A New Decade Begins: Poetry

Dear Reader,

John and I have a breakfast ritual: we each choose one poem from a book or journal and read it aloud. Not much discussion usually follows. We believe that over-analyzing can defeat the purpose: start the day by waking up our brains’ language centers. We have been going through the February 2018 issue of Poetry, which featured Aotearoa/New Zealand poets. I read “drift” by Kerrin P. Sharpe, a dream poem with surreal images.

Because of the poem’s sentence structure and rhythms, I said, “It sounds as if this poet was using Mad Lib’s technique of filling in the parts of speech with your craziest word.” It can be a fun language exercise, and a poem may come from it. Or maybe not.

Poets employ many strategies to jolt Madame Inspiration out of her stupor. And that’s the point about writing a poem. Every word counts, as it rides along in a rhythmic sea of other words. I have been writing poems since childhood and a few survive, yellowed and crumbling in a binder. But what remains fresh in my mind? The moments I knew that I had to write the poem.

We lived on the second floor, across the street from a foundry. The view from the front window was a blast furnace. I loved watching the molten steel do its colorful dance, especially at night. Inspiration seized me - I grabbed a piece of drawing paper and wrote:

 

fire dance
see it
violet flash on blue-green wall
forms
now grotesque, now delicate
smoky mist embracing –
curling ‘round the dimmed light
fire dance
hear it
thump…thump
arms of luminosity
reaching, flying in time
then
blast furnace crashing
seething, pounding
fantastique addition to the fire dance –

Please note the spelling of fantastic – high school French class influence – I think I meant to embed the musical reference “fantasia” in a poem about a noisy blast furnace. I tried to be sophisticated in those days, and it often collided with my spelling abilities.

Time passes. Twenty years ago, when I shifted from full-time teaching to having a self-directed, project-driven life, Inspiration took her place in the driver’s seat. To be fair, I make a triple set of demands on her. With art making, she’s consistently there. With prose writing, she’s gone beyond expectation by gifting me with 9 years of work about poet Stanley Kunitz.

However, Inspiration’s attention to poetry is currently on the wane. Lately, I have written fewer poems and consequently, sent fewer out for publication. Rejection’s sting hasn’t lessened, though (see Judy’s Journal 2005 March).

What have I learned from looking back at 2 decades of poetry writing? Inspiration may return from her break and get in the driver’s seat when I am able to devote more TIME to her. It’s a matter of choice, chance and time management.