement of new love. Once students see that poetry functions for more than dissection in papers for a deadline (or grade so seemingly tied to their self and capital worth), they become more amenable to it. Of course, lyrical language resists ease and seems serpentine. Poetry uncovers and discovers us with its alchemy; it’s no wonder so many don’t like it.

As one of my former students writes, “The world will never be perfect nor will it be just, but it is a beautiful and amazing place.  Poetry is one of the mediums that can remind us of this fact when the sadness becomes too much […]. Poetry is a medium of social critique, mourning, and joy. […] [O]ur lives would be far less interesting without it; in addition, there would be no music to sing out with” (Keplinger). While poems are not quite songs, Dr. H.R. Stoneback reminds us of the intersection of “Poems, Songs, and Ballads” in his annual lecture for the Understanding Poetry course that he created over thirty years ago. From the perspective of singer, poet, and scholar, he reminds us of the innate joy of nonsense words and sounds (that some over-reaching critics have analyzed as evidence of post-war, nuclear anxiety). Stoneback argues that much our wonder and playfulness is lost in such grave misinterpretations. The people, their dialect, and their emotional and topographic geographies shape folksongs and poems in oral tradition. Such transmission colors the words that leave or call to us.

We come to the communal text of poetry innately tied to some preternatural understanding that, even when words are never exactly enough, they are almost all we have. Ultimately, poetry “is first and last the document of a human experience” (Zavatsky). As poet Ocean Vuong recently remarked during a reading on our campus, through poetry we can reclaim our stories, our histories; the “language leads back to a life.” Great works of art can inspire us to be ourselves; they will sit with us in sadness and joy, meditating on mortality and humanity. Regardless of milieu, poetry confirms we are not alone in the expansive dark.

Notes and Sources

[1] I often turn to the Defense of Poetry by Percy Shelley, who states, poetry “awakens and enlarges the mind itself by rendering it the receptacle of a thousand unapprehended combinations of thought. Poetry lifts the veil from the hidden beauty of the world, and makes familiar objects be as if they were not familiar: it reproduces all that it represents…”

Works Cited

“About William Carlos Williams.” Poetry Archive.

Collins, Billy. “Introduction to Poetry.” Poetry Foundation, Poetry Foundation.

Delistraty, Cody. “This Is What Happens to Your Brain When You Read Poetry.”  The Cut.  11 May 2017.

Keplinger, Jesse. “Poetry: Tears, Joy, and Song.” Understanding Poetry Essay, SUNY New Paltz, 2013 Oct. 18. New Paltz.

MacLeish, Archibald. “Ars Poetica.” Poetry Foundation, Poetry Foundation.

Mills, Billy. “Finding the Right Words to Define Poetry.”  The Guardian, 25 Jan. 2008.

Ormsby, Eric. “Jorge Luis Borges and the Plural I.” The Free Library. Foundation for Cultural Review, New Criterion  Vol. 18, No. 3 1999.

Pound, Ezra. “A Retrospect” and “A Few Don’t’s.” Poetry Foundation, Poetry Foundation.

—. “In A Station of the Metro.” Poetry Foundation, Poetry Foundation,

Shelly, Percy Bysshe. “A Defence of Poetry.” Poetry Foundation, Poetry Foundation.

Spengemann, William C. and Jessica F. Roberts, eds. Introduction. Nineteenth Century  American Poetry. 1965. Penguin Classics, 1996.

Stoneback, H.R. “Poems, Songs, Ballads.” Understanding Poetry Lecture, SUNY New Paltz, 17 Oct. 2017. New Paltz

Vuong, Ocean. Poetry Reading, SUNY New Paltz, 9 Nov. 2017 New Paltz.

Williams, William Carlos. “The Red Wheelbarrow.” Poetry Foundation, Poetry Foundation.

Zavatsky, Bill. “Everything You Ever Wanted to Know about Poetry.” Academy of              American Poets, Academy of American Poets.

Revision 1. 999.999. 9999

For Jesse, whose words still sing.

The rendering of a moment as it unfolds in time; the essence of an object or experience in concrete language that makes the mundane once again new; inhabiting the senses through verse; a literary utterance on the spirit of our time; the pleasure of linguistic and imagistic patterns in rhythmic lines; the quintessential music of syntactical and semantic spheres; the hum and resonance of all that has come before and all that will continue to be: all this and more, is poetry.  I often turn to the Defence of Poetry by Percy Shelley, who states, poetry “awakens and enlarges the mind itself by rendering it the receptacle of a thousand unapprehended combinations of thought. Poetry lifts the veil from the hidden beauty of the world, and makes familiar objects be as if they were not familiar: it reproduces all that it represents…”

There is, of course, no way to impart all of this to students in a short, five-week, one-credit Understanding Poetry seminar, such elevated abstractions or mysteries. We spend the first class discussing our preconceived notions of the genre, considering which of its characteristics distinguish it from prose. For guidance, we look to the great poets’ definitions, noting that even these experts cannot agree though their words offer some parameters. Ultimately, if the students can come to their own evolving definition of poetry, if they are willing to give poetry the time of day, to turn to it in the darkness, to listen to its buzz and beat, then that is success.

All this is too lofty, though, isn’t it? It lays an untenable burden onto poetry’s shoulders. How can we affirm this feared and misunderstood genre within but also beyond university (where even English professors have to defend it to colleagues)? In addition, what use do we have for poetry in an age of blue screens? Many think of poets as a wan bunch, antiquated with feather pens and flimsy livelihoods. Poet stereotypes such as “a loony, a misfit, a dreamer” don’t help, either (Zavatsky 1-2).

Luckily, I did not know much about it when I came to poetry. Like most children, I had what my mother read to me, then what I read by nightlight after bedtime: nursery rhymes, Dr. Seuss story-songs in tightly knit metrics about green eggs and ham, Disney books, and the relentless repetition of a children’s Bible. I loved singing along to records, so poetry’s bouncy sounds attracted me. Soon enough, I was reading and reciting poems for a school contest in the third grade. I won a second-place trophy that is now long gone, but one of the poems, Frost’s “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening,” I still know. (A poem that speaks to, or for you will often stick to you.) Later, I was reading Dickinson, Hardy, Bogan, cummings, Bukowski, Harjo, Espada, et al. I was writing poetry, and joined a group that would read at coffeehouses and bars. I was in a poetry club my first year of college. Then, I met professors like Mindy Ross, Jan Schmidt, and Pauline Uchmanowicz who encouraged my curiosity in artful, polysemic lines. Their classes reminded me of what Anne Sexton, one of my favorite poets, imparted to her students: that poetry is shaped largely through selective imagery and telling, sensory details, by intuiting “what to leave out” (Sexton & Ames 335). What’s unsaid, the space on the page, the silence suspends us. There we might reflect and fully feel the currents in stillness.

What is more concrete than a poem, more measured? William Carlos Williams maintains that there are “No ideas but in things,” (“About William Carlos Williams”) and Ezra Pound before him warns, “Go in fear of abstractions” (“A Retrospect” and “A Few Don’t’s”). Pound submits to his own dictum in the 33-line-turned-3-line poem “In a Station of the Metro,” where the blurry commotion of transitory faces in a subway station transform into pale petals stuck to a wet tree branch. This imagist moment—ephemeral features, the stark contrasts of light against dark, and the juxtaposition of the industrial with the natural—creates a striking snapshot. My poem “First Snow” attempts imagistic compression in short lines:

Storm silence slows

Slim veins of water, stills

 

branch sway, weekend rush.

Banks rise: bodies breathing. (3-6)

The poem conjures the quiet of a snowy day, where weather stops us from our business, causing us to reflect. Returning to Shelley’s argument, poetic lines can reveal “the hidden beauty of the world” that we may otherwise be too busy to notice.

Archibald MacLeish provides complementary instruction in “Ars Poetica” that “a poem should not mean, / but be” (lines 23-24), placing emphasis on inhabiting description as opposed to offering prosaic exposition. Poetry’s condensed language demands that every word works. Samuel Taylor Coleridge asserts that prose is “words in their best order,” while poetry is “the best words in their best order” (Mills). The arrangement and unfolding, the multiple layers of meaning and word play, the furthering of poetic argument through the symbiosis of content and form—all this requires indefatigable revision. Poetry is all in the details and the timing.

What about the visceral, physiological response that poetry evokes? As Emily Dickinson says, “If I feel as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry” (Spengemann & Roberts). There is some suspense as a poem unfolds, as we expect something unexpected to occur. Current research published in Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience by Eugen Wassiliwizky confirms the chilling effect that poetry has on readers or listening audiences, even when the content is not macabre; essentially all the study participants experienced internal chills, while forty percent had visible goosebumps (Delistraty). Even more striking is that poetry induces a specific neurological reaction—engaging particular parts of the brain not prompted by other mediums such as film or song. Musicality is clearly essential to poetic language, but songs and poems are distinct. Wassiliwizky concludes that the “poetic lines that most emotionally stirred people were the most memorable for them later.” Surely musical language enhances poetry’s indelible impression.

In the Understanding Poetry class, created by Dr. H.R. Stoneback, I begin with Billy Collins’s poem “Introduction to Poetry”:  the speaker comments on the antagonistic rigor with which we approach the genre, the way we train students to attack the text like a hostage, or “tie the poem to a chair with rope / and torture a confession out of it. […] to find out what it really means” (lines 13-16).  The compulsion to make meaning is common among us. Academics may find it difficult to sit in unknowing, or to admit to those we are supposed to provide answers to that perhaps there are none, or not only one. Poetry taunts us with its ambiguity, its existential enormity, its lyrically serpentine language. It’s no wonder so many avoid it. Yet poetry uncovers with its alchemy.

Well-crafted poetry requires us to notice, to listen. A poem unfolding, line by line, is a discovery. Unlike utilitarian writing, poetry creates that indescribable anticipation mentioned in Wassiliwizky’s study:  “[Poetry] valorizes the unconscious, opening us up to new perspectives. […] When every aspect of a poem comes together—form, cadence, emotional appeal—it doesn’t just provide the literal chills that Wassiliwizky examined. […] it instills a feeling of a great unknown” (Delistraty). It unsettles us, wakes us from our daily tedium.  Williams’s poem “The Red Wheelbarrow” suggests the significance of a single tool for the sustenance of family, a farm, and beyond, meditating on an object in slender, specific, ordinary language. The poem annoys many who feel there is no artistry without linguistic or symbolic obfuscation; others distrust such deceptive simplicity. The poem must mean more than this glimpse of a common thing that we would likely overlook. Poems make big things small and microcosms immense.

We come to the communal text of poetry innately tied to some preternatural understanding that, even when words are never exactly enough, they are almost all we have. Ultimately, poetry “is first and last the document of a human experience” (Zavatsky). As poet Ocean Vuong remarked during a reading on our campus, through poetry we can reclaim our stories, our histories; the “language leads back to a life.” Great works of art can inspire us to be our best selves; they will sit with us in sadness and joy, meditating on mortality and humanity. Regardless of milieu, poetry confirms we are not alone in the expansive dark.

Works Cited

“About William Carlos Williams.” https://www.poetryarchive.org/poet/william-carlos-williams

Collins, Billy. “Introduction to Poetry.” Poetry Foundation, Poetry Foundation.

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/46712/introduction-to-poetry.

Delistraty, Cody. “This Is What Happens to Your Brain When You Read Poetry.”  The Cut. 11

May 2017. https://www.thecut.com/2017/05/this-is-what-happens-to-your-brain-when-you-read-poetry.html

MacLeish, Archibald. “Ars Poetica.” Poetry Foundation, Poetry Foundation.

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/17168/ars-poetica

Mills, Billy. “Finding the Right Words to Define Poetry.”  The Guardian, 25 Jan. 2008,

https://www.theguardian.com/books/booksblog/2008/jan/25/findingtherightwordstodef

Pound, Ezra. “A Retrospect” and “A Few Don’t’s.” Poetry Foundation, Poetry Foundation,

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/articles/69409/a-retrospect-and-a-few-donts

—. “In A Station of the Metro.” Poetry Foundation, Poetry Foundation,

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/12675/in-a-station-of-the-metr

Ames, Lois and Linda Gray Sexton, eds.  Anne Sexton: A Self-Portrait in Letters. Boston:  Houghton Mifflin, 1977.

Shelly, Percy Bysshe. “A Defence of Poetry.” Poetry Foundation, Poetry Foundation.

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/articles/69388/a-defence-of-poetry

Spengemann, William C. and Jessica F. Roberts, eds. Introduction. Nineteenth Century American Poetry. 1965. Penguin Classics, 1996.

Williams, William Carlos. “The Red Wheelbarrow.” Poetry Foundation, Poetry Foundation.

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/45502/the-red-wheelbarrow

Zavatsky, Bill. “Everything You Ever Wanted to Know about Poetry.” Academy of American

Poets, Academy of American Poets. https://www.poets.org/poetsorg/text/everything-you-always-wanted-know-about-poetry

 

Understanding Poetry Writing Prompts

Consider the function of poetry as an art, one of music, meditation, distillation of a moment or slowing time, storytelling, political or social critique, historical record, or as communal text. Why is this function significant to our larger need to connect, right injustices, and understand ourselves, one another, our world/the-natural world/our space in the universe?

There is no one agreed-upon definition for what poetry is, yet, how do we define it, traditionally? Is this definition fully accurate based on what we have explored and heard from our presenters? Ultimately, what should ideal poetry be or do? Where does your definition reside within this larger, ongoing conversation?

Consider the possibilities that poetry can explore, from the effect of both lyric and/or narrative poems, or the power of brief, epigrammatic forms, object or thing poems, persona poems, nature and eco poems, explorations of family and self, coming of age and identity, the ballad tradition/songs. In relation to one of these categories, consider poetic structure, traditional form poetry versus free verse. How does structure enhance and further meaning; what might the form mean in relation to the emotion/tone/content of the poem?

How do you respond to a poet’s poetry on the page versus hearing the poems aloud? What transforms in these various modes of delivery? Poetry is an auditory art that emphasizes musicality; consider the relationship between a physically present audience and the performer, and the ways poems transform from page to stage.

***

Joann Deiudicibus

First Snow

White hush muffles

birdsong and car-whir.

 

Storm silence slows

slim veins of water, stills

 

branch-sway, weekend rush.

Banks rise: bodies breathing.

 

The glint of everything unsaid

in the slippery dark.

 

“First Snow” originally appeared in Shawangunk Review, volume XXVI (Spring 2015)

 

***

Joann Deiudicibus

Survivor’s Guilt

Prepare yourself.

Prepare your shoeless feet for

paths scattered with stone, shells, bone-shatter, casings.

 

There will be flowers,

stems bound like limbs,

bunches of legs dangling above water;

flowers pulled from fields,

dug from torn ground, rootless.

 

There will be blood-black blooms,

mud-colored hair spilling like petals,

dark shards arranged in sharp angles.

 

Those chosen could not prepare:

Captives cast off like chaff

or thrown atop pyres,

stalks askew, barbed leaves lifting

like ash-flecked palms in prayer.

 

Prepare yourself.

The rampart about your heart bursting with grief,

as shrapnel seeps into tight red bud.

 

 

“Survivor’s Guilt” originally appeared in Shawangunk Review, volume XXI (Spring 2010)

Watership Down author Richard Adams dies…

One of many great losses this year…Read more about Adams here.

Watership Down was an extremely influential story from my childhood. It anthropomorphized animals, as we are want to do, but held a mirror to the destructive, power-hungry, greedy, and very human ills that we must keep in check to preserve harmony for all creatures.  It also is a poignant reflection on mortality, with a resounding note of resilience-that we can carry on if we challenge the dangerous and dark impulses within our fellow beings for the greater good of all… What more timeless narrative exists than this?

Sad Bones and Old Wounds: Leaving Home, Going Home

This post is a draft in progress...

***
Death’s a sad Bone; bruised, you’d say,

and yet she waits for me, year after year,
to so delicately undo an old wound,
to empty my breath from its bad prison. -Anne Sexton, "Wanting to Die"

In a studio apartment decorated with all the charms of home, my grandmother sits high on her much coveted bed, with its fluffy pillows, and crisp blue and white flowered quilt. We’d always love to have sleepovers with her just to have the chance to sleep on that bed, soft, high, pillows piled like clouds. Not to mention the cookies…there were always cookies!

Now the bed reigns in this new apartment in a nearly new assisted living facility. It’s clean and bright, with family photos scattered across every surface: the faces of each of her seven grandchildren smiling from school portraits; the faces of her long-gone siblings, at least seven, from family parties and days of their youth in the Bronx. She has outlived most of her family, except for one sister at least ten years her junior now struggling with kidney failure. She has outlived her husband for twenty-one years. She has outlived nieces and nephews, who willed her their savings that is helping to pay for her care, here.

The room has at least six plants on the windowsill, and another in front of the door on a table. There is artwork framed on the walls, some professional, some by my cousins. There are decals of flowers on the wall next to her bed, and the wall near the door as we walk inside. It’s cheery. This room has been her home for the past six months, following a mini-stroke about five months prior to that. The room is in the Memory Care Unit for patients with dementia, or those who like to wander; many residents wear anklets to monitor their location. The doors to this wing are always locked. Only key visitors and staff have the special, ever-changing code to unlock doors to the  main room with its grand fireplace, or the dining rooms, or the other wing where the mailboxes and other sections of the facility are, the ones with more freedom. There is a small courtyard near the common area, which allows residents to gather to watch television, or to take in some sun, or to do crafts in the adjoining activities room.

This place smells faintly good with a side of urine, impending death. Mainly, it breathes hope. Of course, many people here do not have family left,  or family nearby to visit them, or to check on their care as often as would be ideal. At our recent visit, my grandmother remarked how lucky she is to have so many people come see her, or call. She had just been released from the hospital after a bout of pneumonia that turned out to be much more.

My aunt and uncle, who now have power of attorney, live fifteen minutes from the assisted living facility. My mother and other uncle, who live in my grandmother’s home, (her primary caregivers) are two and a half hours away when there is not much traffic. I, the oldest grandchild, am about three plus hours away, and a few other cousins in New England are five or six hours away. Still, we are finding ways to manage the distance.

Assisted living costs:  Independence with monitoring, room and board, a meal plan, activities, health services, physical and other related therapies, laundry…all bearing resemblance to college. Only here there are nurses to weigh you and make sure you are taking medication that you might otherwise forget, which then makes you refuse to take it because dementia and other neurological conditions confuse, create paranoia and a distrust Of authority. After her stroke, grandma often accused us of trying to poison her when suggesting she take her usual blood pressure pills, or later the medicine that was supposed to quell the onset of dementia and paranoia caused by the stroke. She never took it for long, even after all the tests, even after explaining it may have allowed her to remain in her home for a while. Realistically, at 87 the house had become a hazard to her, its stairs, its drafts, its carpeting, its suspect shadows.

After the stroke, we had to deadbolt the doors up high, so she could not wander out into the darkness and get hit by a car or forget her way home.

“You are locking me in like a prisoner!” She’d scream at my mother, or “I can’t go anywhere…you are all trying to kill me!”

She began hiding knives under the couch cushion to protect herself from us. She tried to hit my mother with the broom, or her purse, whatever was handy…

Logically, you could recognize that she did not mean it, that it was not her fault for fearing you irrationally. It did not make it hurt any less. I remember when she thought I had turned on her, too, another part of the conspiracy to imprison her. She glared at me with furious tears, saying, “Not you, too! Why would you do this to me? You are all going to hell.” I said that was fine…I’d go, but that this was to help, not hurt her. I’ll never forget the disbelief and betrayal in her eyes.

After the stroke, my grandmother had no sense of time. She would forget immediately when it was, even after you told her only a moment ago, “It’s 4 PM, almost time to start making dinner.”

Only moments later, she’d say to my mother, “Is it time to make dinner? Can I feed the dog now?”

She would ask what time it was again, then look at the clock to be sure we were not trying to trick her.

She’d go to the windows at night, while we were watching television, or after we’d all try to go to bed. We’d find her staring out into the darkness, but she could not understand it was nighttime. She stopped sleeping, so we stopped sleeping. We knew we needed help.

***

Now that she’s gone, everything must change.

We had our first Christmas without her a few weeks ago. My mother put up the beautiful tree adorned with assorted ornaments, some that still shined from my childhood, others with photos of some of her grandkids as babies, several long-gone pets, and those we gifted on Christmases past. My grandmother loved birds, so lots of cardinals sat perched between the mutli-colored LED lights (which, with a click of a remote could be switched to white, or other twinkle patterns or static glows…she really loved that remote). There were ornaments from my cousin Erin’s world travels, and some funny Disney characters, along with that cartoon lady Maxine. My grandma got a kick out of her, and even had a Maxine cookie jar for a time. While the place was fairly decked, it was not as over-the-top as my mom and grandma’s usual holidayness… Later, my mother admitted she did not want to put the tree up but my uncle had asked her to do it. “This will be the last time,” he said.

The house is to go up for sale soon, with legalities that require it. Had my grandmother lived a bit longer and her Medicaid had kicked in, this may not have been the case. I am certain that knowing her home was being forced out of her children’s hands would have devastated her as much as it is devastating all of us, now. My grandparents had been there for forty years, come up from the Bronx and made their way to a better life in this corner lot, split-level ranch with a modest yard, trees, bird baths and squirrel feeders, swings and hammocks, a shed and garden that the family helped build, tend, or tear down over the years.  Their back patio was where my cousin and I had our summer birthday parties. That yard was where we ran through our Donald Duck sprinkler, climbed a mimosa tree, made hair wreaths from weeping willow fronds, went sledding, played in a kiddie pool, or later walked the various rescue dogs we always fell for (even when one bit my grandma and put her in the hospital).

This was first year in a long time when my mother waited for me to come home to make my grandfather’s family’s Hungarian strudel. This was  tradition that we did not do ever year (it’s a lot of work). I remember watching my grandfather making it in the orignal kitchen, with its dark wood-paneling, when I was little. I remember even better my mother making it in one of our old apartments on a small table in the living room, how I would have to help cut and place the dough in greased bowls around the apartment so it could rise: all those colorful Corelle and Pyrex bowls sitting on steam radiators covered with dishtowels. The oven was a tiny, ancient thing that never baked anything evenly…I don’t know how she made it work for all those years before that apartment caught fire from an electrical issue on the other side of the house (we shared the building with the town judge’s law office). I was later away at school, busy trying to determine how to survive and graduate, then teach and graduate again…each end of semester meant longer and longer papers to finish, and all those student papers to grade. Getting home before grades were due was nearly impossible so I was not involved in the strudel except when eating it and stealing some to take back with me.

Still, a few years ago, I asked my mother for the recipe with some notion that as the oldest grandchild (even living in a small apartment with an outdated oven) that I would someday need to make it on my own. I still have her note on the fridge, but the truth is she just wrote a list of ingredients. When I called her out on this she admitted that no one had really written down the recipe…and that my grandparents had also only an old scrap of yellowed list paper specked with crisco and apricot filling, no doubt, with the ingredients on it. So this year, I decided to participate in the making but to primarily write down the directions so the rest of us would have something to follow. After all, as a writer, I was drawn to the task. I also took some videos to add visual guidance and for posterity, which I’m sure my mother would not appreciate. My mother reminded me not to put too much filling on the thin layer of dough as we rolled each onto the flour-and-sugar piled cutting boards. I really like a bit more filling, though, so I added some extra and, to be fair, I have no real idea of how much is too much having not made the stuff in years. We are stubborn in this family, especially me, so no one was surprised at this. As she had predicted, the strudels with extra filling (it really was a slight amount) split and cracked in the oven. Did they taste delicious? You’re darn right they did. Did they look slightly less appealing? Barely, since you cut them into slim pieces similar to but not as small as rugelach and sprinkle them with powdered sugar. The thing about this strudel is it is nothing like the flakey German or Jewish versions you might know. Those are delicate, sweet, moist. This dough is thick with sour cream and comes out like a dense hybrid of a danish, hence you must roll it thinly. It’s a hearty dough for keeping your poor family full, not some frivolous dessert. I ate a lot of strudel this Christmas: for breakfast with my coffee, as a snack between meals, sometimes as dessert or a late night snack watching crappy cable on my grandmother’s couch where she always sat and had her Entemann’s cake or Ritz cackers. I took a bunch of strudel home (traditional apricot, my favorite, some prune, and rasberry, a new flavor we had never made) and ate it daily for two weeks, even when I was not that hungry, to keep home close.

 

 

 

An Honest Portrait of Love, Grief, and Widowhood in the United States

The widowhood effect: What it’s like to lose a spouse in your 30s, by Christina Frangou

Flip the Script and Alternative Adoption Narratives

I recently had a conversation with a friend and colleague over lunch about the complicated dynamics of family, which shifted to my adoption and relationship with my biological mother, and then explored adoption/orphan cliches in literature or film, etc. I’m not a scholar on orphan narratives, but it’s easy to see that many of the famous ones by Dickens or Rowling or a Bronte are somewhat reductive and two-dimensional. Child is orphaned and does not belong, is unwanted by the new family even, is a burden, but is able to rise above and beat all odds and become super-human; or, has a secret benefactor and will become rich in ways no one could imagine; or, must be rescued and re-parented by an older spouse or love interest, is morally good, and remains an exemplar for all her suffering. This, of course brought about the many problems with only a few, oversimplified narratives, and the significance of more nuanced representation regarding all aspects of adoption. This topic is not new to many of us whose business is words, or making up stories, or thinking about the way we choose to tell stories: our own or others on their behalf. Implicit in this process is something very revealing about perspective and, therefore, power. Who gets to tell whose story in what way, and why?

Before this devolves into a well-worn rant about all that, let me return to my purpose: to share a few resources on the subject. Lost Daughters is a collection of intelligent women writing their own adoption stories, recommending other readings, and more.  Click here for a short NY Times Blog by one of their authors. They are responsible for a series entitled “Flip the Script,” which does not merely settle only for the well-known, eternally grateful adoptee narrative, but rather explores the confusion, anger, shame, fear, sadness, rejection, loss, etc. surrounding the act of adoption.

My own story is mainly one of gratitude, but also one of struggling with rejection and abandonment in my relationships. (You can read about that on the Portrait of an Adoption blog in various entries and mine called “Chosen.”) I was given a better chance at having a supportive family, an education, and more because my mother placed me for adoption. But my story is also one of the challenging transition into an adulthood relationship with my adopted mother, and the uncharted path of forging a relationship with my biological mother since we first confirmed our genetic connection several years ago.

There really are few to no models for adoptees that portray the process of getting to know their birth-relatives. It’s surreal, messy, and leaves a connection, a burgeoning friendship hanging in the balance between obligation and fear, love and being left behind. Suddenly, there are exciting or awkward or revealing conversations with this all-too similar stranger whose loss you can never repair or repay; a guilt that may gnaw at you; a joy of finally feeling understood, or whole, or like you belong to someone, somewhere but then again, do you? Can an adoptee suddenly belong to the woman and womb from which she was exiled? And what does this mean for the home, the familiar people and places that were already provided for the adoptee?  Must the adoptee make a choice between the two worlds/bodies of nature and nurture, and even if she did would she still float in a sort of limbo, with cautious toes in the muddy waters of both? Each protects and provides, and post-reconciliation with the birth family sometimes leads to the sets of parents feeling the pangs of rejection for the first time.

Adoption is labor, and it is love, but at the core of both is loss. Something born must gain independence, and something loved must leave. Is the loss worth what is gained? I hope for many, yes, but how can we know until we listen to their stories for ourselves?

I hope you’ll check out the Lost Daughters and alternative adoption narratives. Acknowledging the complicated emotions and experiences of others is the most compassionate thing we can do. The scared/hurt child inside all of us, I think, would like to feel heard.

One Poem… Two Versions

I drafted this recently, and it has changed quite a bit, especially in line and stanza breaks. I was working in couplets primarily. I am trying it as a single stanza here to see how it sits. Another version is below…

 

Father

 

You are the way I clench my teeth

without feeling connected–

the bit sticks in my jaw, follows

jugular to pools of fused clavicles;

the way I bite the insides

of my mouth, making maps to you;

or lick and chap my lips:

dry and worn working hands

clapped together, praying for release,

Amen.

***

Father

 

You are the way I clench my teeth

without feeling connected

 

the bit sticks in my jaw, follows

jugular to pools of fused clavicles;

 

the way I bite the insides

of my mouth, making maps to you;

 

or lick and chap my lips:

dry and worn working hands

 

clapped together, praying for release,

Amen.