Elizabeth Bishop has been an important poet for me for a long time, yet she was famous reticent about her personal life. In this beautifully written and authoritative literary biography, critic Thomas Travisano helped me to understand the intersections between her personality and life and the work these gave rise it. Understanding the person Elizabeth Bishop was has deepened my love for the work. Love Unknown (Viking, 2019) was a book I treated myself to last spring, when I knew that the pandemic would curtail many activities and open up more time for reading. (Little did I think reading it, and Bishop’s own work, would inspire me to write an homage poem to her “In the Waiting Room” while actually in my own dentist’s waiting room! But that is another story.) If you are interested in understanding Bishop’s life and work, this is the biography for you!
In future posts, I plan to share more volumes from my library on Bishop and by Travisano, just when the mood strikes. For now, on this rainy Thursday, it is time for a bracing cup of tea and some housework that requires coordination, determination, and an apron!
Regarding the Poem for April 8, “Vapid“:
Over the past twenty years, I have enjoyed many “reality” television shows. Favorites have included “The Old House” and “A Chef’s Life,” “What Not to Wear” (British and American versions), and “Project Runway.” This past week, however, I hit the wall. “Love Island”? Well, let’s just say I am not the right demographic. Time to tune in to the semi-final episode of the latest season of “The Great British Baking Show”–after, of course, brewing a cup of tea. Be still, my heart!
This book, Poemcrazy by Susan G. Wooldridge, (Three Rivers Press, 1996) turned the key for me. Back in 2003, as the mother of a pre-schooler and a professional fundraising and writing consultant to local and national non-profits and fledgling yoga teacher with a new yoga studio and a new publisher of materials on labyrinths, I was busy with wonderful things, but I began to feel too distant from my core identity as a poet. (One I realized when I was eight years old.) I can’t recall whether I found this book of essays and exercises or it found me. Suffice to say, that although it took three years (from 2003, when I bought my copy, to 2006 when I let it sink all the way in,) this slender volume exploded a lie I had been telling myself: that I couldn’t write a poem unless I was “inspired.”
You might have thought that participating in an MFA program in poetry would already have weeded out that lie, but it was tenacious. The remedy? Reading Wooldridge’s encouraging and funny and poignant prose, and then really giving her “Poem Tickets” exercise a chance (found in Chapter Four, “The Answer Squash.”)
I don’t want to pretend it was easy, because it wasn’t. I tried on my own, but it wasn’t until I asked for help, and my wise artist-friend, Julia Uleberg Swanson, helped me get the words and phrases I had clipped and saved taped onto actual tickets. We had a blast doing that in her studio. Afterwards, I took tickets home and housed them in a silver Revere Ware bowl and kept them on my desk next to my computer. Each day, I would pull one or two or three and then write a poem-ish thing. The only rule was that it had to use each of the phrases I had pulled.
To my surprise, I found that I could do this, day in and day out, until the tickets were gone. I also found that no matter how seemingly random the prompts, each poem spoke in some direct way to my inner or outer experience. I ended up with more than 30 “poem-ish things.” Many remained in that larval state, like this one.
A surprising number of others, buffed lightly with revisions, found their place in the world. Here are a few examples.
“Evidence” was the first poem of mine to be accepted in 2010 for the annual Poet-Artist Collaboration at The Crossings Gallery in Zumbrota, Minnesota.“Orpheus” was first published in Swamp Lily Review in 2013. I included it in my first book-length collection, Still Life with Poppies: Elegies (Kelsay Books, 2016.)I included this sonnet-esque poem, “En Plein Air Ultramarine,” in my second book-length collection, Cloud Song, in 2017.“Clue” was my first poem accepted by Blue Unicorn, in 2018, and I included it in my third book-length collection, Concertina, in 2019
Not only have I had more easy and enjoyment in composing poems since working with the poem tickets, I have been more willing to risk rejection and steadily send work out. Coincidence? Somehow, I think not. Funny, but though I have long loved the cover of Poemcrazy, for its exuberance and its homage to photographer Henri Cartier Bresson, I only today see the outline of the ticket surrounding the title!
I actually make a strong connection between the poem tickets exercise and the NaPoWriMo experience. Without the poem ticket experience ten years before, I am not sure that I would have had the courage to take on the poem-a-day challenge in 2016. How glad I am that I did! Perhaps this summer would be a good time for me to take a new look at Poemcrazy to see it there is another form of practice that will speak to where I am now?
Regarding Today’s Poem: “Windblown”
I don’t have much to say about today’s poem, other than that it was wholly unanticipated. The photographs below illustrate the weird and lovely unfolding in our early spring garden.
What?Hmmmm…Time for spring cleaning on the back porch as well as the garden…What comes first? Flamingo or its egg?
Until tomorrow, let’s all keep our eyes open, see what the day brings!
LESLIE
Like this! That just blew into my mailbox all unasked for, and opportunity to clothe myself in (beautiful but expensive) poetry. As a metaphor, okay, I will buy it! But my wallet stays shut. I do love the easy look and the way the cover model’s hair echoes the shape of a heart.
This book, The Crafty Poet: A Portable Workshop by Diane Lockward (Wind Publications, 2013) is a handy resource for when I want a fresh approach to writing a poem. Lockward, poet laureate of West Caldwell, NJ since 2009, offers a free monthly poetry newsletter and helms a small publishing arm called Terrapin Press. The Crafty Poet (which now also has a sister-sequel volume) is a composite work dreamed up and coordinated by Lockward but containing craft tips and sample poems from a host of interesting contemporary poets (see contributors’ names below) thoughtfully arranged by topic–from “Generating Material/Using Time” to “Writer’s Block/Recycling” and many gems in between. Material was generated from and originally shared on her Poetry Newsletter.
Regarding Today’s Poem: “X = ?”:
As you know, I have been traveling through the alphabet backward this year. Backwards or forwards, it doesn’t matter: the letter “X” is a daunting prospect. Today, it was Lockward’s book, above, that helped me see the challenge from a fresh vantage point. From the chapter on “Voice,” which suggests locating one’s own voice by internalizing other voices through deep study and frequent reading of a poem (or poems) you love, I used the prompt by Jeanne Marie Beaumont that uses her own poem, “After” as an illustration. Her poem is inspired by Robert Frost’s “After Apple-Picking,” using the first word of his title for her title, then weaving two stanzas out of an acrostic use of the second word in Frost’s title. I am drawn to memorize and recite the poems of other poets anyway, so for me the springboard into my own poem was the idea of creating an acrostic, playing with the ideas of “X” as the unknown quantity and of mysteries encountered at crossroads.
If you would like to know more about this acrostic form, there is a wealth of information online. It is an old form, beloved of children (they enjoy making up poems based on their own names!) and poets of all ages. The trick, I think, is to balance the body of the poem carefully against the seed letter at the beginning of each line. Best of all is when the reader encounters the poem first without realizing it is an acrostic (as happened with me as I read “After.”)
Thanks for reading this! Hope you enjoy today’s construction project!
This collection of essays by poet Jane Hirschfield has been in my library for nearly a quarter of a century, and it still pulls me back in every so often to reread and mull over Hirschfield’s quiet but authoritative wisdom. (I also love the cover image, all that bright citrus partially obscured and in different stages of revelation and accessibility.)
Here are the two sentences that open the preface:
Poetry’s work is the clarification and magnification of being. Each time we enter its word-woven and musical invocation, we give ourselves over to a different mode of knowing: to poetry’s knowing, and to the increase of existence it brings, unlike any other.
A longtime practitioner of Zen Buddhism, Hirschfield’s prose and poetry reflects the values of spare elegant surface opening the mind to penetrating depths. Nobel Laureate Czesław Miłosz has written of Hirshfield’s “profound empathy for the suffering of all living beings,” another hallmark of Buddhism’s emphasis on compassion.
Nine Gates is equally appealing whether approached as a reader of poems or as a maker of poems, exploring as it does the enlarging function of poetry for both the reader and the writer. (Her other collection of essays, Ten Windows: How Great Poems Transform theWorld, is one I still have not read, but I am looking forward to dipping into it. As a well-regarded translator of poems from Japan and India, she is well qualified to ponder this. I am also hoping to explore more of Hirschfield’s body of work in poetry. If you have a favorite among her volumes, please let me know!)
Regarding today’s Poem: “Yellow”
Today’s poem, “Yellow,” cohered around a memory of homeschooling days, when Julia was gaining new confidence as a cook and baker in a circle of friends that extended out from her peers through multiple generations and across state lines–gifts that matter in the moment and linger in the heart and mind. In this case, a yellow gingham apron, practical and beautiful, made especially for her with love, the gift of a grandmother who extended her caring beyond her own grandchildren to their friend, our daughter.
I think the combination of the prompt of the letter “Y” and maybe the cover of Hirschfield’s collection were the catalysts for the poem.
Until tomorrow, maybe you experience increased existence! LESLIE
This two-inch thick tome has been with me since I first had a real job and could afford to buy books. (When you see that the stick price is $7.95, you can compute just how long I have treasured this rather battered paperback.) It is a classic reference, and continues to be updated. Arranged alphabetically, with entries from “Abecedarius” to “Zeugma,” it is my first reference of choice for all things poetic, and it is usually the most complete. Yes, the prose is a little bit dry, and the font size (arrayed in two columns per page) can be politely described as miniscule, but if it were in a reader-friendly 12. font then I wouldn’t be able to lift it. (As it is, the paperback I own weighs three pounds on my kitchen scale.)
This doughty workhorse has no page-turning narrative arc but were I packing a sea chest for a sojourn on a desert island, I would make room for it, right next to my dictionary, blank note books, pens, energy bars, and sunscreen.
Regarding today’s Poem, “Zither”:
For those of you who asked to receive the daily poems, I hope this short video will help give some background resonance to the poem for today. I can’t play a guitar or even a piano myself, much as I have longed to coax music out of both, yet I can see how the three are related. Folk music, and making music at home–can we think about these trends in the past two hundred years without the instruments that made them possible? I would add to that the flute and penny whistle, the recorder (and, of course, the concertina!)
This comes performance of the Beatles “Let it Be” comes from musician Etienne de Lavaulx. I hope that you will enjoy it as much as I do. (Please know that de Lavaulx, a native of France now based in Western Australia, has many YouTube performances of familiar songs and also offers CDs and sheet music. You might want to look for his rendition of Simon and Garfunkel’s “The Sounds of Silence” online. If you have a little more leisure–just twelve minutes!–look at this autobiography in which he demonstrates his life as a musician specializing in guitar and zither.)
(Note: there is no entry in the Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics for “zither” but there is one for “dithyramb.”)
