I’m falling in love
Can I tell you about it?
About a year ago we began courting. And now during this half life of Covid we are seriously dating. Where this will end? I don’t know. But I have a good, true feeling about this.
When writing scenes for my memoir, At the Narrow Waist of the World, I learned that I didn’t like to over explain. One just-so word was better than two (or three). I leaned heavily on fragments of memory, a snapshot in my mind, things I could touch and hear and smell. I wrote in metaphors: la cigüeña, the galaxy, matraca, paper dolls…. My writing colleagues said, “You’re a poet.”
What…?
Here’s all I remember from thin studies in high school and college: Longfellow’s “Evangeline” (That was beautiful!), Walt Whitman’s sexy “Song of Myself,” Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Raven” (for evermore…), EE Cummings’ diagram poems that we all adored. Poems I’d seen in more recent times seemed, well, “complicated.”
Are you here with me?
I noticed a class offering via Sarah Lawrence that involved going with a poet to the art market in Chelsea, New York. To view art, then write. (?) I decided to experiment. Here I was confronted with two things I loved—the visual arts and the music of words. On the last session the poet asked us to write a short poem (once home) beginning with the words ‘After I left you.’ Some time after that my first poem “After Viewing Art with Four Strangers” was accepted for publication in The Ekphrastic Review.
I signed up for another class or two or three with the same inventive and very fine poet who gave us fledging students and established poets exercises that encouraged noticing. I began to read poems. Basic, right? There were so many voices in the world of poetry, past and present. I listened to poems read. I met people besotted by poetry. I wrote.
Years and years ago (when we could travel) I took a week off from work to accompany my husband on a work trIp to Paris. To Paris! As advertised, he worked--while I wandered about in Paris. I spent an entire day at the Musée Picasso in the Le Marais neighborhood. By evening I was skew-eyed, saturated with Picasso’s forms, flattened, fragmented, dimensional. When I returned to New York City, people on the street were flat, face-on and sideways, vibrating with color.
This is what is happening with poetry. I am reading chapbooks and collections of poetry by specific poets of the 20thcentury (to begin with)—as in a museum retrospective where you see an artist’s work over several decades and begin to fathom the artist’s palette, the subjects the poet returns to, the rhythm and energy--one poet at a time.
I am a reader and writer. How could I ignore a means of expression as old as history?
I’m in deep now.
And I wonder if you’ve turned to something new during this difficult Covid pause. Are you learning a new skill? Or find yourself with time to pursue something you’ve always loved?
Or have the kids bamboozled you into getting a new puppy?
I want to know if there is a poet you cherish. Or a poem you love.
Or, why—is it because it doesn’t rely on storyline quite like novels do—that poetry is sometimes dismissed?
American poet, Terrance Hayes explains, “Language is always burdened by thought. I’m just trying to get it so it can be like feeling.”
Emily Dickinson wrote, “If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry.”
A tease for you:
Would you indulge me and take a peek at these three very different poems?
William Carlos Williams (¡Me encanta este poeta!) - (one sentence poem… read it slowly…)
As the cat
climbed over
the top of
the jambcloset
first the right
forefoot
(continue…)
Lucille Clifton – “blessing the boats”
may the tide
that is entering even now
the lip of our understanding
carry you out
(continue…)
Joyce Harjo – “Get Rid of Fear Poem” - read by poet - don’t miss!
Two of my recent poems have been accepted for publication. !!!!
I’ll let you know when they’re officially birthed in the world.