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3:48am, The Real Reason Sharing a Bed with Your Baby Is Highly Unadvisable…
3:48 AM, THE REAL REASON SHARING A BED WITH YOUR BABY IS HIGHLY UNADVISABLE; or, MAMA'S LITTLE HEARTBREAKER by Jenny Sanders
Sleeping, sometimes,
Pink petal, concave curl,
Pliable, meldedcandlewax
Baby—
So that I set the illusion
She is more a part of me.
But those days are over.
She is mostly apart of me.
Often in her infant slumber, reputed for its
Sweetness and tranquility,
She bucks and claws,
Writhes with tortured neck and arch
To draw around herself a circle,
Some clear air.
Yes, even in her dreams
Our recent separation
Is, for her it seems,
Not only fact, but desirable fact.
Soft fall of lashes on softer cheeks,
Lips parted in imperceptible breath,
This ambrosial drop of crushing sweetness
Is crusting over,
Portcullis slowly closing,
An inside joke to which I am no longer privy.
Copyright 2011 by Jenny Sanders
Critique by Jendi Reiter
For this month's Critique Corner, it seemed appropriate to begin 2011 with a poem about new birth and the passage of time. Jenny Sanders of Mount Airy, Georgia sent us this poem about her newborn daughter Lizzie. She told us that she uses poetry to "tap the myriad of intense emotions" engendered by motherhood. Where prose seeks to make experience transparent and orderly, poetry "almost always taps into a knowledge that cannot be defined as sense, but that operates on some other plane of knowing."
Sanders' reflections are a good place to begin our discussion of the use of emotional ambivalence to add dramatic interest to a poem. Coming off the holiday season, we can probably all remember moments when we experienced a disconnect between how we were supposed to feel and how we actually felt. When a poem makes room for the shadow side of an event that has been whitewashed by sentimentality, not only does it freshen up an old topic, but it wins over the reader by promising the relief that truth-telling brings.
Few milestones in life are surrounded by as many high-pressure expectations, both sentimental and judgmental, as motherhood. Recalling our own helplessness as infants, we would feel safer believing that the mother's passion for her child is always only innocent, harmless, and unselfish. As Freud and the Brothers Grimm would agree, though, all intimate relationships have other baggage: sensual desire, fear of separation, fear of mortality, and anger at the beloved for making us thus vulnerable. Like the new year, the new child is a fresh start but also an unwelcome reminder that time passes, and eventually we will die and be replaced by the next generation.
Some renowned poets who have mined this taboo territory include Anne Sexton and Sharon Olds. For instance, in Olds' poem "My Son the Man", the narrator suddenly sees herself as a cast-off trunk from which her son is making a Houdini-like escape. Sexton's 1971 collection Transformations reinterprets familiar fairy tales to highlight the psychosexual tensions between parents and children.
Sanders clearly means to join this company, based on the signals she gives us in the title. "Sharing a bed with" and "heartbreaker" come from the language of romance. The concept of duality, of splitting, is also common to both phrases. Now that the child is out of her body, their perfect union is broken. A piece of the mother is missing, the literal image of a broken heart. They must share a bed because now there are two of them.
What makes this loss interesting enough to build a poem around is, again, ambivalence: both the mother's, and the reader's, uncertainty whether it is acceptable to acknowledge and grieve this loss at all. Shouldn't she want her baby to grow up and become a person? Ought we to sympathize with this character? Like the mother's sensual pleasure in her child, which Sanders conveys well through the tactile delight of the alliterative opening lines, the conflict of interest between mother and child is a truth we'd rather not look at head-on.
The baby in this poem, too, defies our wish for a simplistic greeting-card picture of infant sweetness. "She bucks and claws,/Writhes with tortured neck and arch/To draw around herself a circle,//Some clear air." Sanders effectively uses line breaks for a visual reminder of the baby's expanding personal space. From the beginning, she too is a wholly human mix of affection and aggression.
I felt the poem could be strengthened by cutting the next stanza: "Yes, even in her dreams..." Further explanation of the subtext is not necessary, and these more prosaic lines suffer by comparison with the strong images preceding them.
Critics of co-sleeping, to whom Sanders alludes in her title, sometimes fret that the parent might roll over on the baby and suffocate her. Images of devouring and crushing color the closing scene of the poem, where the baby is envisioned as an edible sweet treat. I like the sound-echo of "crushing/crusting", and the realistic detail that babies and their surroundings become encrusted with all sorts of fluids pretty quickly.
"Portcullis" is a great word, but perhaps not the most germane metaphor in this context. Nothing before it has really primed us to picture the baby as a fortress—a hard, inorganic object. When I saw the words "slowly closing", I thought of the fontanelle, the soft spot on a baby's skull that enables it to compress in the birth canal, and closes up during the first two years. I would suggest substituting "fontanelle" for "portcullis", because then you gain the idea of the skull as another boundary, without pulling the reader out into a new set of metaphors. The child's thoughts are becoming less transparent to the mother as she ages, as evinced by the last line about the private joke.
Of course, the mother has her own private joke to share someday, when her daughter begins to perceive the universal conflicts that give this poem its resonance: "Just wait till you have children of your own!"
Where could a poem like "Mama's Little Heartbreaker" be submitted? The following contests may be of interest:
W.B. Yeats Society Annual Poetry Competition
Postmark Deadline: February 1
Long-running award offers $500, web publication, and invitation to awards ceremony in NYC in April
Able Muse Write Prize
Entries must be received by February 15
New contest from California-based small press offers $500 apiece for poetry and flash fiction
This poem and critique appeared in the January 2011 issue of Winning Writers Newsletter (subscribe free).
Jubilate Agno
Like a black kite
from another dimension,
God appears
circling above
the dying lamb—
unhurried hunger
weaving through
an ordinary sky—
His poisoned eyes
reflecting the knowledge
that his flesh
will become
His flesh,
his blood
His blood.
Sweeping down
in an ever decreasing
vortex,
black wings
shrouding the sun,
He steps down
from His throne of air.
Carrion eater,
tearer of flesh,
purifier,
His terrible
skull red
from holding
back the sun—
shit-stained
legs and feet
clawing the earth
in time's shadow,
patient, waiting,
His skeletal breath
stinks of centuries
of rotting meat.
After an exploratory
peck or two
He grunts, hisses,
then starts with the eyes,
as He promises
Paradise.
Copyright 2011 by Jack Goodman
Critique by Jendi Reiter
There's something about Christianity and gothic horror that seems to go together, as we see in "Jubilate Agno" by Jack Goodman, a poet from Twin Falls, Idaho. Many of our classic fright-fest plots could be seen as variations on Christian imagery, but with God's goodness and trustworthiness removed from the picture. Compare "Rosemary's Baby" to the Virgin Birth, or zombies to the Resurrection. After seeing the "Twilight" vampire movies, I had a hard time not hearing Edward Cullen's seductive voice in this hymn we often sing during the Eucharist at my church:
The Bread that I will give
is my Flesh for the life of the world,
and they who eat of this bread,
they shall live for ever,
they shall live for ever.
Unless you eat
of the Flesh of the Son of Man
and drink of his Blood,
you shall not have life within you,
you shall not have life within you.
What are we to make of these parallels? One could object that artists in this genre are merely appropriating sacred images for the shock value of seeing them profaned. Such was some conservative Christians' objection to the scene of ants crawling on a crucifix in AIDS activist David Wojnarowicz' short film "A Fire in My Belly", which led to the film's being removed from a Smithsonian exhibit. Yet a brief tour through medieval art shows that blood, death, torture, and the grotesque have been part of the Christian story from the beginning. Part of the tradition's power lies in how it faces these realities of the human condition and promises ultimate redemption from them.
That hope, however, is not always as evident to our senses as the suffering, and so the latter threatens to dominate our imaginations, stifling faith. The horror genre voices our fear that unredeemed suffering is the only reality, or that we will have to save ourselves from it via brute force or magical talismans. In this respect, its spirituality can sometimes be more genuine than the G-rated kitsch that's often sold under the label of Christian art.
Given the long history of "the blood of the Lamb" in devotional art and its darker counterpart, horror, how is a poet to approach this theme in a fresh way? Goodman has made several choices that help him out. First, he sticks to describing the action in concrete terms instead of editorializing. He does not need to talk about loss of faith, or the terror of the victim. We feel these directly as we are caught up in the graphic scene. Second, the form of the poem works against any impulse to be florid and wordy, which seems to be a particular temptation for writers of gothic horror because of that genre's roots in the Victorian era. Short lines and simple words keep the action moving and build suspense.
At key points in the poem, Goodman pairs visually arresting images with a sound pattern that is strong and well-paced. The opening K-sounds in "Like a black kite" resemble the harsh caws of crows, while the words themselves instantly create a menacing atmostphere. The stately yet inexorable approach of the bird of prey is heard in the measured rhythms of "black wings/shrouding the sun,/He steps down/from His throne of air." The last phrase carries a subtle allusion to the devil, one of whose traditional epithets is "the Prince of the Air".
Another fine passage is "His terrible/skull red/from holding/back the sun". Regular readers will know I'm critical of over-using line breaks to manufacture drama. Here, though, the technique works perfectly because nearly every word is a strong one and essential to the phrase: terrible, skull, red, holding, back, sun. I can hear the strain of that holding-back. The almost sublime image is then followed by "shit-stained/legs and feet" just to crush any fleeting thought that this deity might be worthy of worship after all.
I would suggest reworking or cutting the second line, "from another dimension", a cliché that's been used to promote too many sci-fi B-movies. I don't know if the poem really needs "Carrion eater" in the second stanza, either. "Carrion" is close to becoming an archaic word that only shows up in gothic horror tales, and could be seen as overwrought. Also consider ending that stanza at "stinks of centuries", which still conveys the notion of decay without the obvious image of rotting meat.
The poem concludes with sibilant menace in the S-sounds of hisses, starts, eyes, promises, Paradise. It's a nice twist to end with a suggestion of the Lamb's masochistic pleasure, since the eroticism of submission is another sublimated strain in Christian imagery that the horror genre brings forward with a vengeance. Believing in God's power but not His love, some opt for the tragic beauty of knowingly trusting the untrustworthy, hoping thereby to manufacture their own transcendence. Jubilate agno—rejoice in the Lamb. Indeed.
Where could a poem like "Jubilate Agno" be submitted? The following contests may be of interest:
Flatmancrooked Poetry Prize
Entries must be received by March 1
Sacramento-based small press offers $500 prize, plus anthology publication for top 30 entries, for poems up to 500 words; enter online
Poetry 2011 International Poetry Competition (Atlanta Review)
Postmark Deadline: March 1
This well-regarded journal offers $1,000 top prize, plus publication for top 20 entries; enter by mail or online
Balticon SF Poetry Contest
Postmark Deadline: April 1
The Baltimore Science Fiction Society offers $100 top prize for poems with science fiction, fantasy or horror themes; winners invited to read at Balticon, their annual convention, in May; previously published work accepted
This poem and critique appeared in the February 2011 issue of Winning Writers Newsletter (subscribe free).
Concerto of Snow and Pelagic Zone
CONCERTO OF SNOW by Ryan Sauers
the symphony of a falling snowflake
plays like a lone violist
secluded in a moment
one single flake
drifts back and forth
in a soft rhythm
heard only in my head
a soft melody of snow crystals
unfolds within me like
an ageless hymn
of quietude and tranquility
a night sky nearly blank
adds to the serenity
like canvas to an artist
here at this street corner's
lonely stoop I focus upon
one single crystalline fleck
with even smooth strokes
through tree tops the little white
sparkle somehow misses every branch
hovering in a crisp night's breath
like soft notes in a gentle chord
only to land upon a snowman's nose
this humble moment blanketed
with a warm and tender silence
one opus ends for another to begin
as a second crystal descends
Copyright 2010 by Ryan Sauers
PELAGIC ZONE by Joan L. Cannon
In the deeps, where memory's the record keeper,
All our truths are subjects now of sea-change—
Wrought by tides of time and waves of green experience.
Where grey grotesques reveal their nacre only after cleavage,
Rosy anemones disguise the moray's lair
And lure to numbing extinction all the small unwary.
Relics huge and impotent, bedecked with useless trinkets,
Are duned by the million million sifting grains of everyday details,
Their bulk and history sleeping, forever obscured by trivia.
In these mermaid caves, where lurk the myths? Where's the real?
Echoes reflect in patterns peacocked with iridescent hues;
Facts ephemeral as the uttered word, now ambered in silence—
Prism'd entities that mirror endlessly the mind's compounded masquerade.
Copyright 2011 by Joan L. Cannon
Critique by Tracy Koretsky
In the October 2010 Critique Corner, I highlighted how two poets conveyed meaning in their poems by using extended metaphors. This month I will demonstrate, in a very practical way, just how that's done, with the help of two poems: Ryan Sauers' "Concerto of Snow" and Joan L. Cannon's "Pelagic Zone".
Let's begin with "Concerto". In this poem, it is easy to see how a metaphor can be extended by using a diction family—words that are related. Here, the predominant family is, of course, music: both its forms, such as concerto, symphony, hymn, and opus, and its qualities, like melody, rhythm and chords.
The repetition of the word "soft" might raise a flag for the poet interested in revision. In this case, however, the poet has used the repetition to bring the words "rhythm" and "melody" into parallel. Notice, too, how Sauers has underscored his metaphor by selecting a second diction family of words that communicate music's opposite: silence. Indeed, he has utilized space throughout the piece to emphasize its pauses. I wonder if you can't identify a third diction family? Words that conjure aloneness: secluded, lone, only in my head, etc.
By interweaving these several families, Sauers complicates his poem and adds interest. In fact, the poem's weakest section is where he digresses from these three main diction families with:
a night sky nearly blank
adds to the serenity
like canvas to an artist
These lines introduce a new diction family which the rest of the poem does not ultimately support.
Not only does the use of diction families unify the poem, but also, in the end, they provide something that every poet needs: a way out. Beginning with his third repetition of "soft" in "soft notes", Sauers gathers words from his various diction families: "chord", "silence", "one", and "opus", thereby creating a pleasing cadence.
With Joan Cannon's "Pelagic Zone", with its lush and consistently interesting language, we see a somewhat more challenging example of the same principle. Ms. Cannon writes, "I want metaphor to carry the message, and most of the time I have message in mind."
I don't know about you, but if I am going to understand the first thing about this poem, I will need to look up the phrase "pelagic zone", which turns out to be any water in a sea or lake that is not close to the bottom or near to the shore. If a reader must look up words to enter a poem, does that make its diction obscure? No. Rather it makes it specific. Obscure diction is actually just the opposite: words selected to make their true meaning harder to discern. There is a place for intentionally obscure diction in poetry, but this poem is not an example of it.
To the contrary, Cannon tells us unequivocally in her first two lines that memory and truth are the subject of her poem, the subject about which the pelagic zone will act as metaphor. Meanwhile, also in those first lines, she establishes that she intends to continue borrowing from the diction family of oceanography to extend that metaphor.
Take, for example, her use of the word "deeps" (as opposed to "depths"). As the third word of a poem, this unusual, though specific, choice is something of a risk. After all, she has not yet earned the reader's trust or respect. Now, risk within a poem is not a bad thing; often it is something to be admired. However, presented in a poem with a grammatical inversion in line two, it might give the impression of someone less than comfortable with English.
To repair this, Cannon need not deviate from her carefully selected diction. Instead a simple repair of the inversion in line two:
All our truths are now subjects of sea-change
resolves the issue without altering her meaning in any way. Read in the light of the title, the reader is now alerted to the particularity of the diction we are to expect in the remainder of the poem, words like "nacre" and the skillful use of metonymy with the word "moray". By exploiting the diction family of oceanography, Cannon extends her metaphor to take us beneath "tides" and "waves". See how the colors of the sea become a small family of diction in themselves? At last she brings us to the treasure—that message she has always had in mind—the effect of memory and truth buried in the sands.
Notice how, beginning with the last two lines of the first stanza and then throughout the rest of the poem, Cannon takes nouns, turns them into verbs and presents them in the past tense: dune'd, peacocked, ambered, prism'd. This uncommon construction creates another sort of diction family and unifies the poem's second half.
This is a formal poem—the sort of poem where the tone supports esoteric language and atypical grammar. To recognize this at first glance, one only need note the use of capital letters at the beginning of each line. Identifying the poem as such offers perspectives for its revision. I see that it is built in unrhymed couplets, each pair containing a complete idea. The one exception is the final line of the first stanza. I question the line. Does it provide new information? For the first time in this poem I feel as if I am being told as opposed to shown.
Formal poetry, like every other type of poetry, is, quite frankly, subject to fashion. Though this may seem frivolous, a freshening of its presentation will probably help its reception without a single revision to its text. Cannon might take a look at online journals such as Mezzo Cammin, Able Muse, or The Barefoot Muse, and study how lines are broken and stanzas shaped in contemporary formal poetry.
Extending metaphors is perhaps the most essential skill every poet must master. It is poetry's logic, the way it operates. Even more than repetition, rhythm, or rhyme, it is metaphor that distinguishes poetry from every other type of writing. Fortunately, as this month's poets have shown us, using diction families make it easy to do.
Where could a poem like "Concerto of Snow" be submitted? The following contests may be of interest:
The University of Derby's literary festival sponsors this contest with prizes up to 300 pounds in adult category, or book tokens (gift certificates) in youth categories
Tiferet Writing Contest
Entries must be received by April 1
Prizes up to $500 for poetry, fiction, and nonfiction from ecumenical journal of spirituality and the arts; enter online only
Writer's Digest Annual Writing Competition
Postmark Deadline: May 2
Competitive award from national writers' magazine offers $3,000 for best entry across all genres, plus prizes up to $1,000 in several poetry and prose genres
Dancing Poetry Contest
Postmark Deadline: May 15
Artists Embassy International offers prizes up to $100 plus opportunity to have your poem presented as an interpretive dance at festival in San Francisco
New Zealand Poetry Society International Poetry Competition
Entries must be received by May 31
Prizes up to NZ$500 for poems in various genres and age categories; open to international entries; no simultaneous submissions
Where could a poem like "Pelagic Zone" be submitted? The following contests may be of interest:
Writecorner Press Annual Poetry Award
Postmark Deadline: March 31
Writers' resource site offers prizes up to $500 and online publication for unpublished poems up to 40 lines
These poems and critique appeared in the March 2011 issue of Winning Writers Newsletter (subscribe free).
Night of Sky and East vs. West
NIGHT OF SKY by Changming Yuan
night of sky in the sea, bursting
with clouds and whales and chrysanthemums
night of sky in my mind—flat
when my meditative spirit stays still
among shapes and sounds, like a lotus-eater
night of sky in the sky, deep night
when my imaginings are starfish finding themselves
swimming closer to the carrel tree, to their nests
Copyright 2010 by Changming Yuan; originally published in Sea Stories
EAST VS. WEST by Changming Yuan
breaking, broken
bare bricks on the Berlin Wall
collected from the ruins
to build a transparent bridge
between the past and the future
broken, breaking
earthen bricks for Badalin Ridge
baked in a dragon fire
to repair and strengthen the long wall
separating the prairies farther from the gobi
Copyright 2010 by Changming Yuan; originally published in Hando No Kuzushi
Critique by Tracy Koretsky
In last month's Critique Corner, I made this fairly audacious statement: "Even more than repetition, rhythm, or rhyme, it is metaphor that distinguishes poetry from every other type of writing." I say audacious because, from the bulk of our mail here at Winning Writers, it is clear that most emerging writers believe that poetry equals repetition, either of sound—in other words, rhyme—or as phrase. This is a misconception.
What is true is that, while metaphor is the logic of poetry—its way of thinking, if you will—repetition is its most powerful device. Surely, that explains why it is immediately noticed and most frequently emulated. But, as with anything powerful, repetition must be handled with care.
One poet who does so artfully is Canadian Changming Yuan, author of Chansons of a Chinaman (Leaf Garden Press, 2009) and Politics and Poetics (Lambert Academic Publishing, 2009), a widely-published writer who, this month, has contributed two poems organized by repetition for us to compare and contrast.
Let's begin with what these poems don't do. They do not repeat the phrase without evolution in meaning. This is the single most common error emerging poets make.
Repetition of a phrase only works when the phrase morphs or takes on shades. This may be achieved as a change in context, as we will see in Yuan's poems, or through grammar, as we saw in Janet Butler's triolet, "Design", featured in the November 2009 Critique Corner. In some cases, the repeated phrase can drive the narrative, as in the "six hundred" from Tennyson's famous poem "The Charge of the Light Brigade" . No matter how it is applied, what is essential to understand is that effective repetition is not static. Misused it can easily overwhelm a poem, render it predictable and soon, dull.
One way that all of these poems evolve their repetitions is through variation. The phrases are not repeated strictly, though enough elements are retained to make the pattern obvious. It is not always necessary to vary the repetition of a phrase, though a great deal—possibly the majority—of well-made, repetition-reliant contemporary poems do. Such variance surprises the ear and holds the reader's interest.
Moving a poem that relies upon strict repetition is much harder to do (and impressive when it happens). One tip: keep the poem short. If you have a many-stanzaed poem built around an exact repetition, consider breaking it into several differently-titled short poems.
Notice the length of Yuan's poems. Notice too, that in "Night of Sky", Yuan does not attempt to extend a single meaning through every repetition of the phrase. Rather, he uses the phrase to organize three distinct metaphors.
Only the initial words are repeated, that is "night of sky in..." Yuan then creates a pattern with the remainder. That is, in the first and third stanzas, the phrase is completed by the definite article "the" followed by a single syllable word beginning with the letter "s". Each is completed by a comma plus a two-syllable word.
The similarity in the construction of these two lines form a bookend surrounding the more greatly varied second stanza in which the phrase is followed by a personal pronoun, a dash (a longer pause than a comma) and a single-syllable word, as if the extra pause given to the dash accounts for the rhythmic beat given to a syllable. Observe that the noun following the phrase in stanzas one and three uses a long vowel, whereas the second stanza uses a soft one.
To further fulfill this graceful balance, Yuan's final repetition of the phrase in stanza three repeats twice within itself by beginning and ending the line with "night", as well as his almost hypnotic use of "sky in the sky". This line is an excellent demonstration of one of the chief functions of repetition—strong emphasis. To modify "night" with "deep night" is simple, stirring, and universally affecting.
Taken as a whole, however, the poem proves the true power of repetition: music. Read the poem aloud and you are practically singing. The ear will always respond to pattern.
I could continue to discuss this fine piece: its careful sound correspondences that lead to more music; the way it moves from its metaphoric framework into the personal, finally bringing the two together in its resolution; how its metaphors are extended through the use of a diction family—but as this is an essay dedicated to the use of repetition, I will instead turn our attention now to "East vs. West".
Here repetition is used to organize a comparison. What one notices first and foremost is the initial phrase and its inversion. However, a bit of deeper analysis reveals that the grammatical structures of the two stanzas are just about identical—a more nuanced method of repetition. Notice that in each stanza the fourth line begins with "to", that "bricks" is the second word of each second line. The effort to parallel the two walls is supported by these choices and made obvious. Too obvious, in my personal opinion. Repetition is, after all, a powerful device—always noticeable. Used here, where it is not meant to "sing", it feels, to me, a bit forced, or at the very least, intellectual as opposed to musical.
That said, creating a parallel grammatical structure is a compelling way to imbue a poem with dignity. Far more subtle than strict phrase repetition, it nevertheless reinforces meaning in much the same way. If you have a poem that uses strict repetition, one way you might consider revising is to create many fewer resoundings of the phrase, and more grammatical parallelism.
In the case of "East vs. West", one revision might be to cut the first line of each stanza or to leave only one of the two closely-related words, perhaps a different one in each. I suspect the poet might believe that much of the art of the piece is bound in the fine distinction between the two forms of the word, but the effect upon the reader is to command so much attention to their parsing that the rest of the poem is slighted.
So strong is repetition that it can easily overpower a poem. Even just the use of the word in a different form is enough to alert the reader to pattern. Respect repetition and your poems will be elegant and memorable.
Where could poems like "Night of Sky" and "East vs. West" be submitted? The following contests may be of interest:
Wild Leaf Press Annual Poetry Contest
Entries must be received by April 30
Small press based in New Haven offers prizes up to $1,000 and publication in annual anthology for unpublished poems
Writer's Digest Annual Writing Competition
Postmark Deadline: May 2
Competitive contest for poetry and several prose genres from Writer's Digest, a leading publisher of directories and advice books for writers; top prize across all genres is $3,000, plus prizes up to $1,000 in each genre
Poetry on the Lake Competition
Postmark Deadline: May 15
Prizes up to $400 for unpublished poems, sponsored by the annual 3-day Poetry on the Lake festival on Lake Orta in Italy; 2011 suggested theme is "Stone"
These poems and critique appeared in the April 2011 issue of Winning Writers Newsletter (subscribe free).
Coal Country
I.
What I can't remember, and what I can:
my mother washing coal dust from the necks
of Mason jars filled with last summer's jams
and vegetables, their lids and rings black
with grit, contents obscured then visible
beneath the touch of a damp flannel rag
she wiped across hand-printed labels,
then dipped again into an enamel pan
where gray water settled from suds to silt.
Those cloths were always discarded, never
used for dishes again, deemed unfit
for the kitchen. Fifty years are over
now: I've known sullied cloth and family:
how some stains never wash out completely.
II.
Some stains never wash out completely,
but my mother's mother, Mary, would scrub
worn work camisas for the soiled but neatly
oiled and pompadoured Mexican railroad-
tie men who came to coal country laying
the wooden ties two thousand to the mile.
Boiled in lye, bleach in the wash and bluing
in the rinse, the shirts emerged starkly white
and innocent as angels. But these iron horsemen
of the Apocalypse, bearing spikes and crosses
for coal and cattle, carried pestilence
with them in that Spring of early losses—
my grandfather dead of flu in '17—
not knowing the damage that would be done.
III.
Not knowing the damage that could be done
we swam in the bright green lake of caustic
water. We thought it daring fun to plunge
beneath the foamy surface, opalescent
with chemicals that oozed unseen from dull
slag heaps: gray hillocks of thick detritus
left from the processing of newly-mined coal.
Knox County was blessed with bituminous
veins, cursed with the scars of its retrieval.
By the sixties, production had slowed down
to a handful of mines that were viable:
the older underground shafts abandoned,
while strip mining left the once-lush landscape stark,
rusted hoppers spilled coal beside old tracks.
IV.
Railroad hoppers spilled coal beside new tracks
as my mother, at ten, scurried along
the crisply graveled rail bed, packing sacks
of burlap with the fuel that had fallen
from overfilled cars. On her lucky days,
the bags grew heavy quickly and no snow
fell across the hills or, ankle-deep, lay
filling up the trackside ditches below,
where the tiny tank town of Appleton,
Illinois, lay crammed into the valley.
And sometimes, when the weak winter sun
grew thin as gruel from a caboose galley,
kind wind-burned men climbed atop the coal cars
and the black heat was gently handed down to her.
V.
This was how the black heat was handled: First,
the topsoil was peeled back by bulldozers
and piled aside for reclamation. Burst
through with draglines, the veins lying closer
to the surface were fractured, making it
easy to scoop the coal from the ground.
Crushed and separated, refined for what-
ever use it was destined: fine powder
for the power plant at Havana, coke
for steel, stoker coal for industry, egg and lump
for the furnaces of homes. Shale, sandstone,
pyrite—impurities—were hauled away and dumped
like wasted lives: what helps and what hinders
and what remains: dead ash and cold cinders.
VI.
And this is what remained: dead ash and cold cinders,
carried in an old coal hod to the driveway,
dumped in the low places. Rusty clinkers
of stony matter fused together by
the great heat of what warmed our little home
on sharp winter mornings. And in summer
the sunlight spiked off the marcasite nodes:
jewels that scraped and stung, lodging under
the skin of my shins and knees when I fell
from my bike to the cinders and gravel.
White scars remain to remind and foretell:
the last delivery truck of T.O. Miles;
shadows filling empty corners of the coal
room: one small, high window like a square halo.
VII.
One small, high window with a square halo
of light around the ill-fitting metal door:
coal lumps heaped up the walls. Dust billowed
through the air, covering the worn brick floor,
my father's tools stored inside for the winter,
and the many shelves of calming jars, contours
soft beneath a veil of dull black. Heat sent
rising through the grates above and the roar
of the ancient furnace were a living
pulse to which we pressed our ears and bodies,
until the natural gas lines reached us, ending
our affair with coal. But like lost love's memories
swept clean, damp days a dark stench still rises and chokes
with what I can remember, and what I won't.
Copyright 2006 by Christina Lovin
Critique by Tracy Koretsky
This month in Critique Corner we continue our discussion of how best to use poetry's most powerful device: repetition, with a closer examination of the most common type, that is, rhyme. Now, most poets would say that they know what rhyme is: a repetition of the terminal sounds or syllables of words. That is not wrong. On the other hand, that is not all.
To demonstrate the full potential of rhyme, I have broken from the usual procedure of commenting on a poem submitted by a contributor for revision, and invited a special guest, Christina Lovin. Ms. Lovin is a highly accomplished and awarded poet, and her poem featured here, "Coal Country", has no need for revision. In fact, it has already earned half a dozen significant awards, including the 2007 "Best of the Best" from Triplopia, for which I served as judge. The prize included a critical appreciation and interview, which are reprinted below this critique.
Before we begin, a brief explanation of the poem's form: it is called a sonnet crown, or corona, a linked sequence of seven sonnets that transits from section to section via a repetition in the last and subsequent first lines. Within a sonnet, there are many rules to consider, if not always to follow. These rules, and the reasons why and why not to adhere to them, will be discussed in more detail in the next Critique Corner. This month we will limit our discussion to the use of rhyme.
Lovin has chosen traditional English or "Shakespearean" sonnets. Therefore, her end rhyme scheme will be a/b/a/b/—c/d/c/d—e/f/e/f—gg. Scan the right-hand column of "Coal Country" with that in mind. You will find pairings such as "rag" and "pan" from sonnet I, or "down/abandoned" from sonnet III. How can these be said to rhyme?
Consider this definition of rhyme taken from Wikepedia: "Have or end with a sound that corresponds to another." Have or end. A rhyme, then, may be considered to be two or more words that have one or more sounds in common. That's all. They do not need to share the same final syllable, nor the same vowel, nor the same final consonant.
Why is this important? For better or worse, poetry—perhaps more than any other type of writing—is subject to fashion. The simple fact is that, today, poetry with relentless hard end rhymes, especially last-syllable rhymes, signals "light" poetry—more so when tightly metered. You'd have to be a pretty big grump to dislike "light" poetry of the type published in journals like Lighten Up Online and Light Quarterly. Nothing could have more charm or wit. The intent of these poems, however, is charm and wit. The style of rhyme explored in our critique is more appropriate for contemporary poetry of serious intent.
"Stark" and "tracks" from sonnet III make an excellent example of contemporary rhyme. Notice how both words appear to have all their sounds in common. However, the inversion of the order of the sounds, as well as the "r controlled" vowel in "stark," soften the rhyme and prevent it from becoming overbearing.
A similar strategy is at work in this sequence of end words from sonnet II: "laying/mile/bluing/white". If the exact ending syllable is used, Lovin chooses different vowels. If the exact vowel sound is used, then the final consonant is varied. Both of these techniques combine in "ground/powder" from sonnet V, which share several consonants and in which the vowels make a hard, though internal, rhyme. The result is much more nuanced—much less noticeable to the ear—than say, "ground/found" or "powder/chowder".
In her interview with me, Lovin spoke of "suggesting" rhymes. "For instance," she said, "'pestilence' and 'horses'...really don't rhyme on the page, but the sibilance makes the ear hear them as a sort of rhyme...so that when the poem is read it doesn't sound as if it rhymes, but rather the reader feels the rhyme."
This effect is strengthened by the frequency of internal rhymes. There is at least one in every sonnet. Take "unfit/for the kitchen. Fifty" from sonnet I. "Fit" and "kit" make a hard rhyme—an exact correspondence. "Fif" from "fifty" is a slightly slant rhyme. The phrase begins with "un" and ends with "en"—a kind of cadence. Oddly, by using more rhyme, by allowing the sound correspondences to occur more organically, the poem is less dominated by adherence to repetition.
Lovin further subverts the potential dominance of end rhyme with some very creative multi-word pairings, such as "Mary, would scrub" set against "Mexican railroad" from sonnet II. Both phrases have two "r's" apiece, both have a "c" and an "m", and the "x" in "Mexican" mimics the "s" in "scrub." With this in mind, look again at the startling final couplet from the same sonnet: "'17-/be done". Though a fairly radical choice at first glance, the pair share a long "e" and an "n" in common.
Ultimately, of course, the purpose of any poetic device is not to be clever. Rather it is to be expressive. In "Coal Country", the end sound scheme increasingly tightens as the reign of coal increasingly constricts the lives of the poem's characters. In sonnets IV and V—which contain the most exact rhymes—the supremacy of coal is at its apex. As the subject of the poem moves to the beginning of the end of that reign in sonnet VI, the end rhymes loosen once again.
In that same sonnet one can see the most expressive application of rhyme in the entire poem:
the skin of my shins and knees when I fell
from my bike to the cinders and gravel.
White scars remain to remind and foretell:
the last delivery truck of T.O. Miles;
"Miles" against "gravel" seems too loose, leaving not quite enough for the ear to connect. The rhyme scheme is broken, morphing in this single instance from a/b/a/b to a/a/a/b. Lovin is not getting lazy here, not trying to get away with something. If she was, she would not have given us the sound echoes of "white/Miles" and "to/T.O." On the contrary, Lovin is actually calling attention to her break in pattern by choosing three hard repetitions of the "ell" sound in a row. She breaks her scheme and deliberately emphasizes that break to express that something has broken: it is the end of the era of coal. The ear perceives an end, a sonic underscoring of the poem's meaning.
This is the true function of any poetic device—to support meaning. The device is not the point of the poem, and meaning must not become subordinate to it. Take care not to wrangle your syntax to support a rhyme. Take care to slant some rhymes lest you become predictable and soon dull. Rhyme is powerful stuff. As with other forms of repetition, it can easily run away with your poem.
Where might a poem like "Coal Country" be submitted? Honors won by Lovin's poem include:
2007 Nominated for Pushcart Prize (Triplopia)
2007 "Best of the Best" (Triplopia)*
2006 Passager Poetry Contest for Writers Over 50 (Passager)
2005 Betty Gabehart Poetry Award (Women Writers of KY)
2006 Oliver Browning Poetry Award, Poesia*
2006 Finalist, Rita Dove Poetry Award (Salem College Center for Women Writers)
2006 High Distinction, Margaret Reid Poetry Contest for Traditional Verse (Tom Howard Books assisted by Winning Writers)
(*contest discontinued)
In addition to these awards, the following contests with upcoming deadlines may be of interest:
New Letters Literary Awards
See website for contest deadlines
Prestigious, competitive awards of $1,000 for poetry, fiction, and essays, from the literary journal of the University of Missouri-Kansas City
Poetry London Competition
Entries must be received by June 1
Top prize of 1,000 pounds and publication in Poetry London magazine in this contest that welcomes both emerging and established poets; fees in pounds sterling only
Guy Owen Poetry Prize
Postmark Deadline: June 15
This long-running $1,000 prize is sponsored by Southern Poetry Review, a fine journal that favors rich, imagistic work
Keats-Shelley Prize
Entries must be received by June 30
This award seeks poetry on a Romantic theme and essays on any topic relating to Byron, Keats, or the Shelleys; 5,000 pounds is divided among the winners and runners-up in each genre
Betty Gabehart Prize for Imaginative Writing
Postmark Deadline: July 1
This contest for poetry, short fiction and essays by women writers offers prizes of $200 plus free tuition and opportunity to read your work at a festival in Lexington, KY in September
Narrative Magazine Annual Poetry Contest
Entries must be received by July 15; don't enter before May 22
Prizes up to $1,500 for unpublished narrative poems of any length, from a high-profile print and online journal; enter online only
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BONUS FEATURE: Tracy Koretsky's Essay and Interview with Christina Lovin
The Best of the Best was a competition sponsored by the now-discontinued online magazine Triplopia. To be eligible, a poem had to have won first place in a previous competition. In 2007 the prize was awarded to Christina Lovin for her poem "Coal Country" by contest judge Tracy Koretsky. As part of the prize, Triplopia published a critical appreciation written by Koretsky as well as an extensive author interview. These are reprinted here.
Clothed in the Palette of Mourning: An Appreciation of Christina Lovin's "Coal Country"
The irony of a name: Appleton, Illinois. Were a ton of apples ever grown there? Not on any highway, not even near one, Appleton is on a railroad line, though, as best as I can tell, it no longer has a station. In fact, it is entirely possible that Appleton, Illinois no longer officially exists, and yet, for its time, it was the veritable navel of our nation, its belly plundered to warm a country still too young to contemplate mortality.
Seen from the air today, 233 km southwest of Chicago, on a green plain surrounded by young forest, there seems no place the sun won't reach, but during the years rendered by Christina Lovin in "Coal Country", the atmosphere of Appleton, Illinois, was a bit more opaque.
"What first got our attention was the way form and subject came together—telling the story of living in this hard, industrial, dirty world—using a form that is historically associated with elegance, courtliness, and love—surprised us," wrote the editors of Passager Journal, Kendra Kopelke, Mary Azrael and Christina Gay, who awarded Lovin their 2006 Poet of the Year award for "Coal Country".
That form which Geoffrey Oelsner, who gave the poem first place in the Fourth Annual Oliver W. Browning Poetry Competition for Poesia Magazine in 2007, described as "seven English (Shakespearean) sonnets, each one as packed with specific memories and stories, multiple meanings and musics, as the mason jars its narrator recalls in its first and last capping sequences."
Linked, these seven sonnets complete a sonnet crown, or corona, a sequence that morphs from sonnet to sonnet via a repetition in the last and subsequent first lines, thereby moving the poem to a new facet of its subject.
It is doubtlessly a stunning choice of vehicle for Lovin's subject—and I promise to defend that later—but first I feel the need to consider just what that subject actually is.
Ostensibly, it's coal. To test that theory I suggest you play "Where's Waldo" with coal in the poem by locating it within every sonnet.
The result is a poem in itself: It's in the food mother gives you; it's in the water in which you immerse yourself, beneath the ground you walk on, in the sacks that mother carries—the economy of the town, handed down from "kind wind-burned men". It's in the low places, and beneath the wounds and scrapes, in the shadows filling the corners of the now vacant coal room. But in the good old days, it was heaped up the wall of the active coal room, back when it was in the air and covering the floor, the pulse of the body in which we lived.
Man, I wish I'd written that!
And then, indeed, I would have written a poem about coal. Christina Lovin, on the other hand, didn't. "Coal" is not the subject of "Coal Country". No, it is only its trope.
Exploiting the form brilliantly, Lovin has framed her poem with a first and final line that intimate its true subject: family secrets that like "sullied cloth and family"—a phrase strategically placed as the volta of the first stanza— "never wash out completely."
I would be remiss not to spend a few words here admiring some of the other ways that Lovin has exploited the form to superb effect. Yet, frankly, I am frustrated to do so. There are so many.
If I may, for example, challenge you to a second round of "Where's Waldo", I would invite you to scout out the internal rhymes. Hint: you will find at least one in every sonnet.
Notice the way the rhyme scheme functions overall to subtly tighten and release the tension of the poem's reading. In sonnet one you are informed that a scheme is definitely in operation, but in sonnet two, which, for instance, positions "horsemen" against "pestilence", you are told not to take it too seriously. The end-sound scheme then becomes increasingly exact, and the internal rhyming more frequent, until, in sonnet four, it is ratcheted up to its tautest achievement, sailing past "egg and lump", and then onward toward the poem's most resounding internal cadence: the perfectly rhymed end couplet of stanza five.
There we discover a colon, the punctuation of declamation. Tucked tightly into the poem's "just the facts, Ma'am" section, like a coda, it is the poem's only other allusion to its true subject. An allusion, by the way, constructed through simile ("like wasted lives"). Lovin never elucidates, no more than the air over Appleton ever completely clears.
Beneath this beats the meter, consistently evident throughout, suggesting pentameter without strictly enforcing it. Some of the best effect of this adherence is realized in the descriptive passages, like this one from sonnet four:
from ov / er filled /cars. On /her lu/cky days,
the bags /grew hea/vy quick/ ly and /no snow
fell a/cross the/ hills or, /ankle-/deep, lay
filling/ up the /trackside/ ditches/ below,
where the/ tiny/ tank town/ of Ap/ pleton,
Illi/nois, lay/ crammed in/to the /valley.
To see how the imposition of conscious meter is affecting the poet's choices here, imagine the lines were free to be of any length, long or short. Meter is not simply economy, after all, it requires grammar and syntax.
And, when handled by a talented poet, meter can be expressive. In this section from sonnet three:
...We thought/ it dar/ing fun/ to plunge
beneath/ the foam/y sur/face, o/ palescent
with chem/i cals/ that oozed/unseen/ from dull
slag heaps: ...
we are lulled with the iambs until we hit "opalescent/with chemicals" which jar the steady meter, underscoring the unsettling content of the words.
Then there are the words themselves—the onomatopoeia of "rusty clinkers/of stony matter" (sonnet six), and "crisply graveled rail bed, packing sacks/ of burlap" (sonnet four). Words as textured as the materials they describe, and so many materials: enamel, wood, iron, cotton, marcasite, not to mention stone, gravel, silt, grit.
Language which accretively piles the image so completely that the reader is trapped within its walls, and yet it is language that never becomes self-conscious, except perhaps, exactly where it ought to become so—at the end.
...But like lost love's memories
swept clean, damp days a dark stench still rises and chokes
with what I can remember, and what I won't.
Man, I wish I'd written that!
Tara Elliott, editor of Triplopia, who nominated "Coal Country" for inclusion in the Pushcart Anthology, wrote of these ending lines, "they sear the poem, in all of its darkness and all of its light, far into the reader's mind. Notice the penultimate line with its jolt of synesthesia, insisting we awaken to the fact that, should any equivocation still remain, memory and its refusal are the real subjects of this poem."
Or are they?
Jorie Graham has written, "In a poem, one is always given, I would argue, a sense of a place that matters—a place one suffered the loss of, a place one longs for—a stage upon which the urgent act of mind of this particular lyric occasion (be it memory, description, meditation, fractured recollection of self, or even further disintegration of self under the pressure of history, for example) 'takes place'. And although it is, most traditionally, a literal place—Roethke's greenhouse, Frost's woods, Bishop's shorelines—often, too, a historical 'moment'— especially the very conflagatory 'now' of one's historical-yet-subjective existence—is felt as a location that compels action, reaction, and the sort of re-equilibration which a poem seeks."
Again Lovin crafts the form to support the content skillfully, using both voltas and the sense of suspension—of delayed quasi-couplet—inherent in the development of the last line/first line repetition, to transit those "fractured recollections".
Except that in "Coal Country", the poet seems to long for a place where, as it happens, she has never been. And, more importantly to the reader, the poem's historical moment encompasses an era.
And that is why, perhaps selfishly, for this reader, "Coal Country" is more than a poem piquing one's curiosity about subterranean family scandal. Rather, it is first and foremost an elegy.
Clothed in the palette of mourning, the words gray, black, white and laundry bluing collectively are used nine times in the poem. Only the jewel-toned toxic lake offers any hint of spectrum.
And like the best elegies, "Coal Country" does not lament one person or one sullied family with their basement of veiled calming jars, but all of us—any of us who heat a home, drive a car, or clean our teeth with imported paste on an imported brush. Here is an elegy for the people who will be used in order that we may continue to do so, and for the land which will be irreparably used up.
Once upon a time, there was a town within a nation "blessed with bituminous/veins cursed with the scars of its retrieval." "Coal Country" is its eulogy and epitaph.
Interview with Christina Lovin, Author of "Coal Country"
Christina Lovin is the author of two chapbooks of poetry from Finishing Line Press: What We Burned for Warmth and Little Fires. She is a two-time Pushcart nominee and multi-award winner whose writing has appeared in numerous journals and anthologies. Southern Women Writers named Lovin their 2007 Emerging Poet. Having served as Writer-in-Residence at Devil's Tower National Monument and the H.J. Andrews Experimental Forest in Central Oregon, in 2010 she served as inaugural Writer-in-Residence at Connemara, the North Carolina home of the late poet Carl Sandburg. Lovin has been a resident fellow at Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, Vermont Studio Center, Prairie Center of the Arts, Orcas Island Artsmith Residency at Kangaroo House, and Footpaths House to Creativity in the Azores. Her work has been supported with grants from the Elizabeth George Foundation, the Kentucky Foundation for Women, and the Kentucky Arts Council. She resides with four dogs in rural central Kentucky, where she is currently a lecturer at Eastern Kentucky University.
TK: As I was trying to learn a little something about you, I noticed that you had a poem in the 2000 Harvard Summer Review and that it said in your bio there that you were completing your undergrad degree. But since I already knew that "Coal Country" had won the 2006 Passager Poet of the Year Award, and that Passager is famous for being, to use their language, "a national journal devoted to finding older writers and making public the passions and creativity that ignites during the later years"...well, being the Google sleuth that I am, I concluded "older student"? Am I right?
CL: Ah, Google. I love the ease of locating information, but am always wary of what I find. For instance, there is a Christina Lovin who is from North Carolina and is a blonde, blue-eyed college student. I am neither, but ironically, I did live in Chapel Hill for a couple of years.
Although I didn't graduate from Harvard, I did attend the summer writing sessions there in 2000 and 2001. I guess I was something of a late bloomer: I turned fifty-five the month I graduated from the poetry program at New England College in 2004, which made me very eligible for the Passager Poet of the Year Award two years later. My sister didn't begin college until she was fifty-five; she received a M.S. in Park and Recreation Management the year she turned sixty-one, I believe. Our mother once made the statement that her girls decided to get "smart" after they turned fifty. For me, it was more a case of familial and economic constraints that kept me from getting a terminal degree in writing until the age when many people are beginning to retire. As a result, I am new to teaching college classes and still feel fresh and have a lot of fun, while some professors my age seem burned out and ready to leave the classroom behind.
TK: Ah, so you "grew up" writing then?
CL: Actually, I grew up singing—my brothers and father were all singers—so that when I write, a bit of that sense of melody remains, I guess. I've been exposed to (and love) all sorts of music: jazz, blues, classical, country, even hip-hop and rap. I used to struggle with writing that was too staid and formal. I had quite a number of poems published in the 70's and 80's, but they were what would be considered very bad poetry by literary standards (although I was paid for each and every one). All these poems were rhymed and rather "light". I had written free verse when I was younger, but was influenced by reading Shakespeare's sonnets, hymns that my mother sang, and probably Hallmark cards! Until I was exposed to what would be considered literary poetry, and could see the difference between what I was writing and what true poets were writing, I thought I was doing pretty well.
I read my poems aloud over and over, sometimes memorizing a poem so that I recite it when I am driving, particularly when it is a new poem and may need revision. Often, the subtle musical changes occur when I am reciting a poem to myself. I firmly believe that poems should "sound" like poems, as well as be poems on the page.
That's what drives my style, regardless of the form or lack of form. When I read a poem aloud and it doesn't flow for me, I know there is something wrong. If I stumble over a phrase or line and it doesn't sound "musical" to me, I will usually change the poem until it feels right. That's not to suggest that every line of every poem pleases me—there are some poems that I still cringe over when I read them. Perhaps they are the patterns of speech of a Midwesterner that have infused my writing with what could be considered "colloquialism". I've noticed that, since I live in Kentucky now, my speech patterns have shifted slightly. Who knows what that will do to my writing?
TK: Do you find Kentucky that much different from Appleton, Illinois?
CL: If I'm counting correctly, since I left home for college in January of 1967 (I graduated high school early), I have lived in eighteen different homes in six states.
But I love Kentucky. Although things are changing quickly here, as they are in most of the US, the area where I live reminds me very much of the way towns were when I grew up in the 1950's. My town's population is less than 4,000; and the population of Garrard County is only around 20,000. So, it is very rural and quite lovely with rolling hills, stone walls, and tobacco barns. Perhaps my affinity for central Kentucky comes from the resemblance of the countryside to the prettiest areas of Knox County, where Appleton was located.
It is my understanding, by the way, that the town of Appleton, Illinois, no longer exists as it did when my mother lived there and would pick up coal beside the railroad track that bisects the town. I believe that the townspeople were forced to evacuate or, at least, move some distance away, due to repeated flooding resulting from the damming of a nearby river.
As for me, the last time I drove through there was when I was about sixteen years old, on my way to somewhere else. By the time I was born, we had no relatives living there, so no reason to visit. Appleton was where my mother was born nearly a hundred years ago. After her father died, my grandmother moved her family in to the "big town" of Galesburg, where my mother later married and raised a family, including me.
TK: So what was the "big town" like?
CL: Galesburg is a very historic town. It was a site of one of the Lincoln-Douglas debates in 1859. Knox College is located there, as are several railroad lines. Carl Sandburg was born there, as well (Galesburg was a destination spot for immigrant Swedes for decades). My father was Swedish. My mother had some Ulster Scot roots on her father's side— Scots Irish who came to this country in the mid-1700's. On my maternal grandmother's side, we can trace our American roots back to the 1650's, when some Danes came to this country.
TK: And eighteen moves later, here you are! Do you think all those moves have contributed to making you a writer?
CL: I would have to say that all those moves have contributed to my writing. I feel very rich to have experienced so many places—Illinois, Indiana, Ohio, Maine, North Carolina, and now, Kentucky. Each place I have lived has provided a new perspective. I've heard that poets who no longer live where they grew up often write most vividly about that place when they live away from it. I felt that way about Illinois when I moved to the East Coast—although I loved the ocean and the literary vibe I found in Maine, I missed the openness of the prairies. When I moved back to Illinois, then on to North Carolina, I yearned for Maine. There are still times when I see a coastal scene on film that I can almost feel the way the light falls near the ocean in Maine; I can hear the surf, and smell that peculiar ocean mix of seaweed, salt, and decomposing sea life. What's odd is that, to me, it is not unpleasant. Now that I've been away from North Carolina for four years, I don't believe that any sky could be more blue anywhere else and I miss much about the area around Chapel Hill. I sometimes believe that we humans discount that part of our animal instincts which is our internal compass, our homing instinct.
Much of my poetry started out as a simple nature poem and then made an unplanned, uncharted turn into loss and longing: my own losses and a longing for a home that no longer exists (and perhaps never did). And just maybe that's what drives many poets—that search for something (someone, somewhere) that is just out of reach, that may never have really existed except in the poet's memory. Or perhaps it is just the human condition to yearn.
TK: Would you say that was the impulse that led you to write "Coal Country"?
CL: To be honest, "Coal Country" came about from a writing prompt. My friend and mentor, Cecilia Woloch, suggested writing about something that happened before I was born. I started thinking about the stories my mother had told about her mother, Mary; the stories about my grandparents in sonnet two and my mother in sonnet four. The story about the men giving mother the coal is true, although sometimes they simply kicked the coal off the hoppers. You can imagine the sight of a skinny little girl (most little girls were skinny in 1918) gathering coal along the tracks and how that might have touched the hearts of those rough railroad men.
When I wrote "Coal Country" I was going through a very painful, drawn-out separation that ultimately ended in divorce from a person I care very much about (and vice versa). The poem is definitely not just about my family, even if that is what I intended when I wrote it. Everything I wrote then (and often what I write now) is colored by what I was experiencing emotionally in my life. So when I said earlier that the search for something unattainable is what drives many poets, perhaps what I was trying to get at is that those yearnings are feelings that anyone can relate to; they are universal, so the poems come alive to many readers (or most readers). Speaking for myself, the poems that mean the most to me are those that have a sense of longing. I guess it may be my age, that I am looking back now at so many things that might have turned out differently, if not better.
Every lost town, every lost loved one, every dead animal (and there seem to be many in my poems) has meaning beyond the image. In The Triggering Town, Richard Hugo makes a statement that the fact that our physical surroundings are changing so quickly (the shopping mall where the old farm used to be, the loss of some old country roads, and so on) may be why so many people are turning to poetry.
TK: I find it interesting that it came from a prompt about a subject. I mean, it wasn't a prompt to write a sonnet.
CL: I was honored to work with Joan Larkin when I was studying for my MFA in Creative Writing. She is definitely the inspiration for "Coal Country". Joan wrote a fabulous sonnet crown, "The Blackout Sonnets". I was blown away the first time I heard her read that particular piece. She is a wonderful poet (and playwright), but her teaching methods are even more impressive. She is tough, but tender, if that's possible. I learned a lot when I worked with her. Another inspiration was Marilyn Nelson. She read "A Wreath for Emmett Till" at a faculty reading when I was studying at New England College. "A Wreath for Emmett Till" is an heroic sonnet crown, meaning that it's not seven interconnecting sonnets, but fifteen. As in the shorter sonnet crown, the first line of each sonnet becomes the first line of the next. However, in an heroic crown of sonnets, the fifteenth sonnet is comprised of the first lines of the previous fourteen! Wow. I remember that Marilyn got a standing ovation after that reading—something that had not happened for those readings up to that time.
As for "Coal Country", when I began writing it was not at all in any form, let alone a sonnet crown. I have the original draft of the poem: just broken lines mostly. I began free writing about all I remembered about coal and how it affected the lives of my family and the area in which I grew up.
After doodling around and writing a few phrases, some lines began to develop, but basically everything was just images—my mother as a girl, her mother washing the railroad men's shirts, the scars of strip mining, and the coal bin, which I can still see in my mind's eye: dark, not only from the lack of illumination, but also from the coal and the dust that went everywhere. But there was that little bit of light around the metal coal door. I still see that.
A few of those lines made it into the completed sonnet series, but when I started to include myself, the whole poem changed and that first line, "What I can't remember and what I can..." left me the room to write about things I didn't know firsthand, but that had been handed down through oral history.
TK: Oral history and memory. I would have guessed "researched".
CL: Well, I do admit to some research. I tend to be a stickler for the right term or definition. When I began to write "Coal Country", I realized immediately that I would need to do some fact checking. For instance, I wouldn't have known the different names for coal ("egg" and "lump" for instance) or when underground mining was abandoned for strip mining. I knew those names existed, I knew that mining had changed, but not when. Most of my research was done online; some things I asked my mother, who has since passed away. I must say, however, that although I didn't know some of the hard facts about coal, I did have feelings about coal. My memory is filled with that blackness—the coal bin, the coal yard where great piles of coal fill what now seems to have been a city block, the mile-long freight trains with hopper cars overflowing with coal, and the visible results of strip mining that just seemed natural when I was a child because they were scattered about Knox County. My father was a game warden for the state of Illinois. I often accompanied him on his trips around the county, so saw a lot of the scars of strip mining, as well as the reclamation that was beginning even during my childhood. I believe that, even with poetic license (which I do claim sometimes), it's important to be as accurate about dates and times as one can be and still serve the poem.
TK: Important or not, one thing's for sure: it's difficult to do work in dates and times artfully. I started to look at all the techniques you use to manipulate time in "Coal Country" and I was amazed by the number of them. For instance, you frequently evoke seasons, always winters and summers—nothing so benign as spring or fall. You also very effectively use character to relocate the reader in an era. In sonnet two we're with your grandmother, Mary, in three with you as a child, in four with your mother as a child. Back and forth, weaving through time, and not at all seamlessly. Rather the seams appear to be a subject themselves. For example, you sometimes just go ahead and expose them with expository statements like "Fifty years are over/now" in sonnet one, or "By the sixties" in sonnet three. Although these may be simple and declarative at first sight, I've noticed how the first is enjambed in a way that enables you to segue from one time to another as well as to compare them though proximity. Also, because both phrases operate as their sonnet's volta, you've exploited the possibilities of the form. By that same token, and perhaps most interestingly of all, is how you've used the crown structure of the last line/first line repetition as a transition. Moving from sonnet three to sonnet four you replace the word "old" with "new". Likewise, between sonnets two and three you've managed the relocation with a single letter!
I found myself wondering, did the form lend itself naturally to managing time transitions?
CL: Once I began writing in sonnet form and decided to proceed with a crown of sonnets, it was not too difficult to write fourteen lines about my mother and myself, then my grandmother, then my mother, and so on. At one point in an early draft, I had labeled each section with the year: "1955", "1917", "1965", etc., but I decided that by beginning the poem with one sonnet that includes my mother and myself, then shifting to my grandmother, then to myself as a girl, the reader is already aware that the sequences are not linear or chronological. I think that sonnet crowns are just another way to create space and time in a poem, much like free verse poems that have numbered sections. With a sonnet crown, however, there is that delicious last line/first line connection that is so much fun to work with.
TK: I've really been curious about that. My sense is that the last line/first line repetition transformation suggests the narrative structure and the poet follows it.
CL: I don't know if changing the words slightly from the last line of one sonnet to the first line of the next is a common element, but I do know that it is used. I mean, I'm not the first to do it. It wasn't my experience that these changes dictate the narrative structure. In the case of "Coal Country", I knew where the next sonnet would go; it was just a case of creating an adequate transition. Of course, there is that one glaring case in the transition between sonnet four and sonnet five. I knew that, at some point, I wanted to write a bit about coal mining in general. I didn't know when or where, but I had found what I thought to be interesting facts about coal mining. If I remember correctly, the last line had been something different, not "black heat". When I chose to write about the coal-mining industry at that point, I changed those words in the last line of the one sonnet to match the first line of the next.
As far as the very first and last lines of the sequence, someone (a rather famous poet whose name I won't mention) suggested that I begin and end with a different set of sonnets. He felt that "What I can't remember, and what I can" was too heavy-handed. In fact, I probably submitted the poem with that change at some point. I just really liked making that significant, decisive move with the last line by changing the "can't" to "won't". The meaning is totally changed, isn't it? I've heard that a poem should either be like a box clicking shut or being opened. In this case, I feel that the poem is opened up to more meanings than simply repeating the first line verbatim.
TK: Oh, the meaning is totally changed, Christina, yes. My feeling is that framing it as you have changes the true subject of the poem, which seems upon a first reading to be "coal", to actually be some deep family secret. A secret, by the way, that the poem never directly addresses. But perhaps the poet would?
CL: If I tell, it won't be a secret. That's a flip answer, I know. What can I say? All families have skeletons in the closet. I just think we had more than most. I am the youngest of seven children; by the time I came along most of the drama was in the past, or was kept from me. Now all but three of us children are gone, including both my parents. I struggle with the ethics of telling tales on the dead and my desire to be the storyteller for my family.
For now, I'll save my divulgences for future work. I am currently at work on a project about growing up female in the 1950's and 60's. Many of the skeletons are rattling, wanting to get out. In "Echo I", one of the two title poems (both sestinas) for my new work, Echo, I write:
And she can hear the whispered secrets
across the empty spaces
of the midnight house. Names
she can make out—the girl's
brothers, their many girlish
wives, dozens of children. Bad marriages: talk
of divorce, abuse, prison. Murderous secrets
to be hauled out and interrogated through the night
in those vacant spaces
between dusk and dawn.
I haven't yet decided how much I will tell. But for now, let this suffice.
TK: All right, fair enough. You were saying that, time-wise, you knew where you were going with your progression, but were there other ways in which you felt the poem led you?
CL: Form poetry is very much about being led into and through the poem. I never decide, however, to sit down and write a sonnet or villanelle or sestina. And, although I often write in form (but definitely not exclusively), it is the poem that dictates the form. If the meaning would be changed greatly by strictly adhering to a syllabic- or meter-driven form, I'll lean toward what will best serve the poem. That strict adherence to meter and rhyme is what many contemporary poets (and readers) object to. Even Shakespeare aimed for a natural speech rhythm in his plays, although they were written in rhyme. I like to think of a drummer in the background, banging away at a steady pace, with a blues guitarist or jazz musician doing what they want with riffs and small improvisations that always come back to the beat. Besides, sonnets are not required to have iambic pentameter or even fourteen lines to be sonnets. For instance, Gerald Stern's American Sonnets often have as many as twenty or more lines, but because they are still "little songs" (the original meaning of the word sonnet), they are definitely sonnets. Marilyn Hacker is a great sonneteer, but her sonnets often have erratic rhyming schemes that help the poem become stronger.
I find that I am always more surprised with the destination when I write in form than when I write in free or blank verse. So, perhaps the poem does have more control, at least in line length, meter, and end rhyme. But how creatively those rhymes are made and what falls between them is still anybody's guess until the poem is finished. I mean, the entire meaning of a line can change (and must change) if a different word is used. And honestly, sometimes, the poem insists on going where it will.
TK: Do you have a "rule" for rhyming? A method? Those are two different things, of course.
CL: As someone who tends to break the rules of form, I would have to say that I do the same with rhyme. I purposefully try not to have a lot of hard rhymes, but rather will search for slant rhymes.
And I do think about the rhymes and try very hard to present rhymes that are creative and perhaps unexpected, so that when the poem is read it doesn't sound as if it rhymes, but rather the reader feels the rhyme. For instance, "pestilence" and "horses", which really don't rhyme on the page, but the sibilance makes the ear hear them as a sort of rhyme. Of course the couplets are very difficult to do this with because two rhymed lines fall together. I am sometimes unhappy with how the couplets turn out.
I do use a rhyming dictionary at times, but not in the way most people would use one. I also use the brainstorming method at times, as well, by just writing out all the words that might work where sonics are concerned, but with a softer rhyme than "moon/June/spoon". I would more likely use "moon/bun/long", relying on the end sound to suggest a rhyme. I sometimes use a thesaurus as a rhyming dictionary—searching the lists of words that have similar meanings, but different sounds. There have been times when I've gone back and changed the first rhyme to better fit the second or third rhyming word. I have a rather analytical mind, so writing in form, particularly with rhyme, is like solving an intricate puzzle.
TK: Yes it is. And one you obviously enjoy playing. I've noticed on the Internet that you've done a few other sonnet crowns since.
CL: Yes, one sonnet crown, "Clear Cut", was written following my residency at the Andrews Experimental Forest in Oregon. Oregon State University has a wonderful program in which writers are put together with scientists. The Spring Creek Project has had some illustrious writers, most notably Allison Hawthorne Deming and Pattiann Rogers.
"Event Horizon" was written about eight months after my mother passed away. I had many unresolved issues with her death because I was ill the entire time she was either hospitalized or in a nursing home. I was hospitalized myself when she died; the family had to hold the funeral off for a few extra days until I was well enough to travel from Kentucky to Illinois. The really sad thing is that my mother, who was still living alone at age 97, had fallen and died as a result of that fall, but only after a month of pain and suffering. I just couldn't deal with the thought that I hadn't been able to tell her good-bye. I was back in Illinois visiting my daughter's family when I witnessed a young deer being hit by that truck ahead of us. No one was hurt, but the deer had four broken legs and kept trying to run. I immediately thought of my mother and her broken bones, and her lying on the floor for hours before anyone found her. It's all still hard for me to write about, even now, nearly two years since I lost my mother.
TK: That sounds very difficult, to be sure. Was there something about the crown form that helped you take on this difficult subject?
CL: As with most of my work, what begins to be a certain form (or lack thereof) often takes on a life of its own and changes as it develops into a poem. I do remember that, when I saw the deer hit, then flying through the air, I thought of physics and Newton's laws. From that catalyst, I began thinking more about the laws of physics. I did a bit of exploring and found that many of the laws applied directly to what I was feeling about my mother and the deer. The crown form was just a natural way for me to write about all three subjects effectively: my mother's death, the deer, and physics. And perhaps the knowledge that I wouldn't have to stay with my mother's pain (or that of the deer) for more than fourteen lines at a time was appealing.
TK: I also wonder, have these done as well as Coal Country, prize-wise, that is.
CL: Well, no, not quite as well. Both poems, however, have been recognized. "Event Horizon" has been a finalist a few times, and I'm told that's the poem that netted me the Emerging Poet Award from the Southern Women Writers Conference. "Clear Cut" was a finalist just once.
TK: In light of that, why do you believe that Coal Country has received more notice?
CL: I think it was just synchronicity or serendipity or some other force that makes things turn out the way they do. The first contest I won did not entail any publication. The Passager prize did include publication. I was lucky, perhaps, that the poem did not win a couple of contests, but rather, simply placed. Then, the last two contests did not state in their guidelines that the poems could not have been previously published, so I was able to enter.
A rather odd thing is that "Coal Country" won honorable mention in another contest, The Spoon River Review Editor's Choice Award. I received a letter from the editors, telling me I had won Honorable Mention. Unfortunately, my letter withdrawing the poem from their contest (due to the Passager award) was either not read or was lost. When I alerted the editors of their oversight, I never heard another word from them and my name was not mentioned anywhere. I still have the letter, though.
But, in answer to your initial question, I think it was just the chronology of the contests.
TK: So tell me—and I mean this in all sincerity—have any of these prizes changed your life?
CL: I can't say any prizes have changed my life, but as I've told many people in the past: "It looks good on a resume." And, to be honest, I don't think it hurts at all to have some extra lines on one's C.V. "Coal Country" has won over $1,000, which is pretty remarkable when you consider that most poems don't make any money for the poet. I am still surprised at any recognition my poetry gets. I am, after all, still an emerging poet. At 58. Go figure. I think Amy Clampitt must be my guardian angel...
This poem and critique appeared in the May 2011 issue of Winning Writers Newsletter (subscribe free).
Breakfast’s Lust
A breakfast spread was
laid out on the table.
Coming down the stairs
in a purple robe flowing
light around my knees I
saw him happily reading
the paper. Out of the
corner of his eye he
spotted me urging me
into his arms.
I went to those arms facing
him while sitting down on
legs that cradled us as
we slept.
A brush of morning kisses
painted me the smell of
minted paste invaded waving
the air of the sweet
breakfast behind us.
What a wonderful way to
start the day. He hugged
me closer as I slid my hands
down the length of his
torso like curtains ending
a play, I slid my hands
down to the zipper of his
pants letting the palm of
my hand kiss the growing
firm members.
I slid my hands in a slow
action as it swelled and
pumped please don't stop.
Cold sweat beads glittered
against members flesh, but
the kisses never stopped just
hungered for each other a
little more.
His hands pulled on the
robe as he trying to resist
the finish.
From his kisses shivered
a moan slithered between our
tongues as he rubbed the
backs of my legs wanting
to place that swell of
pleasure inside my own
tightness so we may enjoy
the swell together. With
the other palm held the
rested slick backed hair
against my neck breathing
more moans and hisses to bed
smelling flesh that gleamed
in the face of pulled back
curtains of the kitchen.
A little nip on flesh,
an arch of cramped bone
clashing together to
relax, an eased swallow
of a climax producing a
formed whisper of
"I love you." Blessed
our morning while I put
member back in his pants
and held him as if the
world was going to end.
Copyright 2011 by Amber Davis
Critique by Jendi Reiter
Sex and lyric poetry fit together like...your favorite body parts. Erotic verses may be written to seduce, to boast of conquests, to memorialize a moment that was as fleeting as it was all-consuming, or even to satirize an opponent for his undignified slavery to lust. From Catullus, to the medieval troubadours and the bawdy Elizabethans, to contemporary poets like e.e. cummings and Sharon Olds, poets have found myriad ways to examine those acts that lay bare the emotions as well as the body.
But how much detail, or rather which details, should the poem expose? These choices can spell the difference between a satisfying erotic poem and one that instead provokes disgust or ridicule. Where sex writing strikes a false note, it's often because the language is overly clinical, vulgar, or pompous and flowery—or some buzz-killing melange of all three. It's no wonder that so much comedy revolves around sexual innuendo. The sexual moment requires you to cease stage-managing the self and just inhabit it, and sincerity always risks crossing over into foolishness. Without the possibility of a fall, the tightrope act wouldn't be exciting. The good erotic poem knows how to walk the line.
I selected this month's poem, "Breakfast's Lust" by Amber Davis of Troy, NY, because it's an example of an erotic lyric that has potential but could also be improved through editing. Davis takes us step by step through this episode of seduction, lingering on each sensation to intrigue and hopefully arouse the reader. She doesn't indulge in the florid metaphors for sexual organs that were once the hallmark of romance novels. Yet the coupling is suffused with a romantic glow because of the comfortable domestic setting and the slow build-up of physical intimacy between the partners.
Timing is everything here, so it's important to reread your erotic poem with a critical eye for unnecessary asides and repetitive words that dissipate the tension. The style of "Breakfast's Lust" is relatively unsophisticated, a first-person "and then...and then...and then..." straightforward description of events, without the associative leaps that a more advanced writer would employ to connect sex to some other aspect of the human condition—for instance, something funny, melancholy, or frightening about our inner nature that breaks through our defenses and disguises when passion takes over. By comparison, the motivation of Davis' poem is simply to share the pleasure of the scene. If that is your goal, it's all the more important to be concise.
Although Davis' focus is narrow in this way, the poem remains interesting because not all of the delights it presents are actually sexual. The rich color and silky flow of the bathrobe, the appetizing aroma of breakfast, the sunlight through the kitchen window, and the clean scent of toothpaste are equally to be savored. Where metaphors make an appearance, they are surprising and original, not used in a coy prudish way to pretend we aren't talking about sex, but rather to make the setting as vivid as the encounter within it. Some of my favorites were "a brush of morning kisses/painted me" and "I slid my hands/down the length of his/torso like curtains ending/a play". These images flirt with concealment even as the characters begin to bare all. Such texture or counterpoint can make the difference between literary erotica and the dull mechanical pumping of body parts in pornography.
"Show, don't tell" is a cliche because it's true. Love poems seem particularly subject to the temptation to over-declare. We certainly wouldn't want to edit our partners if they said "I love you" a thousand times! But the reader is won over by craftsmanship, not sincerity. Here, the tender relationship between the partners is perfectly encapsulated in the lines "I went to those arms facing/him while sitting down on/legs that cradled us as/we slept." On the other hand, the sentence "What a wonderful way to start the day" is unnecessary and bland.
Allow me to suggest some other phrases that could be cut without hurting the meaning and rhythm of the poem: "I slid my hands/down to the zipper of his/pants" (we already know where she's headed!); the next "I slid my hands " before "in a slow action" (repetitive); and possibly the lines "but/the kisses never stopped just/hungered for each other a/little more" (it's nice that they're not forgetting the romance in the lust, but there are more kisses coming soon, and "hungered for each other" is a bit melodramatic). The section could be rewritten thus:
He hugged
me closer as I slid my hands
down the length of his
torso like curtains ending
a play, letting the palm of
my hand kiss the growing
firm member
in a slow
action as it swelled and
pumped please don't stop.
Additional edits would clean up grammatical errors such as the plural "members" for "member", and omitted articles and pronouns ("while I put his/member back in his pants"). A stanza break following "resist/the finish" would provide nice breathing space and make the stanza lengths more uniform. Davis might also want to think about changing the poem title. "Breakfast's Lust" sounds rather like a bodice-ripper and doesn't add anything. Titles can be a convenient place to provide background information without intruding into the temporal flow of the poem. Would the author like to tell us more about the relationship between the lovers? Is this a special day for them? How long have they been together? Have they made up from a fight? Are they married to each other, or to other people? The mystery is hers to reveal.
Where could a poem like "Breakfast's Lust" be submitted? It was challenging for me to find markets for this poem, because its subject matter might be too racy for the amateur magazines and local poetry societies that I typically suggest for emerging writers, but its style is too simple for the more prestigious journals. The following contests may be of interest:
Oscar Wilde Award
Postmark Deadline: June 27
Gival Press offers $100 and web publication for poems by authors aged 18+ that "best relate gay, lesbian, bisexual, or transgendered life"; past winners have included erotic poems
Aquillrelle Poetry Contest
Entries must be received by August 31
Belgian writers' forum offers publication of a book-length manuscript for the top three winners of their free contest for unpublished poems
Suggestions for Further Reading:
Charlie Bondhus, How the Boy Might See It
Mary Carroll-Hackett, The Real Politics of Lipstick
Jill Alexander Essbaum, Harlot
Lisa Glatt, Monsters and Other Lovers
The New Penguin Book of Love Poetry
This poem and critique appeared in the June 2011 issue of Winning Writers Newsletter (subscribe free).
Meanings and A Winter’s Night
MEANINGS by Norman William Kearney
So sweet the rose, that opens in the sun,
How soft the light, when day is almost done.
Gardenias scent wafts gently on the breeze,
And fresh the air across the lapping seas.
The gentle touch, when love is said, and felt,
Sounds, far away, from distant ringing bells.
Sweet kiss of lips, when given in surprise,
A song of birds, on blue and cloudless skies.
Wind blows light, thru' tresses, soft' and fair,
The music plays, and love songs fill the air.
Turn of head, when words are softly spoken,
A promise kept, and never to be broken.
These things there are, and here for all to see,
But only you, mean all of this, to me.
Copyright 2011 by Norman William Kearney
A WINTER'S NIGHT by Norman William Kearney
A winter's day 'tho it be sharp might be a man's delight,
When a hard days work is done, it quickly turn to night.
The sight and sound of rain on roof, or twinkling stars above,
Brings thoughts anew, and fresh, and keen perhaps ideas of love.
The warmth that comes from heart of man might serve to overcome,
A cold and cheerless time, from the weakening of the sun.
And were you there and waiting still, for man's return from toil,
Then I would never feel the cold that comes from winter's chill.
Your presence cheers and fills the heart so that my blood runs full,
And always would I hurry home, for comfort, in the evening's cool.
If only you forever stood and always by my side,
I should feel always tall and strong, from darkness never hide.
From winter there could be no care, and nothing that forbode,
If you were there and kept me warm, and free from life's great load.
Copyright 2011 by Norman William Kearney
Critique by Tracy Koretsky
To preserve special formatting in this critique, we have uploaded the first part of it to Scribd. Just scroll through this window:
Critique of Two Poems by Norman William Kearney
Where could poems like "Meanings" and "A Winter's Night" be submitted? The following contests may be of interest:
Dream Quest One Poetry & Writing Contest
Postmark Deadline: July 31
Twice-yearly contest for emerging writers offers prizes up to $500 for prose, $250 for poetry, plus web publication; previously published work accepted
Poetry Society of Texas Annual Contests
Postmark Deadline: August 15
The Poetry Society of Texas offers a members-only prize of $450 and 99 other prizes ranging from $25 to $400, with various restrictions on theme and genre (some are also members-only); no simultaneous submissions
Helen Schaible Shakespearean/Petrarchan Sonnet Contest
Postmark Deadline: September July 15
Free contest from the Poets' Club of Chicago and the Illinois State Poetry Society offers top prize of $50 for a sonnet
These poems and critique appeared in the July 2011 issue of Winning Writers Newsletter (subscribe free).
The Crossing
I am drawn to such tales:
St. Kenneth and the Gulls
who found him floating
in a creel in the Bristol Channel
only a few days old, abandoned
by his Welsh father-prince.
Who knows why.
E-e-e-e-e wailed the hungry babe,
Creee-e-e cried the wheeling saviour birds.
See how pink he is, they marveled—
as sweet as a scallop,
his eyes pieces of sky.
They carried him to their aerie
perched in craggy cliffs, pulled downy feathers
from their own breasts for a nest—
no cold stones for this orphan.
A forest doe came every morning
to feed him with her milk.
An angel offered a cup.
He grew strong and kind and joyful
happy to share in mercy
as it moved throughout the world;
revered by all the local peasants.
Is this what it takes to be loved?
To be a wild-child sailor
without words or compass,
bereft of motherlove and mothernest?
Father, where were you during my rough channel crossing?
Did you not see my infant face in your face?
Did you not hear my howls?
Copyright 2010 by Sandy Longley
Critique by Tracy Koretsky
If you are fortunate enough to have taken a class in writing poetry, you may have encountered a two-part assignment that I call "a fold". First, write a poem that describes a journey you've taken in the last day or so, say, a walk or a drive. Then, write a second poem of the same length about something very different, perhaps a second narrative or something more abstract; for example, your response to a particular color. The instructor will then ask you to start with line one of the first poem and couple it with line one of the second, and so on until the end—in other words, to fold one poem into the other. The final step is to shape the sloppy result of this hammered-together draft by adding or removing words, shifting or cutting lines, etc.
The point of this exercise is to demonstrate the potential motion of a poem, the way it zigs and zags the reader's attention over two or more elements, bringing them together and creating a greater and unique whole. Many would argue that this dynamic (the fancy word for it is "dialectic", in the sense of "tension or opposition between two interacting forces or elements") is the essential quality of poetry—what makes it a poem, as opposed to prose presented in broken lines. Its simplest manifestation is the metaphor. However, as the exercise I have just described teaches us, there are more ways to create this tension. The lesson demonstrates something else as well: the linking of two disparate concepts may not always be the product of insight and inspiration. It can be achieved through craft.
This is relevant to us here at Critique Corner, because it means that dialectic tension can be strengthened in the process of revision. The trick is recognizing which of our early drafts might profit from "folding".
I believe that Sandy Longley's "The Crossing" is one such piece. It is constructed using "bookends". That is, the first element, the authorial voice, appears in the first line and returns in the final seven, basically introducing the poem's second element and then neatly summing why the two are relevant to each other. The strength of this draft is in the depiction of the legend. It is creative, sensual, and succinct in its telling. The choices of diction, in particular, are excellent.
However, in my opinion, the structure, with its introduction and summation, are ultimately too conclusive. They direct the reader to a single, unambiguous reading. And since the "address" of this poem—the person or people to which a poem intentionally speaks—is to the poet's father, the reader is cut out of the communication. As readers, we are now more voyeurs than participants.
What would happen if the two elements of this poem were folded together? To demonstrate, I'll show two possible arrangements with the folded material in bold type. Caveat: the results are rough and incomplete. To smooth them, as described in the first paragraph of this essay, my personal style and diction choices would surely be introduced. It is not the place of someone offering suggestions toward to revision to re-write anyone else's poem. Rather, these are intended as jumping-off points the poet may choose to work from.
That said, revision one:
THE CROSSING
St. Kenneth and the Gulls
who found him floating
in a creel in the Bristol Channel
I am drawn to such tales
E-e-e-e-e wailed the hungry babe,
Creee-e-e cried the wheeling saviour birds.
See how pink he is, they marveled—
as sweet as a scallop,
his eyes pieces of sky.
Is this what it takes to be loved?
To be a wild-child sailor
without words or compass,
bereft of motherlove and mothernest?
only a few days old, abandoned
by his Welsh father-prince.
Who knows why.
They carried him to their aerie
perched in craggy cliffs, pulled downy feathers
from their own breasts for a nest—
Father, where were you during
my rough channel crossing?
no cold stones for this orphan.
A forest doe came every morning
to feed him with her milk.
An angel offered a cup.
He grew strong and kind and joyful
happy to share in mercy
as it moved throughout the world;
revered by all the local peasants.
Did you not see my infant face in your face?
Did you not hear my howls?
I have experimented with opening the poem on the subject of St. Kenneth as opposed to the subject of the author. This gives the reader an opportunity to locate whatever associations he or she might have either with St. Kenneth or the image of a babe afloat in a fishing basket with no intervention from the author. As soon as the author enters, the topic of this poem is narrowed. That's not a bad thing necessarily, but just when to direct this focus is something the poet can and should control. Notice too that, because the questions now occupy new positions, the referents in the lines "bereft of motherlove and mothernest/ only a few days old" and "this orphan" are now somewhat conflated. Are they intended to be about St. Kenneth or the author? Since this association is largely the point of the poem, the slight tension that always results from conflation is expressive.
Let's take this technique a little farther:
THE CROSSING
E-e-e-e-e wailed the hungry babe,
Creee-e-e cried the wheeling saviour birds.
See how pink he is, they marveled—
as sweet as a scallop,
his eyes pieces of sky.
I am drawn to such tales:
St. Kenneth and the Gulls
who found him floating
in a creel in the Bristol Channel
Is this what it takes to be loved?
To be a wild-child sailor
without words or compass,
bereft of motherlove and mothernest?
only a few days old, abandoned
by his Welsh father-prince.
Who knows why.
Did you not see my infant face in your face?
Did you not hear my howls?
They carried him to their aerie
perched in craggy cliffs, pulled downy feathers
from their own breasts for a nest—
Father, where were you during
my rough channel crossing?
no cold stones for this orphan.
He grew strong and kind and joyful
happy to share in mercy
as it moved throughout the world;
revered by all the local peasants.
A forest doe came every morning
to feed him with her milk.
An angel offered a cup.
In this more radical experiment, I have started the poem with its most original lines, a technique always worthwhile to consider in revision. (See Critique Corner, January 2010.)
When a narrative begins in medias res, the background is always spooned in later, frequently in disjunctive bits. This opens the structure of the narrative and gives both author and reader greater freedom. I took advantage of the slight shift to authorial voice in the words "who knows why" to turn the poem radically to the subject of the author. Notice that, as readers, we have no problem following the narrative even with these turnings. We don't yet know who the "you" is in those lines—it could be St. Kenneth, for example, or the reader—but that question is resolved in just a few lines. In the meantime, it creates an interesting suspense.
One problem a poet must always grapple with when reworking the structure of a poem is the final line. Although I personally found the questions addressed to "Father" too directive, ending with the simple conclusion of the St. Kenneth legend fell flat. It is always an interesting option to end the poem with a new image. The line "an angel offered a cup" leads me as a reader to ask what would have been the fate of the author had a cup been offered to her. What would have been my fate had a cup been offered to me? And how very sad for both of us that no such cup was forthcoming. It is an image of lack and longing—universal feelings that give the reader a chance to respond to something about him- or herself, not just to something about the speaker of the poem.
The fascinating part of all this jiggering is that Longley's original intent—an entreaty to her father—is never lost. Rather, shadings of that intent are layered on as we all learn about St. Kenneth and ask ourselves what it takes to be loved.
Using the folding technique has, I believe, enriched "The Crossing". In other instances the same technique can actually create multiple concurrent meanings. This is what is known as "complexity". Let me be clear: complexity is not obscurity. It does not refer to poems that use a sort of personal code or otherwise do not permit readers to parse them. In fact, the opposite. Complexity invites the reader to derive his or her own meanings in addition to the author's initial intent. It opens a poem and invites participation, keeping the poem interesting throughout several readings. And perhaps most relevant to us here at Winning Writers, it is probably the quality that most often moves a poem into the second round of a contest.
Where could a poem like "The Crossing" be submitted? The following contests may be of interest:
Naugatuck River Review Narrative Poetry Contest
Entries must be received by September 1
Top prize of $1,000 from this literary journal based in Western Massachusetts; enter online only
Sacramento Poetry Center Annual Contest
Entries must be received by September 15
Local poetry society offers prizes up to $100 and a reading at the Sacramento Poetry Center in California
James Hearst Poetry Prize
Postmark Deadline: October 31
North American Review, a venerable journal that favors accessible narrative free verse, offers prizes up to $1,000 plus publication for winners and finalists
National Poetry Competition
Postmark Deadline: October 31
The Poetry Society (UK) offers top prize of 5,000 pounds for unpublished poems by authors aged 17+; online entries accepted
This poem and critique appeared in the August 2011 issue of Winning Writers Newsletter (subscribe free).
Three Poems
# 1
if i put the pen in the flame
the damn thing will melt
dropping black ink
into the yellow heat
so small but so hot
capable of major injury and harm
but will i be careless
I don't think I choose that kind of pain
written in my blood
with spilt black ink
bubbling and cooking my flesh
damn pen
# 2
time to clean out the closet
the dust and unused books of directions
the funny photographs with the finger
in front of the lens
the lost pasta box with one strand
of thin spaghetti remaining
the birthday hat
converted to new year's eve
in two thousand and five
i sneeze and curse the dirt
my fingertips begin their
transformation to grey
i cough and wipe my nose
on my dusty sleeve
memories spill to the floor
winding up in the tall green trash
making room for more
to touch and discard
time to clean out the closet
# 3
a positive note
sprayed the air
printed in the smallest type
but the message is clear
brightly fortissimo
shattering the gloom like glasses
plastered over the hillsides
lowsides and inbetween
bringing that unmistakable something
so usually unseen
not hiding but waiting
Copyright 2010 by Tim Young
Critique by Tracy Koretsky
Last month in Critique Corner, we considered a technique for adding complexity to a poem, not to obscure it, but rather to open it to multiple interpretations and invite the reader's participation. This month, I'd like to take the discussion farther with an already quite complex piece: "Three Poems" from New York rocker Tim Young.
Notice that the diction and grammar of "Three Poems" is spare and plain. Nothing is incomprehensible or evasive. Indeed, the first abstract concept does not occur until more than halfway through, with the phrase "memories spill to the floor". Moreover, this is not a poem that expounds upon grand concepts. It is not about Justice, Eternal Love, or the Glory of God. Rather, "Three Poems" focuses on accessible—mundane, actually—objects and circumstances.
So, one might ask, why might this poem be considered complex? It has to do with the relationship of the narrator to the objects, as well as the relationship of the objects to one another. It has to do with the tone of each individual section, or "canto", particularly in its shifts from canto to canto. Above all, it has to do with the fact that these relationships are neither explicit nor justified. Young leaves it to the reader to make of these lines what he or she will.
Why is he telling me about a pen and what does the pen have to do with the closet? How do either relate to the final canto, whatever it is about? The key, as I suggested above, is to attend to their tone.
With the line "I don't think I choose that kind of pain" Young signals to the reader that he has at least actively considered hurting himself. Notice that he has capitalized the personal pronoun in this line—the only place in the poem in which he does so. Do "i" and "I" represent two separate psyches? The Id and Ego? As a reader, I can only wonder, and be intrigued—that, and troubled. Without saying "I am in pain" Young conveys a very real sense of emotional distress. I don't know why and I don't need to. Enough room is left for the reader to relate his or her own experience to that of the narrator.
I particularly admire the psychological observation found in the final line of that canto. Here, the internal pain of the speaker is transferred to the object in two deft words.
In the second canto, with its focus on tangible, even slightly silly artifacts, and its emphasis on physical action, the tone lightens considerably. One is relieved that our narrator has put aside his self-mutilating musings for what seems like some overdue tidying up. One can, of course, read "closet" as "closet", but just as easily it can be read as "the subconscious" or "the past", be it a specific time or event, or a more general sense of personal history. All these readings work. This is the point of complexity: multiple readings can be simultaneously true.
Again, I don't know what is inspiring our narrator's mania; I don't need to. Instead, I am led to recall some time when I manifested a similar psychological state with a similar physical response. Or, if not me personally, then someone I know, because this is a common human process. Complexity renders our poems more universal by making room for the reader's own experience to become relevant to their interpretations.
With the third canto, a very different tone is introduced: ecstasy, the dazzling aftermath of pain's release. The opening lines operate as extended synesthesia, conflating music with substance with text and again with music. As a device, synesthesia is always arresting; at some level one must stop and say, "Wait. Did I read that correctly?" In so doing, it has a way of waking a reader up. Interestingly, synesthesia is most frequently associated with the French Symbolists, known for encoding internal states with ordinary objects, as this poem does. Here, Young prolongs this state of heightened sensual awareness over five lines to suggest that the formerly dampened spirits of our narrator have been enlivened—some sort of passage has been completed.
This can only mean it's time for song, as the poem gives over to pure musicality, riffing through lines six through ten. To end, a coda, a restatement of the same idea that completes the second canto: The time to clean out closets will come again, and, if we live, again and again.
Thus, the pen, on some level, indicates the acknowledgment of pain; the closet, psychological processing which leads to emotional catharsis. With no knowledge of the particulars or instructions towards response, poet and reader together make a complete and satisfying journey.
Which is not to say this poem is complete or has fully met its potential. I assume, as I do with all pieces submitted to Critique Corner, that this is a draft. To revise, I suggest that throughout, the author simply demand more from himself. Mr. Young is a songwriter, so I would remind him that in a song you have the rhythm, melody and chords to give valence and energy to the lyrics. All you have with a poem is its language.
"Thin spaghetti." That would be as opposed to fat? Demand sharper or fresher images. The line "capable of major injury and harm" is a good example. Young means "capable of causing..." Dropping the "causing" probably elides well in a song, but here, it just strains the syntax. On the other hand, restoring an extra verb there leaves us with the most pedestrian of prose.
Fortunately, poetry is made out of images and "major injury" and "harm" just cry out to be images. They don't have to be metaphors which might pull us out of the dramatic pen/flame scenario, but perhaps something sensual within the moment, or specific and within the realm of possibility.
Make sure every line says something, and that it says it succinctly, unless you are adding words because of rhythm.
A quick scanning of the left side of the poem suggests that line breaks might be reconsidered to fall less predictably and elicit more tension across lines. Certainly, this triptych deserves a more evocative title.
So, it needs a red-penning, but please, Mr. Young, nowhere near fire! Still, taken together, "Three Poems" nicely demonstrates one of the important differences between poetry and prose: the associations a poem suggests are as significant to interpretation as its specifics.
Where could a poem like "Three Poems" be submitted? The following contests may be of interest:
Poetry Kit Poetry Competition
Entries must be received by September 30
The Poetry Kit, a UK-based site with listings of markets and contests for writers, offers 100 pounds and web publication for poems of any length; fee is a pay-as-you-wish donation
Reuben Rose Poetry Competition
Entries must be received by October 10
Long-running international contest from Voices Israel offers prizes up to $750 and anthology publication for unpublished poems
This poem and critique appeared in the September 2011 issue of Winning Writers Newsletter (subscribe free).
Garden
I have my gardens recite to me
In many tongues of flowers
In their poppy-seeds
i see sweetness and life without bearing judgement.
For i have learned enough
of my share of my own existence
in the melodious names
of a hundred fragrances
And fruits.
And in their sweetness,
I will buy back something of their Composure
which holds me here for a while
under the scorching skies.
For such bitterness would not chill me
half as much as these mute pleadings
Held with so much promise and wealth.
For that is what i understand:
Ripe fruits and flowers held in their own poetry
Dripping with bolus colours
Set before a thousand canvas
Arrayed in the sun
Exhausted by their own beauty and plight
Copyright 2011 by Kelechi Aguocha
Critique by Tracy Koretsky
For the last two months, this column has considered how and why to add complexity to our poems. This month, with the help of Nigerian poet Kelechi "Kaycee" Aguocha, let's reverse that trend by demonstrating one of the most simple—yet infinitely likeable—revision strategies: "generosity".
Here at Critique Corner we regularly receive poems from all over the world. Although I enjoy reading these, I will confess, I do hesitate to select poems for this series from places truly foreign to me. I cannot write about them in relation to contemporary American poetry, because that is not what they are.
For example, were I to see an American poem with capital letters beginning every line in one, unbroken, stanza, I would suggest those as areas to be questioned in its revision. But such formal conventions are cultural, even, I dare say, fashionable, and I find that I am not sure what is appropriate to recommend.
Another example: if a poem that I believed to be by an American had sloppy spelling, or truly confusing grammar...well, I'd think less of its author. Yet, seeing the same mistakes made by someone very far away, often writing in their second language, I am charmed—and impressed. They're doing way better in my language than I am in theirs. Surely there's more to offering a revision than cleaning up some spelling. It would not make an essay worthy of your attention.
But there was something about Mr. Aguocha's poem that stayed with me. Likely it was those inviting first lines:
I have my gardens recite to me
In many tongues of flowers
It occurred to me that those lines would be evocative to any person anywhere in the world. And that made me think of a revision strategy I have always wanted to share, something I learned in a lecture by Pulitzer Prize–winning poet Carl Dennis. He called it "Generosity".
It's wonderfully simple. Take the first person pronouns—I, me, mine—and turn them into third person pronouns—we, us, ours.
So here's the poem again:
We have our gardens recite to us
In many tongues of flowers
In their poppy-seeds
We see sweetness and life without bearing judgment.
For we have learned enough
of our share of our own existence
in the melodious names
of a hundred fragrances
And fruits.
And in their sweetness,
We will buy back something of their Composure
which holds us here for a while
under the scorching skies.
For such bitterness would not chill us
half as much as these mute pleadings
Held with so much promise and wealth.
For that is what we understand:
Ripe fruits and flowers held in their own poetry
Dripping with bold colours
Set before a thousand canvas
Arrayed in the sun
Exhausted by their own beauty and plight
Now the poem is about me and about you and about humanity and about Kaycee—which is what the poet asked to be called.
Now the garden is a garden, but also our collective gardens, and the EARTH, as a collective garden and each of our personal ones.
As for:
For we have learned enough
of our share of our own existence
in the melodious names
of a hundred fragrances
And fruits.
What a lovely sentence. It's a much bigger poem, and I simply find it makes me happier to read it.
Part of what makes me happy is that this poem sings. The sudden change of rhythm in the phrase "For such bitterness" is a sort of key change, perhaps with "would not chill us" to a minor key. With the change of pronouns, it becomes a beautiful song about "us".
If the poet were to make those changes, I'd suggest removing the first two words.
The poem is already generous. One way that poems communicate is to share our common humanity—for example, our common celebration of the natural beauty around us.
Everyone has a poem in his or her file that will fly with just a touch of generosity. Find it, revise it, and share it with the world.
Where could a poem like "Garden" be submitted? The following contests may be of interest:
Founders Award
Postmark Deadline: October 31
Georgia Poetry Society offers top prize of $75 for poems on any topic, up to 80 lines; no simultaneous submissions
Soul-Making Literary Competition
Postmark Deadline: November 30
Prizes up to $100 for poetry, stories, prose poems, personal essays, humor, and literature for young adults, sponsored by a chapter of the National Association of Literary Pen Women; contest looks for original, freshly creative and finely crafted work that embraces all creative interpretations of English poet John Keats' statement: "Some say the world is a vale of tears,/I say it is a place of soul-making"
This poem and critique appeared in the October 2011 issue of Winning Writers Newsletter (subscribe free).
Whispers
Mile after mile of trees border
the highway. She gasps.
The Maples' fiery red, the creamy
white petals of the Magnolias,
the verdant Evergreens standing
side by side lining the forest wall,
as though guarding its history.
It's her first visit to the south.
The early morning breeze rushes
through the car's open windows,
battering her windswept hair
as her eyes greedily search
for the unfamiliar.
She spots a shadowed grove
littered with deadfall,
like corpses strewn across a battlefield,
blemishing the landscape of soft
and dark greens, tinged with sunlight.
She hears a chorus of sounds;
a rustling amongst the trees,
ghostly whispers conjuring up visions
of secrets buried long ago, in unmarked,
unblessed graves.
Passing trees at 65 mph, she spots an Oak
and strains her neck for a quick look back
at a tree whose branches, as history records,
were once adorned, hung, and weighted
down with ornaments of flesh and blood.
Shrinking back from unwanted visions
of tree roots permanently stained a dark,
reddish-brown with the life force of her
ancestors, she curses the wrath inflicted
upon God's own likeness.
Off to the side, away from the trees
stands a Willow. The sway of its branches
in the breeze, calm, hypnotic, brings her
back to the moment. She can't help
but compare its grace to the stock-still
branches of the surrounding trees.
Again, she hears the sounds of the forest
swept along through the leaves moving from
tree to tree; less frightening, less haunting,
a voice whispering, "forgive them
for they know not what they do."
Copyright 2011 by Vea A. Glenn
Critique by Tracy Koretsky
In last month's Critique Corner, I offered a single simple technique that can instantly improve a poem. Well, I've got another one for you. This month, Vea A. Glenn has allowed me to use her powerful and heartfelt poem, "Whispers", to demonstrate.
It is a common technique—perhaps the most common—and so, I have heard it given many names. For now, let's go with poet Fred Marchant's nomenclature when he said, "Every poem could use a good scrubbing."
Extra syllables are what he suggests you scratch away at—syllables in the form of small words or parts of words (look for "ing" endings) as prepositions, or as part of complex verb tenses. Punctuation is your friend in this game.
Why? Well, consider what happens I remove just the word "the" from stanza one of "Whispers":
Mile after mile of trees border
highway. She gasps.
Maples' fiery red, creamy
white petals of Magnolias,
verdant Evergreens standing
side by side lining forest wall,
as though guarding its history.
The result is that the first time the definite article occurs is in the first line of the second stanza: "the south"—that is, a specific place, as opposed to a direction. American readers will understand this to be the area of the country associated with plantation slavery and the harshest of the civil rights struggles. By removing the prior occurrences of the word "the", its first appearance gains valence. I suggest using "an" as the first word of the next line to retain the effect.
To take the scrub further, the poet might replace the "of" in line one with a comma. See how punctuation can replace syllables in this revision of stanza three:
She spots a shadowed grove:
littered deadfall,
like corpses strewn across a battlefield,
blemishes the landscape—soft
dark greens, tinged with sunlight.
If the resulting sound strikes you for some reason as more "poetic", this is because density is a quality associated with poetry. Certainly there is now more elegance to this language, greater dignity.
A second difference between poetry and prose has to do with rhetoric. Poems are built upon the logic of metaphor, so we never need to justify or establish their use. This means, for instance, that "as though" from line seven could be scrubbed.
Another place extraneous syllables hide is in complex verb tenses and in prepositions that commonly accompany them. "Standing" in line five, for example, could be "stand". "Up" after "conjure" (line 21) and "down" following "weighted" (line 29) can fall away without altering the meaning.
Prepositions like this are actually a kind of redundancy. Excising redundancies is not quite the same as a scrub (see November 2010's Critique Corner for a fuller discussion) but they are closely related. Take, for example, the phrase "adorned, hung, and weighted/down with ornaments" from stanza three. The conceit is contained in the words "adorned" and "ornaments". This is ironic, since these decorations are of "flesh and blood". Irony is strong stuff and strong stuff is what this poem calls for. The other descriptors dilute its strength.
In practice, scrubbing amounts to close line-editing. To provide a full impression of how this is done, I will go through the poem in its entirety, providing a rationale for each revision in the parentheses that follow each stanza:
Mile after mile, trees border
highway. She gasps.
Maples' fiery red, creamy
white petals of Magnolias,
verdant Evergreens,
side by side, line forest wall,
guarding its history.
(Beyond the changes discussed above, I have removed the verb in line five as trees can be assumed to stand.)
It's her first visit to the south.
An early morning breeze rushes
through the car's open windows,
battering her hair.
Her eyes greedily search
for the unfamiliar.
(I have used punctuation to replace a syllable in line five. I have also removed "windswept." Battered hair is windswept. "Battered" is strong choice in a poem about physical violence and should be preserved.)
She spots a shadowed grove.
Littered deadfall,
like corpses strewn across a battlefield,
blemishes the landscape—soft
dark greens, tinged with sunlight.
(Discussed above. Notice how the change in punctuation allows the verb in the fourth line to be more active.)
She hears a chorus of sounds:
rustling among trees;
ghostly whispers conjuring visions—
secrets buried long ago, in unmarked,
unblessed graves.
(The use of a colon at the end of the first line indicates a list, which allows for some syllables to be excised.)
Passing trees at 65 mph, she strains
her neck with a quick look back;
an Oak whose branches, history records,
were once adorned
with ornaments of flesh and blood.
("Tree" and "Oak" are redundant. This version is a bit cleaner. The revision of the last two lines was discussed above.)
Shrinking from visions
of roots permanently stained dark,
reddish-brown with the life force of her
ancestors, she curses the wrath inflicted
upon God's own likeness.
(We can assume that the visions are unwanted because she has shrunk from them. More importantly, removing "tree" from the second line supplies "roots" with a second meaning. That is, roots in an ancestral sense.)
Off to the side, away from the trees
stands a Willow. The sway of its branches
in the breeze, calm, hypnotic, brings her
back to the moment. She can't help
but compare its grace to the stock-still
branches of the surrounding trees.
(Here I have not changed a word. Why? Because in this stanza, which invokes the association of the Willow with the gospel, the poem "turns". Allowing the language to remain lush in contrast to what has previously been spare reinforces the change in tone. It makes the previous revisions more expressively meaningful, which is always the reason for making any revision. If I were not using this to make a point, however, I might suggest striking "back" from the fourth line.)
Again, the sounds of the forest
sweep the leaves;
less frightening, less haunting,
a voice whispering, "forgive them
for they know not what they do."
(The poem has now turned. Remaining as economical as possible as it resolves will strengthen its drama. Of course, a sound cannot "sweep" as in line two. This is an example of a device called synesthesia, which blends the senses. It is an arresting technique, very useful for expressing a heightened sense of awareness.)
"Whispers" is a serious poem. The dignity that a scrub produces suits it. But is Fred Marchant correct? Can every poem use a good scrubbing? I don't think so. Poems that are conversational or in dramatic persona may have an expressive reason to sound casual. Poems that are metered sometimes require extra verbiage so as not to sound stilted.
Rather I would say that every poem deserves a scrubbed draft. The options this technique offers line by line are always worth considering, even if, ultimately, some or all of them are rejected. In other words, a scrub is one stage in the larger process of revision.
A word of caution about this: I often find that when a syllable is removed the rhythm changes. If I am close to the poem, especially if I have only recently composed it, I resist the change. There is a certain rhythm in my mind and I feel adamant that it is the correct one. Experience has shown me, though, that if I set the poem aside for some time, I discover the cleaner choice is the stronger one. Another good way to test whether a scrub is working is to ask someone else to read aloud the lines in question. You may be surprised by how powerful they sound.
Where could a poem like "Whispers" be submitted? The following contests may be of interest:
Cafe Writers Open Poetry Competition
Entries must be received by November 30
Writers' group in Norfolk, England offers prizes up to 1,000 pounds for unpublished poems; online entries accepted
Prism Review Poetry and Fiction Prizes
Entries must be received by November 30
Literary journal of the University of La Verne in California offers $200 for unpublished free-verse poems; enter online
Writer's Digest Poetry Awards
Postmark Deadline: December 1
National writers' magazine offers top prize of $500 for unpublished poems up to 32 lines; no simultaneous submissions
Gemini Magazine Poetry Open
Postmark Deadline: January 2
Online journal offers prizes up to $1,000 for unpublished poems of any length; enter by mail or online
This poem and critique appeared in the November 2011 issue of Winning Writers Newsletter (subscribe free).
A Selection of Fine Poems from the Winning Writers Community: What Makes Them Great
PRAISE POEM by Stephen Derwent Partington
We praise the man who,
though he held the match between
his finger and his thumb,
beheld the terror of its tiny drop of phosphorus,
its brown and globoid smoothness
like a charred and tiny skull
and so returned it to its box.
So too, we hail the youth who,
though he took his panga on the march,
perceived it odd within his fist
when there was neither scrub
nor firewood to be felled,
so laid it down.
An acclamation for the man who,
though he saw the woman running, clothing torn,
and though he lusted,
saw his mother in her youth,
restrained his colleagues
and withdrew.
We pay our homage to the man who,
though his heart was like a stone
and though he took a stone to cast,
could feel its hardness in the softness of his palm
and grasped the brittleness of bone,
so let it drop.
We laud the man who,
though he snatched to scrutinise
the passenger's I.D.,
saw not the name—instead, the face—
and slid it back
as any friend might slide his hand to shake a friend's.
And to the rest of us,
a blessing:
may you never have to be that man,
but if you have to,
BE!
Copyright 2011 by Stephen Derwent Partington
This poem is reprinted from his collection How to Euthanise a Cactus (Cinnamon Press, 2010).
QUILTS by Thelma T. Reyna
Mother plugged up the coffee spout
with foil after dinner
to keep the cockroaches out
and laid a pile
of patchwork quilts on the chilly floor
for us to sleep on and urinate.
She hung them on the doors
next morning,
colorful, stinky banners hanging
room through room
to dry—rearranging
them next night so the most pissed
would be on the bottom of the stack
and we could sleep without the stench
of too much wetness.
Her black
coffee sometimes had a baby cockroach
drowned in its bitters. Got through the foil, I guess,
damned little fool,
got through the plug to mess
her brew, as we messed her quilts—
growing kids lying shoulder to shoulder
on the floor,
growing older,
still peeing, still wrapped in each other's arms
to keep warm.
Copyright 2011 by Thelma T. Reyna
This poem is reprinted from her collection Breath & Bone, which was a semifinalist in the 2010 New Women's Voices Chapbook Competition and was published in April 2011 by Finishing Line Press.
TWILIGHT OF THE SWORD SWALLOWER by Dana Curtis
The metal ground sharp and
sparks: a brand new constellation: "Fire
Opal," "Ruined Lizard," "Eye's
Inner Sanctum." In the sweet
illumination, I work at the saw
cutting fish out of silver
for jewelry or some soon to be invented
weapon. Everything is manipulated,
softened by heat, hair caught
in the polishing wheel, glitter
of new set jewels. Titanium,
treated with flame or electricity, turns colors
no bomb would wear: consumptive nova
bursting myriad blades. It takes skill
to split small things. Let the new sky
bless the new stars.
Evening, what is known
as golden hour, the film crew
rush to get the shot while Seraphim
walk their small mad dogs.
So attracted to the camera's
rigid intent blinking their watery eyes,
spoiled by wingspans: a sexy use
for archaic weapons. Visit me
at my pretty house where I'll serve
grapes and whisper
something no one remembers, hopes
never to hear. Not the inevitable
edge, the intimate comprehension
of swallow and remove, my presence
on a red cushion in the black and white
night. We cut our throats on
the new sky, old angels.
Copyright 2011 by Dana Curtis
This poem is reprinted from her new collection Camera Stellata, which was recently published by WordTech Communications.
COMPOSITE COLOR by Robert Savino
The night sky is black, perforated by bb holes
of light, sometimes under a blanket of doubt.
Perhaps it will change to African American night;
and Indian Summer to Native American autumn.
Why not...ask Crayola!
prussian blue changed to midnight blue
flesh is now peach
indian red, chestnut
and while green-blue, orange-red and lemon-yellow
were retired and enshrined in the Hall of Fame,
pink flamingo, banana mania and fuzzy
wuzzy brown were added to the list.
Segregation has become a tempered memory.
A double scoop of chocolate and vanilla,
once packed like fists of Sugar Ray
and Jake, now melts in handshakes.
Sammy and Frank; Martin and Bobby—
forging connections, a slow crawl
of tap dance steps to gigantean proportions,
a mixing bowl with no sense of separation.
Crayola brands, ice-cream stands,
playful minds, shaded hues of humanity.
Copyright 2010 by Robert Savino
This poem was first published in the Fall 2010 issue of North American Review.
NEWS OF THE NAMELESS by Veronica Golos
*
I climb marble steps worn to the shapes of waves.
I follow those with the loudest voices.
I am a dry broom
an old man sweeps his floor with; the sunlight speaks in Braille.
All Bethlehem is a child's tale: the crisis-crossed road,
the man in the white robe, the donkey,
the already dangerous dust.
Now the news is full of splinters.
Graffiti scars my palms, my wrists—
I walk through the library of forgetting.
I am my own news and nothing's
good.
*
Who was he, naked and bound on the ground?
He is gone now.
Disappeared into the crowd of other news,
disappeared into someone's home,
where he sits, hands flat on the table—
pierced by a brilliant sun.
Where is the solider, the helmet, the hands, the threat
that pulled him naked from his cell
held him
as the choker clicked like a timepiece?
Who carries the dead weight, the iron cuffs,
the chair in the center of the room,
the whisper behind the earlobe?
I hear particulates strung along air, vibrating:
What is his name?
What is his name?
Copyright 2011 by Veronica Golos
This poem is reprinted from her collection Vocabulary of Silence, which was released in February 2011 by Red Hen Press.
Critique by Tracy Koretsky
Some poems rise above. This month in Critique Corner we are happy to announce a new feature in this series: occasional essays in which we consider why this is so. Rather than revising a piece offered by a contributor, we will, from time to time, offer an appreciative reassessment of poems reprinted elsewhere in our pages, poems that have either won awards, or received significant publication, or been included in award-winning collections.
To launch these new appreciations—as well as bid farewell to 2011—let's take a look at five poems reprinted in the Winning Writers newsletter during this last year in our Recent Honors for Subscribers feature: "Praise Poem" by Stephen Derwent Partington (February 2011), "Quilts" by Thelma T. Reyna (March 2011 supplement), "Twilight of the Sword Swallower" by Dana Curtis (July 2011), "Composite Color" by Robert Savino (March 2011 supplement), and "News of the Nameless" by Veronica Golos (February 2011).
One characteristic common to all of these poems is their artfully selected and occasionally outstanding diction: the descriptive precision of "its brown and globoid smoothness/ like a charred and tiny skull" from "Praise Poem"; the emotional connotation added by the final word in the phrase, "a baby cockroach /drowned in its bitters" from "Quilts"; the economy of "consumptive nova" from "Twilight of the Sword Swallower"—such a big idea conveyed in just two words; the specificity of the proper nouns in "Composite Colors"; the punning "crisis-crossed road" (as opposed to criss-crossed) in "News of the Nameless".
Diction can always benefit through revision. Ask yourself if your verbs are active and interesting, if there are more specific or less prosaic ways to convey ideas, if your descriptions really help a reader visualize. Take the time to use a thesaurus, especially for adjectives. Words with connotative meanings add layers to a poem.
But beyond diction, each of these poems offers some insight into what works effectively.
Notice, for example, how repetition is used in "Praise Poem". In the April 2011 Critique Corner, I claimed that repetition is poetry's most powerful device, and warned that, because of its strength, it should be used with care. Partington's recurring construction "who,/though" demonstrates a light touch which unifies the piece and imparts a song-like quality without becoming overbearing. In part this is because it is merely a two-word phrase which occurs mid-sentence grammatically and is enjambed, as opposed to a complete sentence repeated verbatim. To save his poem from falling into predictability, Partington slightly varies the full phrase in the second stanza by choosing "youth" instead of "man". He also lets go of it in the final stanza—a way of signifying that it is, in fact, the final stanza.
As elegant as I find this particular use of repetition to be, I actually do not believe it is why this poem rises above. Rather it is its "generosity". In the October 2011 Critique Corner, I defined this quality, in terms of poetry, to mean a sharing of our common humanity. With this praise for a pacifist, Partington offers up a poem that can give voice to all of us.
Which is not to imply that a more personal poem cannot also be generous. Thelma Reyna's poem "Quilts" shows how this is done. As Jendi Reiter wrote about Jack Goodman's "Jubilate Agno" in the February 2011 Critique Corner, the poet "sticks to describing the action in concrete terms instead of editorializing." In other words, especially with its final line, this poet generously refrains from instructing the reader how to feel.
Though, of course, its generosity is not all that makes this poem rise above. Perhaps obviously in this case, what makes this poem outstanding is its sensory detail. I feel as if I can hear their "brew" percolate beneath the sounds of many kids waking up.
Less obviously, this poem is successful because it is tightly written, every part reused. The coffee comes back, its smell a foil to the stink of urine; the mess of quilts on the floor overlap like the limbs of the children. Yet, despite the clutter it depicts, this poem remains uncluttered in its focus. Reyna understands the capacity of her poem and so chooses to leave the hot plate and bare light bulb and the absence of dad for another piece. Furthermore, she has paid attention to form and selected one that propels the reading forward.
The same can be said of Dana Curtis's "Twilight of the Sword Swallower". Notice where the poet has chosen to end her sentences. Because she frequently does so mid-line, she can race the reading along in a way that either full stops or predictable grammatical phrase line-breaking would foreclose. In addition, she can take advantage of interesting and surprising enjambments, for instance "sweet/illumination" from lines four and five or "invented/weapon" from seven and eight. Since we don't expect "sweet" to modify light or "weapon" to follow "jewelry", the line breaks reinforce a sense of discovery in this poem, making it consistently fun to read.
Such challenges to our logic are a large part of what makes a poem a poem. The August 2010 Critique Corner addressed the difference between poetry and prose more fully. There, we noted that the word "verse" means to turn and that such turns are the essence of poetry.
To understand what such versing can lend to a poem, have a look at Robert Savino's "Composite Color". For the first three stanzas, this would seem merely to be a poem exploiting the rich diction family to be found in a box of crayons. What lends the poem its gravitas—as well as its generosity—is the leap in stanza four to the topic of racial segregation. By landing the reader in a new place, this poem rises above.
Veronica Golos's "News of the Nameless" uses a similar strategy, moving in its second stanza from a personal narrative to a meditation on an unknown soldier. But even before she gets there, Golos shifts perspective line by line moving from the subject of the poet in line three, to an old man in line four, to the city in line five, and so forth. Notice that in this poem, most of the lines end in either periods or commas. The few lines that don't are thereby imbued with an implied buffer of quiet, demonstrating how line breaking can be used as effectively to slow a reading as to speed it. Nevertheless, we find in this poem a sense of surprise similar to that in "Twilight of the Sword Swallower", on account of its many fresh images. "I am a dry broom" and "the sunlight speaks in Braille" are both original and evocative, elevating this poem.
As we have seen, each of these poems is excellent in several ways—not just one. In particular, it is evident that their authors gave some thought to the best form for their poems, the most effective way to shape the reading of the piece so that it might be faster, slower, or more song-like. Such choices are generally made in revision. Taking the time to reconsider our poems, perhaps to focus them by removing what is extraneous or to enliven the text with startling diction—this is what allows them to rise above.
These poems and critique appeared in the December 2011 issue of Winning Writers Newsletter (subscribe free).
Words
Words are like raindrops.
They fall. Single and
Sublime upon the earth,
The shores and the
Stream that
Gurgles and splutters and
Tries to
Make sense.
Words join together in
Sentences of streams,
Rivers, overflowing, flowing
And flowing in roads connected,
Disconnected, passing each
Other,
Only to be joined, connected
And go on
And on.
Words flow calm and tepid,
Smooth and serene
Or hot and roaring, thundering
And screeching.
Gnashing themselves on
The rocks and dead
Foliage.
Words are holy—
The scriptures of religion.
They are the canon that tell the
Pope what to do.
Almighty, all powerful they are
More powerful than
God himself.
Words are the creator—
They made God.
They made everything possible.
They have the power to kill or
Maim, to love or hate, to admire or
Insult. Words. Soft, romantic and
Lustful. Harsh, bitter,
Revengeful.
Words hurt. Words cure.
They are the surgeon's
Tools. They cut and chop,
Disengage and defuse.
They bisect, dissect and
Resurrect.
Words explode more potent
Than bombs.
They can take away or
Legitimize a life. Prop you up or
Bring you down and
Turn you round and round.
Words—I salute you.
Copyright 2012 by Shirani Rajapakse
Critique by Jendi Reiter
A new year, a fresh start. Time to re-assess the familiar materials with which we've labored for the past twelve months, to rediscover the heart of our projects and re-commit ourselves to bringing forth what's essential. In December's Critique Corner, my colleague Tracy Koretsky offered a close reading and appreciation of some prizewinning work by our subscribers. In this month's column, Sri Lankan poet Shirani Rajapakse invites us to a similar appreciation of the writer's most basic tool—words.
In this data-overloaded culture, where words (or misspelled fragments of words) are largely disposable vehicles to convey information quickly, the poet's careful attention can be a subversive luxury. How often do we take the time required to ponder the subtle differences between words and reflect on why one is a better fit for this line of this poem?
Certainly, careless word choices can produce some howlers for contest judges. A misplaced word is like a nail sticking up from the road, causing a flat tire that stops the reader's journey. To continue the automotive metaphor, bad poems can result from tunnel vision: the author concentrated so hard on one dimension of the word, such as rhyme, that he didn't bother asking whether the word was also a fresh image or consistent with the poem's mood.
The many dimensions to consider include meaning, sound, syllable count and accents, degree of formality, historical period, and even the word's history of usage in other well-known poems. And then there's the question of how many words are required to make the point—elaboration and repetition versus minimalism. Writing instructors sometimes offer cheap shortcuts such as "eliminate adverbs" or "no more than one adjective per noun" (so long, wee, sleekit, cow'rin', tim'rous beastie). A thoughtful writer, however, will allow the words in each poem to choose their own companions, whether few or many.
Rajapakse's "Words" are gregarious indeed, yet her theme appears simple. So simple, in fact, that sometimes I asked myself whether the poem displayed true movement or only repeated a single theme to excess. The short line breaks contribute to this impression of a lengthy but monotone list. But I think there's more here to reward the patient reader. Countering our tendency to skim text for the "take-home message", Rajapakse wants us to slow down, give each word the benefit of the doubt, and think about how it functions:
They are the surgeon's
Tools. They cut and chop,
Disengage and defuse.
They bisect, dissect and
Resurrect.
Poets are like collectors. We love words with texture, sparkle and edge; rare words; lively words that are not used as often as they deserve. Rajapakse is a connoisseur of active, specific verbs, as this passage shows. Do we need both "cut" and "chop"? Well, cutting is precise and calculated, chopping is rougher and perhaps aggressive. The surgeon needs both types of blades. So does the writer. Along with a range of meanings, different words facilitate different sound techniques. "Cut and chop, disengage and defuse" give us alliteration; "bisect, dissect and resurrect" add rhyme. Maybe it's best to think of this poem not as a narrative but as a variety showcase, a talent show for words.
The opening lines demonstrate another aspect of wordplay, namely mimicking the rhythm of the thing spoken about. Notice the choppy linebreaks and short sentences when the author is comparing words to raindrops, versus the longer and more regular lines in the passage beginning "Words join together in/Sentences of streams".
Not all of the unexpected linebreaks are as successful. For instance, "Passing each/Other" introduces an awkward pause that isn't justified either by the importance of the word so highlighted, or by the sound-picture she's aiming to create, since this is the section of the poem where the metaphorical water is supposed to flow smoothly.
Another rough spot occurs in "They are the canon that tell the/Pope what to do." I generally advise against ending a line with the word "the" because it is a weak word to emphasize, and the break goes against the natural cadence of speech. The author might consider breaking after "canon" instead.
Rajapakse has made the rather old-fashioned choice to begin each line with a capital letter, which calls further attention to words that have been placed in positions above their real importance. During revision, she might try switching to standard capitalization (only at the beginnings of sentences), to see whether it makes certain phrases flow more naturally.
A couple of stanza breaks could also improve the pacing. For example, try breaks after "Foliage" and "revengeful". Each new stanza would then begin with "Words", adding a visible structure to the poem. In our March 2011 Critique Corner, Tracy discussed diction families—related words that build up an extended metaphor. By setting off one diction family from another, stanza breaks could turn "Words" from a repetitive "list" poem to one that actually contains pauses for thought.
Finally, Rajapakse might consider a more universal ending. The authorial "I" felt to me like an intrusion, since the poem was not a first-person lyric up to this point. Switching "I" to "we", as suggested in our October 2011 Critique Corner, generously invites the reader into the poem. However, "salute you" is still a cliche, and the lines immediately before this one are not especially distinctive either. Perhaps she could tinker with the last four lines to stay completely within the military diction family suggested by "Words explode more potent/Than bombs. They can take away or/Legitimize a life." These are some of the strongest lines in the poem, in terms of meaning and rhythmic punch. They should either end the poem or be followed by something shorter, thematically connected, and equally powerful. Rajapakse has a lively vocabulary and a love for the raw materials of writing, which will serve her well as she polishes this poem further.
Where could a poem like "Words" be submitted? The following contests may be of interest:
Poetry Society of Virginia (Adult Categories)
Postmark Deadline: January 19
Prizes up to $250 for poems in over two dozen categories including humor, nature, and a variety of traditional forms
Slipstream Poets Open Poetry Competition
Entries must be received by January 31
British writers' group offers prizes up to 250 pounds for unpublished poems on a selected theme (2012: "Encounters")
This poem and critique appeared in the January 2012 issue of Winning Writers Newsletter (subscribe free).
Katie
A dozen scrawny children run and play
rags for clothes, and silly boots meant for bigger steps
scuffing, jumping, clomping across the rubble strewn square
burnt brick, mortar, shattered glass and scrap metal
to me a dreadful remnant of war costly won
to the children, an undiscovered country
to conquer, to tame, to slay dragons therein
One lad slips and scrapes his knee
I hobble over, and set him on my lap as the others gather round
Tell us mister how you lost your leg?
I wipe clean his scrape
tear off a piece of empty trouser leg to bandage the hurt
A German wanted it more than I
I find myself smiling
an unexpected joy, to bandage a child and not a soldier
in his eyes, wonder, hope, and mischief
his world burned and bombed and taken away,
still he dreams, thanks me kindly
and off to battle dragons again
Children heal so quickly
I have much to answer
all done rightly, all done proudly
I am told
grieves my heart the same, never any peace
I know how the stories end
I know the moment
I know their names
I know what we've done
Katie is lost as well
she doesn't know it's over
she doesn't know her name
I gave her Katie, my wife's name
when she needed it
Katie lay trapped in a cellar with her dying family
no one knows how long
her building bomb-collapsed
hour after wretched hour alone
finally hiding too deep to be found
to be four
to be there
The children wave and smile as I enter the hospital
Katie is such a pretty, tiny thing
her eyes terrible as any nightmare
she lives in that cellar still, oh God
She deserves what peace I gave away
broken, scattered, tearful eyes shut tight
I kiss her cheek
place my hand over her mouth and nose
Copyright 2012 by L. Kerr
Critique by Jendi Reiter
Juxtaposition is creative writing's path to insight. Placing two narrative threads side by side, without immediately explaining their connection, prompts the reader to search out areas of sympathy between them. This leads to a deeper understanding than if we analyzed each topic separately. The same is true of the uncommon pairings of images that characterize a fresh and effective use of metaphor in a poem. Practiced with empathetic attention, this kind of reading can cultivate a habit of mind that breaks down barriers between our own life and the lives of others who seem superficially different from us. This month's critique poem, L. Kerr's "Katie", demonstrates both the technique of surprise juxtapositions and the opening-up of moral vision that it can produce.
In the first half of the poem, the narrator, a war veteran, affectionately watches children at play in a bombed-out neighborhood. Their imaginative transformation of the ruined streetscape presents a hopeful contrast to his memories of battle. Unanswered questions keep the reader engaged. Who is the "Katie" of the title? Is the "rubble strewn square" a casualty of the same conflict in which the narrator was wounded, or another war, or the daily violence of the ghetto?
The juxtaposition of children's games of heroism and the ugly realities of battle, for ironic or tragic effect, has become a cliché of war poetry, and if "Katie" pivoted on that comparison, it would not be a memorable poem. Instead, the poem gains dimension by shifting, without warning, to another story: "Katie is lost as well".
Crucially, we do not learn what the stories have in common until other details have stirred our emotions. Had Kerr introduced the change of topic by saying, in effect, "This reminds me of Katie, whose home was also bombed," it would seem heavy-handed and preachy. Besides, factual similarities miss the deeper point. What is universal in all these stories is loss—collateral damage, the loss suffered by innocents too young to know what death means, even when it's all around them. The gap in information between "Katie is lost" and "her building bomb-collapsed" makes space for the reader to intuit this shared experience.
Katie's story also complicates our picture of the narrator, in a way that enriches the poem. The first scene is all sweetness—too much so, if left to stand alone. The veteran idealizes the children, and their optimism calls forth his better self, so that he accepts his wounds without bitterness toward the enemy: "Tell us mister how you lost your leg...A German wanted it more than I".
Shortly thereafter, he hints that this saintly behavior is an inadequate attempt to make amends for the atrocities that warfare requires. "I have much to answer...I know what we've done". It was justified, it was heroic, according to the official line—but is this as much of an illusion as the children's fantasy that a junkyard is a land of dragons? The reference to Germans suggests World War II, which many Americans think of as the last "good" war. But the narrator reminds us that even a justified war leaves soldiers with stained souls. To save Hitler's victims, we bombed civilians in Dresden, and then in Hiroshima. Again we see how paired narratives naturally ask questions of one another, without the poet spelling them out.
The last line adds another wrenching twist. It appears that the narrator had to smother Katie because she would otherwise have died a terrible slow death, trapped under immovable rubble. In retrospect, the poem has earned the sentimentality of the veteran's kindness to the children, as a relief from the awful ambiguity of a world where killing and saving are nearly indistinguishable.
My main criticism of this poem is the stylistic inconsistency between its two halves. Beginning at "I have much to answer", the narrative is delivered in a taut, plain-spoken style that suits the persona of the "everyman" soldier. Unadorned language gives the sound of sincerity to dramatic and painful revelations.
The first section of the poem is wordy and old-fashioned by contrast. It does not always sound like the same narrator, and seems less immediate to me, like a tableau observed at a distance. Phrases like "a dreadful remnant of war costly won" and "to slay dragons therein" have a musty Victorian flavor. Because the scenario of the battle-weary soldier refreshed by childhood innocence has been so over-played, it is especially important that the style hold no trace of sentimental straining after dramatic effects.
Juxtaposition is not patchwork. For the conversation between narratives to work, they must both be speaking the same language. A consistent voice is the holding environment where the drama of contrasts is played out. Condensing the opening stanzas, possibly by as much as half, would make "Katie" an even stronger poem about the hard-won victory of empathy over violence.
Where could a poem like "Katie" be submitted? The following contests may be of interest:
Fish International Poetry Prize
Entries must be received by March 30
Irish independent publisher offers 1,000 pounds and reading at West Cork literary festival in this contest for unpublished poems; online entries accepted
Press 53 Open Awards
Postmark Deadline: March 31
Small press in NC offers prizes of $250 and anthology publication in 5 genres: poetry, short story, novella, flash fiction, and creative nonfiction; enter by mail or online
This poem and critique appeared in the February 2012 issue of Winning Writers Newsletter (subscribe free).
That Great Baseball Summer of 1982
"Break the Guinness record?"
"Who, YOU? You must be KIDDING!"
The cries of laughter
that rang through the hills of Willapa Town
that summer when the mill was down
and the woods were quiet too,
were cries of disbelief, mostly,
that any fool who sat on a stool
at the local pub could hope to rub
elbows with a Guinness award for endurance!
But the echo resounded with glee!
Almost like a guarantee
that more spirited young lads had not yet been born!
"Then we'll make it a BENEFIT game!
And YOU can have the fame!
For we KNOW what we're made of!!"
cried the boys of a feather whose days together
were previously spent
walking the tightrope in work and in play,
flirting with danger 'most every day,
(or boozing and cruising and closer to losing
sight of more tomorrows
than any day on record anyway).
So, a benefit marathon was born
in Willapa Town when the mill was down,
in that great baseball summer of 1982,
and the cries that rang through the evergreen hills
changed in tune to ones that sang
"They AREN'T kidding!" once the 300th inning began!
***
The stands were full now,
applauding the boys in the field,
and so were the skies which poured forth
their own sentiments to nourish the crops in the field,
but which did little for the boys in the field
except to build some character
by presenting yet another challenge called MUD!
Then, while the innings were changing,
and the days were turning to nights,
so too the hecklers changed,
now becoming care takers
of sprains and strains and blistered feet,
of socks, and towels, and things to eat,
while slow pitch ball became slow death for all
who couldn't sleep or cope or eat,
and who had no sight of tomorrow at all,
but were still hanging on
by the fragile threads of determination.
By the 4th day,
after 91 hours and 21 minutes
playing 552 innings of baseball,
with a final score of 365 to 283,
the wild-eyed crowd was cheering,
for the end was finally nearing,
and Willapa Town had HEROES!
(But was also fearing for their lives,
for when the umpire hollered "GAME!"
they watched the spent and the lame
fall in a heap, determined to sleep forever.)
***
Soon the cries that rang down
the evergreen hills of Willapa Town
were cries of pride that came from inside
for everyone loves a hero,
especially one who tried
to break a world's record
for the longest slow pitch game in history,
and raised $20,000 doing it!
"We BROKE the Guinness record
for the longest game—NO KIDDING!"
was the song they were singing then,
in that great baseball summer of 1982
when the mill was down, and the woods were quiet too,
and the heavens poured nourishment
on the crops in the field,
and lessons in character building
were handed down to the next generation
of spirited young lads
who would set their own records
for hanging tough
by the fragile threads of youth,
while still hoping for a glimpse
of yet another tomorrow.
Copyright 2011 by Isa "Kitty" Mady
Critique by Tracy Koretsky
It's spring at last. What a perfect time for a poem about baseball! And what better way to convey the fun and drama of that game than with one of poetry's most enduring and entertaining forms: the ballad.
It's also a great opportunity to remind readers that WinningWriters.com has an exciting new Sports Poetry and Prose Contest. So, this month, with the help of "That Great Baseball Summer of 1982" by Isa "Kitty" Mady as well as a few classics, we'll look at how vibrant sports writing is constructed.
In general, I am not a fan of the common practice in which a teacher tells a student to go off and study a famous piece. This can intimidate, squelching the creative urge with the weight of the comparison, but there is a reason teachers do this. Sometimes it is the best advice.
In this case, it serves, amongst other things, to demonstrate how perfectly Mady has married topic to form. Today the word "ballad" has come to mean a slow popular song, usually romantic. Originally, though, ballads were the fare of wandering minstrels. Literally singing for their supper, balladeers had to engross if they wanted to eat. Other than light verse, which delights with wit, there is no other poetic form intended solely to entertain. The ballad, however, does not operate by wit. Rather, its vehicle is plot.
As a plot-driven form, ballads frequently laud a single character, often a tragic hero, as in "Barbara Allen", which dates as least as far back as the 17th century, yet endures to this day as one of the most popular folk ballads in the British Isles. Notice that, just as in Mady's poem, dialogue plays a significant role. In fact, ballads are more likely to contain dialogue than any other form of poetry. At its best, this dialogue conveys regional color through accent or idiom.
Also like Mady's piece, there is a rhyme scheme. "Barbara Allen" is an example of the traditional ballad scheme of a/b/c/b, though forms vary and evolve over time.
At first glance, you might not think Mady's poem suits that description, but a little deeper analysis shows that, setting the given line breaks aside, a pattern emerges for much of the first long stanza:
The cries of laughter that rang through
the hills of Willapa Town
that summer when the mill was down
and the woods were quiet too,
were cries of
disbelief, mostly, that any fool
who sat on a stool
at the local pub could hope to rub
However, the a/b/b/a; c/d/d/c scheme soon unravels. If Mady should choose to maintain it, she will need to rework the next few lines. Line thirteen might end with "chance", for example, to form a rhyme with "endurance". Alternatively, the somewhat awkward syntax of line 10 might reconfigure to something like "winner of a Guinness" or "Guinness award", both of which offer other opportunities for rhyme.
As an example of the kind of redrafting I mean, here are a few revised lines from the end of the first stanza:
So, in that great baseball summer of '82
a benefit was born—a marathon
in Willapa town, when the mill was down
and the cries that rang through
A note here about using numbers in poems: as poetry is an oral form, numeric words must indicate how they are to be said aloud. Is $20,000 meant to be voiced as "twenty thousand dollars?" If so, write it that way. Other choices might be "twenty g" or "grand" or "thou," all of which are more colorful, fewer syllables, and offer more possibility for rhyme. Likewise, when dealing with time, one might choose "21 minutes past 91 hours," for more rhyming opportunities, or "nineteen hundred and eighty-two" to affect a folkloric tone. Many creative choices are possible.
In the second section Mady foregoes rhyme for repetition: "field" pairs with "field"; "changing" with "change"; "eat" with "eat". This is a wonderful impulse. As a second canto, it operates like the second movement in a symphony. A new timbre and tempo refreshes the reader. Also, as its subject is the numbing iteration of innings, the repetition provides a sonic counterpart. The problem is, just as in stanza one, the pattern peters out.
We might question here whether it is worth the bother to adhere to a pattern and break lines to emphasize it. In very practical terms, rebuilding a poem towards a specific scheme is difficult and, because rhyme is so noticeable, it can easily overwhelm. Today, most traditional forms have been revisited, favoring subtler rhymes.
Personally, I enjoy that Mady has embedded many of her rhymes internally. They are less predictable, keeping the poem fun to read. More importantly, their frequency and exactness create a kind of drumbeat, heightening the drama. For that reason, the scheme, whether presented internally or as end rhyme, is well worth a formal analysis that will continue and strengthen it.
Besides, with a completed scheme, "That Great Baseball Summer of 1982" would suit formal poem competitions in which, I believe, it might do well. Also, in Mady's particular case, I sense such a revision is more attainable than usual. For one thing, the scheme is already nearly intact. More importantly though, I feel there is still work to do on a more basic level that will present new possibilities. Specifically, I refer to diction.
Have a look at Franklin Pierce Adams's "A Ballad of Baseball Burdens". The first thing you might notice about it is that it is not, in fact, a ballad—a story, but rather an ode—a praise song. Adams, famous in his day for his light, witty, verse, has indulged in a bit of consonance at the expense of accuracy. Never mind. Notice instead his lively diction choices. Verbs like "swat", "biff", "clout", and "slug" are the spice that makes good sports writing tasty. Expressions from the lexicon like "jasper league" and "on the knob", not to mention the various players' names, add authenticity, perfectly setting the tone.
Now, Ms. Mady has already demonstrated that she is a natural rhymer. Redrafting with striking, active verbs, and phrases from the baseball diction family will not only give her lots of room to formalize her rhyme scheme, they will make this already fun poem an absolute pleasure to read.
That is, once she reorganizes her story a bit. Remember, first and foremost, the ballad is plot-driven; its intent, to relay a dramatic tale. As a case in point, let us refer to Ernest Lawrence Thayer's ever-popular "Casey at the Bat". (By the way, would-be sports writers, check out the great links on the left of that page. Also, there is also an awfully fun reading of the poem by James Earl Jones.)
Now "Casey at the Bat" is a masterwork, a true piece of the American canon, beloved by generations. I apologize again for comparing Mady's poem to it, but there is so much there to be enjoyed—and learned from.
Once again we have lively diction: "the former was a hoodoo and the latter was a cake." Dialogue like "We'd put up even money now" is idiomatic, contributing to the tone, a tone consistently humorous in its self-consciously heightened drama: "ten thousand eyes" vs. "five thousand tongues." I particularly admire the rare expressive use of meter in the phrase, "and a smile on Casey's face," which breaks the rhythm for a quick triplet, like a child's sudden happy skip.
But above all, what makes "Casey" succeed as a dramatic work is that it has beats. "Beats" are what fiction writers and playwrights call the movement between characters, or between character and setting—the back and forth. See how Thayer has used the movement back and forth between the playing field and the crowd to develop the crowd as if it had a singular personality?
Baseball, as a subject, lends itself naturally to beats, with pauses inherent in its nine innings, and one, two, three strikes, you're out. Take a moment to think about how the beats work in "Casey". See how they are present in every stage of the plot: the set up, the main action and the resolution?
Take note too, of where Thayer chooses to begin his story. There is some brief set-up to the action, but we are already in the game. "That Great Baseball Summer of 1982" uses a different strategy—a long preamble. It's a good choice, imbuing a quasi-folkloric tone. But what I question is whether the first lines are the place to reveal that this ballgame will be played in the hopes of a Guinness record. It might work better coming later, as a surprise. And I'm pretty sure there may be a few beats missing before that 300th inning.
The second section of Mady's poem is more directly comparable to the action in "Casey". The game is in progress. We are told (alas, not shown) that rain becomes mud. In the next beat we discover that the hecklers change. But we never knew there were hecklers in the first place—a sign that we are missing a beat.
The beats in the second section of "That Great Baseball Summer..." might possibly go something like this:
1) The hecklers begin.
2) Day turns to night.
3) The sky threatens rain.
4) The players react.
5) The crowd reacts.
6) It does rain! Boy, does it rain!
7) More hours, more minutes, more innings...
8) Could they break the record? (What record? An exciting new element!)
9) The crowd become caretakers.
And so forth. Mady is clearly a spirited storyteller. Once she takes the time to list and order all the details of her drama, I suspect the words will offer themselves.
You may be wondering where there is room in this already long piece for added beats. Actually, the poem is not overly long for a ballad at this point, though much longer and, indeed, it might strain the reader's attention. Removing some of the redundancy will open space for character development and specific detail.
Make sure every detail is actual information and new information at that. If it refers to previous information, it must develop it. Currently, the poem's third section is mostly recap. Mady has used repetition here as a type of coda. While this is a solid musical instinct, remember, codas generally modulate in key. Bear in mind too, that other great ballads like "Casey" and "Barbara Allen" resolve almost immediately after the final action, allowing their dramatic finales to linger in their impact.
And yes, I said "other great ballads". I really believe that, with revision, the addition of some entertaining and memorable details, Mady has everything she needs to craft an excellent poem. She has a charming story to tell and, apparently, an innate musicality with which to tell it. I only hope that when her skies pour "forth their own sentiments", she'll slip in a little reference to Mudville, and that, for a moment, there will be joy.
Where might a poem like "That Great Baseball Summer of 1982" be submitted? The following contests may be of interest:
Alabama State Poetry Society Poetry Competition
Postmark Deadline: March 23
Prizes up to $50 in a variety of themed categories; previously published poems accepted
Writers' Workshop Annual Poetry Contest
Postmark Deadline: March 30
Top prize in this contest from the Writers' Workshop of Asheville, NC is your choice of a 3-night stay at their Mountain Muse B&B, or 3 free workshops, or 100 pages line-edited and revised by their editorial staff
Kay Snow Writing Awards
Postmark Deadline: April 23
Oregon's largest writers' association gives awards up to $300 in adult category, $50 in student category, for poetry, fiction, nonfiction, screenwriting, and juvenile (a short story or article for young readers)
Senior Poets Laureate Competition
Postmark Deadline: June 30
Amy Kitchener's Angels Without Wings Foundation awards top prize of $500 for poems by US citizens (including those living abroad) who are aged 50+
This poem and critique appeared in the March 2012 issue of Winning Writers Newsletter (subscribe free).
Life
Life is long when you are young
Life is short when you are old
Life is long when songs are sung
Life is short some days I'm told
Life is gone when you are dead
Life is done the graveyard said
Life's a question asking why?
Lively blossoms fill the air
Life's a heartbeat pulsing by
Life is maidens soft and fair
Life of dawning days will end
Life's a yawning viper's grin
Life's a calling whippoorwill
Life's a melody of rides
Life's a falling star until
Lifeless crater she resides
Life is good but sometimes odd
Life's a life then life subsides
Life is from the breath of God.
Copyright 2012 by Wesley Dale Willis
Critique by Laura Cherry
Form and content should touch and talk to each other like a pair of dizzy lovers, or dance and sing together like a well-honed vaudeville act. The poet can start with either one, and find that his or her choices are guided, coaxed, informed and sparked by the other; ideally, this interplay happens throughout the creation of the poem, and these two components strengthen each other like the members of any good team. To see how this works in action, let's look at what can happen when the poet starts with a particular form in mind.
Paradoxically, rules and guidelines can work as a stimulant to creativity; they can provide just the right kind of distance to guide an idea out of chaos and into words. In particular, heavily weighted emotional content can be easier to manage when it is poured into a container rather than onto the open floor of the white page. While one part of the poet's mind is occupied searching for rhymes or counting beats in a line, another can be shaping those emotional raw materials. The swamp of emotion becomes a project—an elegant building or bridge—rather than a morass.
There is a whole tradition of forms to choose from, of course, but inventing a form can be an extra feather in the cap! The invented form, of course, has the additional advantage (and challenge) of allowing the inventor to set the rules him- or herself, based on what sort of tickle will provoke the muse of that particular day. In "Life", the poet, Wesley Dale Willis, uses an invented form he calls a "sonnadeucearima", whose form we'll examine closely in a moment to see how it works and plays with its content.
Invented forms have an appropriately quirky history. They're often, though not always, created for fun, and sometimes for the sake of a single poem. Some notable invented forms include the clerihew (a whimsical, four-line biographical poem invented by Edmund Clerihew Bentley) and the roundel (a variation of the French rondeau, invented by Swinburne). The Pollock (John Yau) and the Rothko (Bob Holman) are invented poetic forms inspired by painters. Another recent example is Billy Collins's paradelle, which he invented as a parody of complicated, repeating French forms like the villanelle. Though it began as a sort of literary joke, other poets have actually embraced the paradelle, even producing an anthology of poems in the form.
Like any form, of course, the invented form must be examined to see what qualities and effects that form itself produces. A villanelle, for example, with its patterned repetition of lines at the end of each stanza, is an excellent way to examine the same idea, theme, or image from a number of different angles, or with a deepening perspective (as in Dylan Thomas's classic "Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night"). Such a form would not be a good choice to tell a long or complex story—the repeated lines are too circular to proceed clearly and narratively through scenes and plot points.
Willis's sonnadeucearima uses a rhyme scheme of abab, cc, dede, ff, ghgh, ihi, with additional internal rhymes in the couplets (gone/done, dawning/fawning), and has seven feet per line, four stressed and three unstressed. It's also worth noting that the poet says that his poem was written after and about his father's death: hence the emotional content mentioned above. Where, then, does Willis's created form lead the content of his poem? The rhyme scheme, together with the short lines, lends itself to a deliberate simplicity, as in a lullaby, which provides an intriguing tonal contrast with the poem's themes: death, impending death, fear of death, and acceptance of death. This, in turn, leads the poet to a songlike repetition of the same word (or variants of that word) at the beginning of each line. And the lines themselves offer clichés turned on their heads and intermingled with fresher imagery. The next question to ask is: how effective is each of these strategies in conveying this heavy freight of content?
To my mind, the strategies employed in this poem are each at least partially successful. The lullaby simplicity of the poem not only provokes images from childhood (and confounds them with its theme), it echoes works in the canon like Blake's "Songs of Innocence and Experience". That said, it can be difficult to manage simplicity in a poem without tripping into oversimplification. In "Life", for example, I enjoy the clear statement, "Life's a calling whippoorwill", but the line "Life is maidens soft and fair" seems more tired, less vivid, and somewhat archaic. It's worth avoiding archaisms in a poem whose form already so strongly harkens back to another era.
Repetition can be used for a number of different effects: to provide emphasis to a particular word, phrase or line; to set up expectations for sound and meter and potentially to subvert them; or to connect different ideas or moments in the poem. In other words, repetition has implications for both the thematic content and the music of the poem, working in concert on both aspects. Rooted in the oral tradition, repetition and rhyme once made long poems and songs easier to recall and retell. We don't often memorize and declaim poems these days—at least, most of us don't—and so our poetic effects are aimed at different targets, but a striking use of repetition can still remind us of its historical usage.
The repetition of "life" as a stressed beat at the beginning of each line gives it clear pride of place within the poem. The subject is life (and its opposite), and the poem had better live up to it! As with the other effects, the technique of repetition provides both an opportunity (to explore different aspects or facets of the same idea) and a challenge (to do this while maintaining conceptual movement and verbal interest over the course of the poem). Willis does diversify the ideas and images in each line, again with some success. "Life's a question asking why?" is something like placeholder philosophy and is much less interesting to me than a line like "Life's a heartbeat pulsing by", the rhythm of which brings to mind an actual beating heart, as well as the temporal meaning of "heartbeat". Repetition can truly shine in its variations, which stand out and focus the reader's attention. To zero in on these, the two lines that do not start with "Life" or "Life's" are:
Lively blossoms fill the air
(Life's a falling star until)
Lifeless crater she resides
These lines show the kind of flexibility that even a strict form can provide. Of these two variants, I prefer "Lively blossoms fill the air" (though I'd love to see the language punched up a bit, made more strange and wild). In the second variation, while I appreciate the juxtaposition of "Lively" and "Lifeless", and find the image of the star and crater compelling, the sudden personification of the star as "she" is another archaism. The device jars me because it is not echoed or supported elsewhere in the poem.
Playing with cliché is a valid, but dangerous, poetic tactic—all too often it can fall short of the mark and come across as the very cliché it means to subvert. For that reason, my recommendation for this poem is to maintain the repetition and form, with their effective simplicity, and further tweak the imagery of the poem so that each line contains a surprise for the reader. "Life is short when you are old" reads as received wisdom, with nothing in it to wake the reader up. By contrast, "Life's a melody of rides" has a lovely newness and resists easy interpretation.
The final tercet, or three-line stanza, functions in much the same way as the final couplet in a Shakespearean sonnet: to wrap up both form and content with a last, perhaps summarizing, flourish. This tercet provides a strong end to the poem that could be made even more powerful. In "Life is good but sometimes odd", I very much enjoy the understatement of "sometimes odd", but see "Life is good" as a catchall phrase and missed opportunity. "Life's a life then life subsides" reads beautifully aloud and gets in three punches of the word "life", as if in a final frenzied dance. "Life is from the breath of God" pivots on that word "from", which torques what might be a religious cliché just enough to make it both strange and tangible.
Finally, a note on the title: while it underscores the repetition of the lines' first word, as well as the poem's apparent simplicity, it arguably takes that simplicity a step too far. Another possibility would be to use the title as a place to launch more freely from the poem. A title such as "What the Graveyard Said" is more likely to stick in the reader's mind than the perfectly apposite but less intriguing "Life".
Where might a poem like "Life" be submitted? The following contests may be of interest:
Alabama Writers' Conclave Writing Contest
Postmark Deadline: April 20
Local poetry society gives prizes up to $100 for formal and free verse poems, fiction, and essays
Lucidity Poetry Journal Clarity Awards
Postmark Deadline: April 30
Twice-yearly neutral free contest gives top prize of $100 for poems about the human experience, by authors aged 18+
Writer's Digest Annual Writing Competition
Postmark Deadline: May 6
Competitive contest for poetry and several prose genres from Writer's Digest, a leading publisher of directories and advice books for writers, gives a grand prize of $5,00, a paid trip to the Writer’s Digest Annual Conference, a coveted Pitch Slam slot at the Writer's Digest Conference where the winner will receive one-on-one attention from editors or agents, and publication of their winning piece on WritersDigest.com; enter by Submittable
New Zealand Poetry Society International Poetry Competition
Entries must be received by May 31
Numerous prizes up to NZ$500 for poems in various genres and age categories; open to international entries; no simultaneous submissions
This poem and critique appeared in the April 2012 issue of Winning Writers Newsletter (subscribe free).
Tar Sticks to Everything
Stumps pierce a white blanket of snow—winter
in burley country. Three hundred stalks
per row stake and trap
history, which hangs over the country
side before falling
to earth. Autumn draws longer shadows
where a faded tinderbox barn looms—
its broad sides converge into sheet
metal lances aimed at an apathetic sun.
Inside its walls, a year's labor cures,
ten stalks per hickory stick each speared
at the base. As winter nears
the green blood dries and gravity
claims every leaf. Tar gathers dust
from a dark dirt floor. The farmer pulls
a leaf from its stalk, holds it first
to his nose, then to the fading light.
Flaccid. The browning hangs over knuckles
like skin. Dust and tar cover hands
that won't come clean
'til right before planting season.
Time for stripping, bundling leaves. Soon
another year's work auctioned—the weed
will rest in the hands of sinners and cancer
patients. The father closes the barn door
and turns away.
Handwashing. Suppertime.
Behind him thin slats of light peer
through the dead oak boards,
while in the shadows his son cups
palms around an orange tell-tale cherry—
and coughs. The boy allows smoke
filled with pitch to warm his hands.
Copyright 2012 by Allen Gray
Critique by Laura Cherry
Writing poems is often considered to be an effete, elite process, far removed from ordinary folks and "real" work. One challenge to this limited notion of poetry is the work poem, which takes as its subject the unglamorous jobs, the mucking out of the world's stables. The act of writing such a poem can be a reclaiming or celebration of labor, whether it is one's own work, the work of one's family, or work more distantly observed. Capturing some form of work in a poem, particularly manual labor, so frequently marginalized in Western culture, can mean wrestling with all sorts of contradictions.
At the same time, work is an ideal subject for a poem. Jobs often come freighted with rich lexicons of terminology that can be plundered in the service of the poem. Work requires gloriously specific objects and actions. It is vivid even when boring, and it generates stories. Work makes things happen; it makes things. The work poem just needs to open the door to those things and let them in. Allen Gray's poem, "Tar Sticks to Everything", does exactly that.
Gray's poem has an honorable lineage. Perhaps the most renowned "poet of work" is our current Poet Laureate, Philip Levine. Check out his "Fear and Fame" (from his collection What Work Is) for a masterful example of the genre. Levine is by no means alone, though. Other powerful collections dealing with physical labor include BH Fairchild's The Art of the Lathe; An Honest Answer and Hurricane Sisters, by Ginger Andrews (known as "the cleaning lady poet", though she is much more); and Max Garland's The Postal Confessions. The speaker in Susan Eisenberg's Pioneering: Poems from the Construction Site is a woman working in a traditionally male job, doing physical labor. A beautifully poignant example of work poetry is Thomas and Beulah by Rita Dove (see the poems "Straw Hat" and "Dusting"), based on the lives of Dove's grandparents. And for another perspective on work poetry, see "Poems on Work and Money" on the Academy of American Poets website. In addition to what we might call blue-collar poems, there are also many poems based on the plight or good fortune of the office worker (or doctor or lawyer or investment banker), but those will remain a topic for another time.
The work poem often deals with work that is difficult, dangerous, perhaps even morally compromised, and from these conflicts grows the richness and complexity of the poem. A whole subgenre of poetry has been written on the life of the coal miner, for example. Miners are subjected to extreme danger in both a daily and a long-term way. They do work that is demanding and tedious, in the dark, for little money. Historically, they are often mistreated by their employers. Yet there is a fascination, almost a mystique, surrounding the coal-mining life and its struggles. For examples of poetry about coal mining, see Tess Gallagher's "Black Money", Philip Larkin's "The Explosion", and the book Kettle Bottom, Diane Gilliam Fisher's luminous collection of voices from the West Virginia mining wars of 1920 and 1921.
Coal mining is an interesting counterpoint to the subject of Allen Gray's poem, the equally complicated world of tobacco farming. Here is another difficult job with its own rhythms, its own way of life and its own dark side: the physical blight it brings to all it touches.
Grey gives us a beautiful example of a work poem in "Tar Sticks to Everything". The diction Gray uses to describe the materials and activities of the tobacco farm (burley, tar, hickory stick stakes, stripping and bundling leaves) conveys an easy, confident intimacy with the subject: this may not be a familiar place to us, but we sense we are in good hands.
Another thing I admire about this poem is the way Gray moves between concrete and figurative language. In the very first stanza, Gray gives us these lines:
...Three hundred stalks
per row stake and trap
history, which hangs over the country
side before falling
to earth.
Replace "history" and "country/side" with details of the tobacco farm, and you still have evocative, vivid lines. As they stand, the abstractions lift the poem from the beginning to a higher level of discourse, but with ease, almost off-handedly. It takes guts to whip out such abstractions, and to use them without causing the poem to shift off-balance and grow portentous. With his casual tone, and by moving afterwards back to the actual scene, Gray pulls it off, and I'm delighted to see him do it.
In a similar move from bare fact to image, the visually evocative detail, "a faded tinderbox barn looms" is followed by the equally ominous metaphor of "sheet / metal lances aimed at an apathetic sun." The latter image is another breakthrough judgment that works to set the poem's tone. There is little kindness in this landscape, but Gray shows us the beauty in its starkness and the sadness in its danger.
The language throughout the rest of the poem is casual, conversational, describing "the farmer", who is also "the father", checking his harvest as any farmer would do. The detail that "Dust and tar cover hands / that won't come clean / 'til right before planting season" tells us that his crop is as dangerous to him as it will be to those who eventually smoke it.
Gray does so many things right in this poem that I don't have space to detail them all here; in particular, his restraint, and his relaxed control of both the language and the material, make the poem powerful, not overblown. The title is a perfect example of this control, with its plain language but bold statement: this title conveys the poem's important points and establishes its voice. In telling us that "tar sticks to everything", it implicates all of us in the tobacco-growing paradox: the farmer must grow his crop to make a living. Smokers are compelled to buy it. Farm subsidies allow the cycle to continue. Both the farmer's family and the crop's consumers are physically damaged. Morally, the situation is complex and nuanced; from most perspectives, it is tragic.
In only a few places does Gray wobble over the line of restraint into overstatement: the farmer's reflection that "the weed / will rest in the hands of sinners and cancer / patients" seems to cross that line to me. It would be more compelling, and more in keeping with the tone of the poem, to leave at least the cancer patients, and perhaps the sinners as well, merely implied.
More subtly, the dash just after the wonderful image in which "his son cups / palms around an orange tell-tale cherry" gives too much dramatic weight to the subsequent ominous cough. The reader gets the point, that the son himself is doomed by his father's livelihood, and does not need the dash to establish a pause. The light touch Gray uses in the rest of the poem would work well here to get the greatest possible power from these lines.
Finally, a small quibble with a detail that this particular reader finds distracting and confusing: the poem begins with "winter / in burley country" and then moves backward to "autumn", which is then reinforced by the phrase "as winter nears." A simple fix to establish temporal continuity would be to change "winter" in the first line to "fall". That quintessentially American word for the season also puts us in the right spot, place-wise, for all that follows in this quiet and remarkable poem.
Where might a poem like "Tar Sticks to Everything" be submitted? The following contests may be of interest:
New Letters Literary Awards
Postmark Deadline: January 15, 2021
Prestigious, competitive prize series from the University of Missouri-Kansas City literary journal gives $1,000 and publication for poetry and short fiction manuscripts
Beacon Street Prize
Entries must be received by May 30
Redivider, a literary journal based at Emerson College in Boston, MA, gives $500 apiece for unpublished poems and short stories; online entries accepted
Bridport Prize
Entries must be received by May 31
High-profile British contest awards prizes up to 5,000 pounds for poetry and short stories, 1,000 pounds for flash fiction; online entries accepted
Guy Owen Poetry Prize
Postmark Deadline: June 15
Long-running award includes $1,000 and publication in Southern Poetry Review, a fine journal that favors rich, imagistic work
Ledbury Poetry Festival Poetry Competition
Entries must be received by July 3
Contest sponsored by UK-based poetry festival awards 1,000 pounds (cash prize added in 2012) and free tuition to a writing course at the Ty Newydd Creative Writing Center, North Wales; no simultaneous submissions
This poem and critique appeared in the May 2012 issue of Winning Writers Newsletter (subscribe free).
After
You are gone
I live here alone
with the dog
he will soon follow
nose to the ground
tail like a plume
disappearing down the path
which interwoven spruces' branches
enclose like a shroud.
Memories settle like a fine dust
everywhere, I dust and clean,
still molecules fill every crevice
of the house and my brain.
The water in my bath
glides over me like your hands
circles clockwise then
disappears down the drain with a sigh.
From the spruces,
where stolen blue from the sky
tinges each needle blue-green,
a white-throated sparrow
calls Old Peabody-Peabody-Peabody
ending with his pensive notes
Wait-up, Wait-up.
Wait-up, I repeat: Wait for me.
Copyright 2012 by Joem D. Phillips
Critique by Tracy Koretsky
It is no exaggeration to say that I cried when I first read this month's poem, "After", from the collection A Voice Alone by Joem D. Phillips of Santee, South Carolina, and Campobello Island, Canada. What is more surprising, though, is that despite many readings, I continue to find it deeply moving. Honest, pellucid, in no way sentimental, manipulative or mawkish, its declarative tone is direct, humble and altogether human.
Though its topic might elicit fear or drama, there is a calm assurance to this poem. This may be, in part, due to its confident sense of place conveyed through the naming of the bird, and the meaning of its song.
Likewise, in another possibly very fine poem, this topic might inspire specificity: "your tennis trophy", "our travel souvenir", "the pictures of our children". However, the images here—the well-observed dog, the house with its quotidian demands, the quiet but undeniable sexuality of the water circling the drain, the return to the trail with its spruces who bear their ancient witness—are available to us all to share, comprehend, and empathize with. The power of this poem is that to understand it, all a reader need bring is an open heart.
Which is not to say that Phillips's use of images is unsophisticated. Notice how she transits, in the manner of poetry, from one dominant image to the next.
Something similar is true of her diction choices. So unassuming is this diction, that there is no attempt to call blue anything other than blue. Dust is repeated because dust is repeating; it's everywhere, all the time, always more of it. Clearly, to be unassuming is a tonal choice.
Yet there is more to it; observed carefully, the sounds, like the images, shift in their dominance from stanza to stanza. The o and u sounds connect the first stanza with their subtle, invisible threads. The second stanza, much more staccato as the poet's day proceeds, is stitched together with s's and t's, moving into the final stanza whose subject is sound, sound created by fellow travelers whom, like the sound patterns in the previous stanzas, we may not at first be able to discern.
Towards revision, I would reconsider the punctuation of this piece. Actually, punctuation deserves consideration in each and every poem we write. Sometimes, it seems to me, poets fear punctuation. I theorize that this is because poetry does not always adhere to the standard rules of grammar, with its propensity for "run-ons" and "fragments", as our grade school teachers used to say, as well as other syntactical irregularities.
Often, rather than be "incorrect", poets skip punctuation entirely, relying instead on line breaks. This is a misunderstanding of the line break. We break our lines in poetry to create a tension in opposition to the sentence. Line breaks work with grammar, not instead of it. One widely held misconception is that that the end of a line indicates a pause. It does not; that is the function of punctuation.
This is why punctuation ought to be a delight to poets. It operates musically, directing the degree of pause, or a change of timbre. A period, obviously, is a full stop, akin in its way, to a quarter note. Everything has been said. A comma, with its promise of more to come, is more like an eighth note rest. There is no greater friend in reducing verbosity than the colon. The dash indicates a change: tone, subject, address, anything really, whether internal to the sentence or arriving at its end. Such changes lend texture and complication to our poems. Whereas a semicolon, it seems to me, describes the very essence of poetry itself, by bringing two disparate ideas together (just remember that the general rule is that there be a verb on both sides of the semicolon).
Occasionally there is a valid expressive reason for choosing either to forgo punctuation or use it in non-standard ways—for instance, where the poem's subject suggests a very spare presentation, or the poem is built of imagistic fragments, or there is an intentional desire to conflate and confuse the syntax. Though this can be very stylish and often affecting, the choice to omit punctuation always comes with a risk. Readers require grammar; that's just part of reading. If the poet asks the reader to supply unspecified grammar, some cognitive energy will necessarily be spent there. While this may be a fun mental exercise, potentially engaging the reader actively, be aware: that energy will have to be spent before the poem can be comprehended, and more importantly, before it can be felt.
Which is why careful, unobtrusive grammar choices support an emotionally potent poem like "After". Just look at the difference these small changes make in the opening lines:
You are gone.
I live here alone
with the dog.
The full stop at the end of the first line is so definitive, so incontrovertible. The closed-door fact of it is no longer mitigated by the existence of the dog.
The next two lines could end in a period, comma or semicolon with differing, mostly rhythmic, effects. The same is true of these lines:
Memories settle like a fine dust
everywhere, I dust and clean,
Memories settle like a fine dust
everywhere I dust and clean.
Memories settle like a fine dust
everywhere. I dust and clean,
Memories settle like a fine dust
everywhere. I dust and clean.
Memories settle like a fine dust.
Everywhere. I dust and clean.
Here not only does the rhythm change, but there is a slight shading of the meaning too. Are the memories evoked by the specific objects and places she dusts and cleans? Or are the memories like fine dust in general, adding to the futility of her response? In the last example I demonstrate how a poet might choose to ignore the formal principles of grammar in order to orchestrate a rhythm to the words.
This may sound overly basic, but a good first step to rethinking the punctuation in our poems is to reset the text temporarily as if it were prose. Oddly, standard punctuation comes more easily this way. Then the poem must then be read aloud, repeatedly, and possibly experimented with. When the poem sounds right to its author's ears, guiding punctuation can be added.
In the end though, even if Phillips had removed every bit of punctuation from this piece, I would still have been moved by it. Punctuation can never, in itself, make a poem as affecting as this one is. That can only be done when a poet is unafraid to share her humanity.
Where might a poem like "After" be submitted? The following contests may be of interest:
Pat Schneider Poetry Contest
Postmark Deadline: July 1
Amherst Writers & Artists, a well-regarded writing workshop, offers $1,000 for unpublished poems; winners invited to give a reading in Western Massachusetts
Porter Fleming Competition
Postmark Deadline: July 13
Prizes of $1,000 for poetry, short fiction, essays, and dramatic works by residents of Georgia, Florida, Alabama, South Carolina or North Carolina who are aged 18+
This poem and critique appeared in the June 2012 issue of Winning Writers Newsletter (subscribe free).
Gotham City
reborn vultures create mischief in Birmingham
with abandoned parachutes and excessive tattoos
selling insurance against bad weather and bad luck
homeless scarecrows in corduroy search the trash
for empty lipsticks and worn memories
foghorns signal mildew in the night
police battle inner demons on weekends
in a thick soup of deserted hotel,
forsaken church, and abandoned lighthouse
autumn's vague prophesy delivers emptiness
at the doorstep of her beloved
weary evangelists call for repentance
and foghorns whisper secret passwords and jade status
torpedoes head for the opera house in full formation
angels get wings trimmed in barbershop quartets
blind whales flounder through treacherous currents
of underground lakes and river
even as salmon swim the canals on Mars
the morning is dank and hung-over
as smoke from junkyard tugboats
and foghorns speak to passing ships in their own language
Monday's desolate sun sets on abandoned coffins
jazz musicians stand beside corrupt snake charmers
worthless confessions spill out of rusted horns
cold lanterns illuminate nervous encounters in a subway tunnel
gypsies cry obscure and foreign spells
and foghorns play ambient hymns for zombie weddings
pinstripe chain gang swings the hammer in bad neighborhoods
accident-prone clowns sing the blues
from a disappointed balcony
to an aimless congregation of shaggy mutts and
old propellers
gargoyles patrol the sky looking for food
and foghorns signal a call to prayer at the appointed hour
green limousines roam the street in frozen weather
detectives inspect strawberry rhinestones in a warehouse elevator
cheerleaders way past their prime assemble in vacant lots
foghorns breathe clouds of gloom in the cathedral
sigh cranberry sadness over the city
sing velvet songs of lost love
...and foghorns mourn for creeping and forgotten dreams
Copyright 2011 by Charles Kasler
Critique by Laura Cherry
A learned friend of mine told me that there's a fine line between utopia and dystopia. "Why is that?" I asked, and he told me it's because of the rigors of plot. Because a fictional utopia needs drama, the author has to play with the limits of its perfection by introducing threats or dangers or a sinister underside to the idyll. Similarly, for the sake of complexity and richness, depictions of dystopia can and should include some elements of lightness: for example, flashbacks to a happier, pre-Armageddon time, or a contrast between the language and what it describes. Charles Kasler's "Gotham City" showcases an urban landscape in ruins, but cast in such vivid, nearly ecstatic language that readers may find themselves happily caught up in this dark vision.
Kasler's poem gives us Gotham with no Batman in sight; this city is a maelstrom of wreckage and corruption. Images of hope in the form of music are undermined or destroyed ("torpedoes head for the opera house in full formation"). In the first line, Gotham is also referred to as Birmingham, which we can perhaps read as Birmingham, Alabama, with its history of race-related violence, but which could also refer to industrialized Birmingham, England. In this setting, insurance salesmen mingle with "homeless scarecrows in corduroy", evangelists, gypsies, jazz musicians with their "worthless confessions", and chain gangs. The darkened streets are punctuated with fretful bursts of light, color, wealth: "cold lanterns illuminate nervous encounters in a subway tunnel", "detectives inspect strawberry rhinestones in a warehouse elevator".
Stylistically, "Gotham City" plays out primarily in long lines liberated of punctuation and capitalization—a style associated with such notables as e.e. cummings and W.S Merwin—which has the effect of intensifying the scene's confusion and blurring of boundaries. To be honest, this is not normally a stylistic choice I favor, but here I find it suited to the poem's cascade of images. The poem is an accretive spill of sensual details, many of them weird and evocative. The result is not horrific but mesmerizing; we don't know what we'll see next, but we may find ourselves peering around corners for the next spectacle.
Music is important to this poem, and nowhere more than in the repeated foghorns, with their connotations of loneliness, melancholy, and, of course, eerie fog. The foghorns function almost as characters here, and their range of actions ("signal mildew in the night", "play ambient hymns for zombie weddings") adds a delightful series of surprises to end each stanza.
But back to our theme of dystopia. I see "Gotham City" as balanced between the poles of a celebrated poetic utopia and an equally famous dystopia: Samuel Taylor Coleridge's "Kubla Khan" and T.S. Eliot's "The Waste Land". Written in very different periods and styles, these poems (two of my favorites, I admit) still influence how we write about imagined paradises and brutalized landscapes today. In "Gotham City" I hear the echo of Coleridge's ecstatic language and fantastical scenery:
A savage place! as holy and enchanted
As e'er beneath a waning moon was haunted
By woman wailing for her demon-lover!
Stylistically and thematically, Kasler's poem leans more heavily to Eliot's fragmented collage and disaffected characters:
The nymphs are departed.
And their friends, the loitering heirs of City directors;
Departed, have left no addresses.
Having explored what territory Kasler's poem covers, it remains to say a few words about what it leaves uncovered. What does this dystopia say to us? It offers some excellent description and exciting images, which we are free to interpret as we will. Is this the present, the past, or the future? How did the city get here or where is it going? Are we looking at the collapse of the environment, the government, the social contract? Some hint of further meaning would give the poem greater resonance.
Alternatively, if the language and images are meant to be the entire experience, each one should be polished to an elegantly shiny finish. As it stands, the poem contains some slack, less fresh phrases: ("empty lipsticks and worn memories", "weary evangelists call for repentance", and the final line, "...and foghorns mourn for creeping and forgotten dreams"). These, particularly the ending, should be re-imagined to give the reader an uninterrupted Technicolor journey through the questionable streets of Gotham.
Where might a poem like "Gotham City" be submitted? The following contests may be of interest:
Great Canadian Literary Hunt
Postmark Deadline: July 31
This Magazine, a Canadian magazine of politics and culture, offers prizes of C$750 apiece for poetry, short fiction, and creative nonfiction narratives by Canadian citizens or residents who are new and emerging writers
Aesthetica Magazine's Annual Creative Writing Competition
Entries must be received by August 31
British journal of arts and literature gives prizes of 1000 pounds for poetry and short fiction; enter online
Reuben Rose Poetry Competition
Entries must be received by October 10
Voices Israel Group of Poets in Israel gives prizes up to $750, plus anthology publication for many runners-up; enter online
This poem and critique appeared in the July 2012 issue of Winning Writers Newsletter (subscribe free).
Three-Petaled Love Ghazal
All Other Loves
The Infant Warrior sings in every tongue, inflames all other loves.
Beware ravishings of the swaddled One who contains all other loves.
When did my desire turn on me with its green hunger, its hollow teeth?
My craving craves me back: pinched and jealous god who slays all other loves.
Poplars glint and shimmy in their spangled chorus line. They shiver, swept
by gusty fingers of a flirting sylph who disdains all other loves.
I abandon my mandrake garden. Now cankered roots poison the ground.
Juicy djinn's eggs, stolen for my silver bowl, red-stain all other loves.
Moses said. Moses said. He's dead. All the Earth is Egypt in the egg.
O Exodus hatched from the plagues of those gods, unchain all other loves.
Language ladled into Karen like alphabet soup from deep Word wells:
bright clad children queue to crazy-quilt the looped refrain, "all other loves".
At Center
This day is the end of my life: boundary enclosing the center.
All my days sigh, fall in spent rings around me, exposing the center.
Hankerings crowd my heart at cross purposes to draw and quarter me.
Warring loves clash! Which contentious itch is this bulldozing the center?
Your Spirit in me waits; crouches low like a pilot light: patient fire,
while each ignited cell in me, a hearth and pyre—glows at the center.
Such insatiable satiation! Can't say no to the rhumba urge.
Weight, mass and swivel merge—with gravity presupposing a center!
Listen, heart: who deep-carved into you these toxic runes and puzzling wounds?
Hold still for the ghazaling therapist who's diagnosing the center.
If you're reading this, it means I've died. In lieu of tears, Karen sends you
colors full of joy till in time all arrive, disclosing the center.
Arrive at Love
Inching, inching down to the well far beneath the fog, I strive to love.
Crouched light on its lip till you tell me to tip and I nose-dive to love.
A filmier face leans out of yours; it winks and scolds me: "You're dead, dear!"
snaps back as I slip slow through the narrows of the night, deprived of love.
Once said, these words are in the way: snapshots stalling a silent movie.
Words of all my yesterdays lie yellow-edged in the archives of love.
The city sings: a thin-skinned orange; juicy sharp high C inside. Wait.
Six wafer moons pass; peel back rind of the unexpected life I love.
Hidden to elude pursuit, I hang this hasty bamboo curtain and
peek quick-eyed at you from between the slats till I can survive your love.
Karen, pivot here on the hinge Contingency. Simplify to this:
you do not reduce to one, but us. Hinge on this kiss; arrive at love.
Copyright 2012 by Karen Winterburn
Critique by Laura Cherry
As forms go, as with Olympic sports, each has a different level of difficulty. Fledgling poets might, for example, start exploring the world of form by trying out the haiku or the rondeau; some time later, they might move to the sonnet or villanelle. This is not to say that it is easy to write a superb haiku or rondeau, but that it is possible to learn the very clear tenets of these forms and to create satisfying versions fairly soon. The more difficult the form, the harder it is to execute it in a way that will add something new, surprising, and lasting. Practice, diligence, and lavish amounts of reading are needed to progress in trickier, more demanding forms.
Somewhere far away up the ladder of difficulty, hanging out on a rung near the sestina, is the ghazal, a Near Eastern form which until recently was not widely known in the West and which still remains relatively obscure here. The ghazal (you will impress your poet friends if you know to pronounce it "huzzle") dates back to seventh-century Arabia; famous ghazal practitioners included the Persian poets Rumi and Hafiz. There has been passionate debate (fascinating for poetry geeks) about how to translate the usage of this form from its traditional Arabic or Persian into English. My own understanding is indebted to Agha Shahid Ali, a skilled writer of English ghazals who worked to bring the form to greater prominence in the West. Unlike some other definitions of the ghazal, Shahid's English interpretation of the form has a number of quite strict rules that must be followed.
To simplify to the core components: Firstly, ghazals have "timeless" subjects such as romantic love and mysticism. The ghazal form itself is made up of a series of long-lined couplets (at least five but no more than fifteen); the lines' meter is unspecified but should be roughly consistent. The same word (or phrase) is used as a refrain to end both lines of the first couplet and the second line of the remaining couplets. And finally, the poet's name appears as a "signature" in the last couplet. Simple, right? The trick here is to do something far-reaching and unexpected and mind-blowing with all that repetition, within the expansive space of those long, leggy lines. What does this look like in practice? Take a look at Shahid's untitled ghazal for an allusive, elegant example. Or you might check out Karen Winterburn's series of ghazals under its umbrella title "Three-Petaled Love Ghazal". In fact, let's look at Winterburn's approach to the core components of the ghazal to see how she handles them.
For her subject and theme, Winterburn gets extra points from the judges by choosing romantic and religious love, interwoven, or an eroticized version of religious love. This plunges directly to the heart of the ghazal's traditional intention, with the Western twist of incorporating Christianity as the religion of concern. There is something audacious yet entirely fitting in this choice, and Winterburn executes it with confidence.
Winterburn uses the requisite long-lined couplets, in a neat arrangement of six per ghazal. With her end words, Winterburn achieves a higher level of difficulty by not just incorporating the same end word or phrase into each couplet, but prefacing it with a refrain that rhymes but does not repeat—a feature of the Arabic ghazal that is not always used in English. For example, the refrains in the first ghazal, "All Other Loves", include:
contains all other loves
slays all other loves
disdains all other loves
unchain all other loves
Winterburn's rhymes are mostly true rhymes, though occasionally she will use assonant rhyme (as in "slays all other loves") or another variant. Winterburn also includes her signature at the end of each ghazal, first referring to herself as poet ("Language ladled into Karen"), then addressing the beloved ("In lieu of tears, Karen sends you / colors full of joy"), and finally addressing herself directly ("Karen, pivot here on the hinge Contingency").
It's also instructive to look at Winterburn's titles. Ghazals in their original form are not titled. Shahid, in his English ghazals, tends to use a ghazal's refrain word or phrase as its title, at least in a collection of ghazals where differentiation is useful. Winterburn uses this same convention for her individual ghazals, while giving the sequence an overarching title that evokes the Trinity and introduces the poem's romantic elements.
Of course, you can put together a perfect form without bringing a poem to life. Winterburn's poem is not empty form, but uses the ghazal as a structure or strategy for ranging widely across her theme. With each refrain, she pushes the poem in a slightly different direction. From the start, the "Infant Warrior", a symbol for Jesus, is seen as containing "all other loves", some of which include erotic desire, cravings, and stolen treasure ("juicy djinn's eggs"). The poem's images are wild, complex, ecstatic, and despairing.
In the first ghazal as throughout the poem, the language is a delight, full of deft assurance and lively music. A sentence like "Poplars glint and shimmy in their spangled chorus line" creates pops and spangles in the mouth if read aloud, even as it draws a vivid, glimmering picture of that row of trees. The last couplet of this ghazal describes the process of assembling the ghazal itself: "crazy-quilt the looped refrain, 'all other loves'". In the second ghazal, "At Center", the poet dies a symbolic death, drawn and quartered by conflicting desires, which are alternately warm, patient, satiating, enlivening, puzzling, and joyful. Each stanza's refrain works to bring its pinwheeling emotions and images back to the theme. Fittingly, the refrain "at the center" gives the poem its heart.
The third ghazal, "Arrive at Love", serves as a culmination of the sequence, the poet's arrival at what has been yearned for. In this ghazal, the images and lines become especially hermetic and surreal, as if following a private code: "A filmier face leans out of yours; it winks and scolds me, 'You're dead, dear!'" Here again, the form is followed precisely. The end refrain, used to explore the theme, never becomes tedious.
However, I find this last ghazal more striking than satisfying. The last six couplets are well executed but resist interpretation or a sense of what is being arrived at, and with whom. Is this an ecstatic spiritual moment? A long-delayed acceptance of the earthly beloved? A post-mortem reflection on the life of the senses? Deprivation, pursuit, and hiding are all elements of the plot, but it is not clear what it means to transcend these for the indicated arrival. I'd very much like to feel, with the speaker of the poem, what is going on in this final acceptance, the "nose-dive to love."
Does Winterburn stick the landing? I enjoy the last couplet, its provocative pivot on the hinge of a kiss, and the lovestruck reduction not "to one, but us". I just wish I understood more clearly what has led up to it.
Here is a note from the author on writing ghazals: "When I saw I needed a whole lot of images that needn't be related or unified or developed, I mined my old 'dead' poems—some even from high school (many moons ago!) in which I might have had a couple of good images but the poem itself never went anywhere. It's fun to collect all those and recycle them." Note the discovery that Winterburn quietly makes about the assortment of images her poem requires in order to develop breadth and range to counter the repetition. This is a key pleasure of form, if you can manage it: to discover and learn from the poem itself what it needs to sing.
For extra ghazal enjoyment, find Agha Shahid Ali's collection Call Me Ishmael Tonight or his anthology Ravishing DisUnities: Real Ghazals in English.
Happy ghazaling!
Where might a poem like "Three-Petaled Love Ghazal" be submitted? The following contests may be of interest:
Jeffrey E. Smith Editors' Prize for Fiction, Essays & Poetry
Postmark Deadline: October 1
The Missouri Review awards $5,000 in each genre; online entry accepted; suites of thematically related poems have done well in this contest
Joy Harjo Poetry Award
Postmark Deadline: October 10
Colorado-based journal Cutthroat offers this contest named for a well-known Native American poet and activist, with prizes up to $1,250; online entry accepted
This poem and critique appeared in the August 2012 issue of Winning Writers Newsletter (subscribe free).
Cupid and And Speaking of Strategic Planning
CUPID by Jean Wilson
A greeting to all you lovers, and those who like romance,
We put our trust in Cupid's arrow, nothing is left to chance.
Our fat, little cherub friend shoots our perfect mate,
Instantly we fall in love and leave the rest to fate.
Problem is, poor Cupid is feeling very sad,
Divorce rate is escalating, and things are looking bad.
Cupid's hit an all time low, his aim has gone to seed,
He's drinking rum by the barrel, and smoking loads of weed.
When it's time to do his duty, he aims his arrows high,
Off they wobble in the air, sailing through the sky.
Where they land is anyone's guess, it's certainly not the target,
There's going to be a few mistakes, some people will be hard hit.
Now there's utter chaos, since Cupid's seeing double,
This could be disastrous, us humans are in trouble.
He's joining people together for an inevitable life of doom,
The bells will dolefully ring "here comes the Bride and Gloom".
He's made some very strange couplings, Jordan and the Pope?
A vicar with a stripper, oh Lord give us hope!
Prince Harry and Lady Gaga, the monarchy's in strife!
It was bad enough when Charles took Camilla as his wife!
Kermit and Pippa Middleton? Oh Cupid can't you see?
Poor Jennifer Aniston, you've matched her with a tree!
I really think enough is enough, I'm calling in your boss,
Venus will be horrified and very very cross!
Our Goddess was sympathetic, she let Cupid keep his job,
On condition he join a "self-help group", which he agreed upon a sob.
The next day he flutters in, to a meeting of the AA.
He sits down, takes a breath, and then begins to say...
"Hi, my name is Cupid and I'm an alcoholic,
I've never had to seek help, I'm normally very stoic.
But times are really changing, it seems love is replaced by hate,
My job just seems so stressful now, there's too much on my plate."
"No one seems to take the time to listen to their heart,
Those lazy humans sit and wait for the piercing of my dart!
I would create the perfect union then it would end upon a whimper,
Instead of trying to work at it a solicitor would be simpler."
"I can't be responsible for the failing human race,
Marriages in crisis, the establishment in disgrace.
A complete lack of morals that the media promote,
Lengthy anniversaries becoming more remote."
"I no longer feel any job satisfaction,
It drove me to drink, hence this drastic action.
It really must be time for me to hang up my bow,
I will tender my resignation and in a month I shall go."
"For years I've joined these couples and all of it for free,
I've always been single, so when is it time for me?
I need that special someone who believes in exchanging rings,
Who will be happy to settle down and clip my errant wings."
"Who will tickle my fat belly and call me names like 'cuddles',
Who will fly with me in the rain and dance amongst the puddles.
Who will moan to me constantly about the toilet seat,
In whose warm bed can I depend in which to warm my feet."
So Cupid raised a final glass of aphrodisiac mead,
Off he flew to find his mate and the new life he would lead.
So what will happen to us all without his intervention?
The effects are astronomical and too numerous to mention!!
Copyright 2012 by Jean Wilson
AND SPEAKING OF STRATEGIC PLANNING by Lisa Badner
Yesterday's meeting was not to be believed.
So invigorating, it sent some over the edge.
The roll-out agenda ambitious,
the deadlines aggressive. Implementing
critical initiatives at this critical juncture
is critical, said Troy from Operations.
Steady as she goes. Thirty seven
glossy 11 by 17 pie charts. Beverly
from Licensing wore a long blouse
over her tattoos. Vickie from Finance
wore pink. Key is to strike a balance,
said George, chief associate deputy
to the deputy associate chief
of Analysis and Audits, between
the objectives of goals
and the goals of objectives.
Fran from Communications presented
a soft launch of the new mission.
In song. Then, Wanda from Data
dimmed the lights. Powerpoint blue
engulfed the northwest wall.
The anticipation unbearable,
Margaret from Research ran out.
Oh the pressure. The pressure.
The new logo was red.
And black. And purple.
Shadows of teal. A touch
of magenta, when you stare
for three seconds, then look away
and blink, each eye separately,
four times. It spoke to everyone,
Collections staff cried. Enforcement
saluted. The fonts: Bakersfield
Old Face and Brittanic Bold.
Subtext in Century Gothic
Estrangella Odessa.
Copyright 2012 by Lisa Badner; first published in TriQuarterly #137
Critique by Jendi Reiter
What's a joke without a punchline? Whether a poem is serious or funny, it should build to a conclusion that enhances the meaning and exceeds the power of the preceding lines. This month we present for your consideration two poems that made it to the semifinals of our 2012 Wergle Flomp Humor Poetry Contest, a select group of about 60 out of 2,500 entries.
Both of these poems rely on incongruity, a staple feature of humor, though in quite different ways. "Cupid", by Jean Wilson of Shropshire, England, gets laughs from the peculiar celebrity pairings that result when the God of Love goes on a bender. The image of a drunken, morose cherub also comically reverses our expectations. "And Speaking of Strategic Planning", by Lisa Badner of Brooklyn, NY, displays incongruity both in the events and in the tone of her poem: the melodramatic behavior at a corporate meeting, and the rapturous voice in which the speaker describes something as trivial as a new logo. Good satire reveals the exaggerated importance we place on unworthy objects, by exaggerating it even further.
Tone of voice is another crucial tool in the humorist's kit. In fact, it can make or break a poem, turning a would-be joke into a belabored mess, or a sentimental ode into an unintentionally ridiculous display. Choice of form interacts with choice of tone, because form can tell us how serious the poet is about her subject matter, while tone often determines whether she convinces us of that assessment.
For example, "Cupid" uses a loose iambic heptameter, arranged into four-line stanzas of two couplets with predictable sing-song rhymes. This was a common structure for epic and tragic verse during the Romantic era, but its very success in that mode has since made it a cliché and a hallmark of bad amateur poetry today. Therefore, it is a perfect form for a poem that pokes fun at romantic conventions. The bumpety-bump rhythm hints that "Cupid" will be a farce, while the tone of the first two stanzas goes from almost-straightforward to clear silliness by line 8 ("drinking rum by the barrel").
The farce amps up, as it should, till we reach the point that for me was the heart of the poem: the ludicrous yet oddly apt love matches between celebrities. Prince Harry and Lady Gaga? Why not? Imagine the hats at that royal wedding! And poor Jennifer Aniston, indeed—the tabloids have matched her with so many beaux, a tree may be the only new possibility left.
Unfortunately, "Cupid" did not advance further in the judging because nothing so memorable occurred in the rest of the poem. Cupid's six-stanza speech contains some smile-worthy rhymes (alcoholic/stoic, puddles/cuddles) but the new information comes at a much slower pace compared to the rapid-fire jokes in stanzas 5-6.
The last lines in particular felt like a throwaway ending; the poem had to stop somewhere, but nothing was added or resolved. For me, it would have been more satisfying to end with Cupid finding an incongruous mate of his own. (Margaret Thatcher's single, isn't she?) A good ending references what has gone before, with a twist.
The humor in Badner's "And Speaking of Strategic Planning" is deep rather than broad. It's free verse that still pays careful attention to form. Paradox? Not really. Just as "light" verse shouldn't mean careless writing, neither does "free" mean "anything goes". Line breaks, cadences, and sound patterns must be used thoughtfully to create drama and highlight key concepts. Badner does this so well that even though I understood the joke, the mood of hushed reverence affected me, too.
Whereas Wilson's simplistic rhymes and predictable meter set the stage for farce, Badner's ironic humor derives from pairing stylistic sophistication with banal events. She carefully places line breaks to create tension that resolves with an absurd anticlimax, again and again: "Implementing /critical initiatives at this critical juncture /is critical"; "Vickie from Finance /wore pink."
This is why I was expecting a more resonant ending than a mere list of fonts. After the delicious melodrama of "It spoke to everyone, /Collections staff cried. Enforcement /saluted.", this was one spot where an anticlimax simply made the poem feel unfinished.
However, the prestigious journal TriQuarterly found it satisfactory, possibly because their criterion was not "what makes Jendi laugh so hard that her iced tea comes out her nose". Or maybe it was the typeface.
Where could poems like "Cupid" and "And Speaking of Strategic Planning" be submitted? The following contests may be of interest:
Reuben Rose Poetry Competition
Entries must be received by October 10
Long-running contest from Voices Israel gives prizes up to $750 and anthology publication; enter online
Firstwriter.com International Poetry Competition
Entries must be received by October 1
British writers' resource site gives prizes up to 500 pounds for poems 30 lines maximum; enter online
These poems and critique appeared in the September 2012 issue of Winning Writers Newsletter (subscribe free).
Again Guernica and Lesson at MoMA
Again Guernica
Again I stand before the frame
where Picasso in the aftershock
multiples a woman
deconstructs a face
pries open her story
in cubed space
Again I wince before the flower
of baked bones Madrid
bursts on streets
Buttonhooks
scatter like quince
Again I watch Madrid
mother and child gape
in open-mouthed surprise
a dead soldier upholds a defiant
fist to maddened skies
Ah Picasso's irreverent brush
tells and foretells
a century of scalding skies
cyclones of ash
frantic elbows of the lifeless
The horns of astonished bulls
poke through a canvas
of pity and sorrow
Lesson at MoMA
A witness of many seasons
I need no map to find my way
back to the Guernica
the bull kneeling
horns poised against the eye
And there
on the marble floor
a student at fevered work
her cheek a curved muleta
a red cape of hair shuddering
on one shoulder
She leans on a pad of folded knees
sketching a ziggurat of limbs
a howling beast
the mother comforting
an openmouthed dead child
the soldier's hand a broken sword
a cubed flower of baked bones
yields to a mad sky
Still grasping a charcoal stick
The artist sneaks her wrist
over wet lids
I stand coveting
the black tear
on a young cheek
Copyright 2012 by Lou Barrett
Critique by Tracy Koretsky
Ekphrastic poems, like the two submitted this month by Lou Barrett, respond to other works of art. The word comes to us from the Greek meaning "description", though even the early canonical example of the genre, Keats's "Ode on a Grecian Urn", moves beyond the urn's mere description to the poet's responses and his enlarged general conclusion that "Beauty is truth, truth beauty."
Today ekphrastics include a variety of approaches: imaginative flights, such as dramatic monologue; or cultural reinterpretations, for example, through the lens of feminism; or meditations on the fate or history of a piece (how did the Elgin marbles wind up in the British Museum and why are they still there?). In general, the underlying theme of these poems is how the artwork affected the poet, how the piece has changed them, or perhaps changed the world.
It may be helpful to think of ekphrastics as a genre as opposed to a form. In other words, there are no strict rules or guidelines, but there are qualities and conventions. The most obvious among these concern how to guide the reader to the poem's inspiration. After all, it is rare that a publication will run the referent image in conjunction with the poem. To do so can be harder than it might first appear, with the need to acquire rights and permissions standing in a well-intentioned publisher's way.
An exception helpful to our discussion here is the always-interesting online poetry journal, Poemeleon, which ran an ekphrastic issue in the winter of 2006.
A quick flip through its contents reveals the most common ways allusions are made. This is because the allusion is almost always made prior to the end of the first stanza in order to firmly ground the reader. Poems are frequently titled with the name of the work of art, as our contributor has done in his first poem, "After Guernica". Another strategy is to use an epigraph such as "after Leda, sculpture, Fernando Botero" as Wendy Taylor Carlisle has done in her poem, "Her Husband". Sometimes it is the artist's name that is invoked, perhaps as a direct address, as in Andrena Zawinski's "Impressions En Plein Air", or in the title or epigraph.
Are there ekphrastics that don't allude? Consider Ren Powell's poem, "A Strange Woman". Here we have a piece inspired by a little-known artwork with no specific attribution. Therefore, from the poet's point of view, it is an ekphrastic. But from the reader's?
I'm going to venture not. Frankly, as a reader it is not important to me where a poet gets inspiration. What matters to me is what the poem communicates in the end. In my opinion, a vital part, if not the essence, of what an ekphrastic has to offer is a shared experience of a work of art. Without that, though the poem may be excellent, I would not classify it as an ekphrastic.
For this reason, I found Maureen Alsop's choice of the Helga pictures affecting. Certainly it is true that not every reader is going to know about the treasure trove of paintings found in Andrew Wyeth's attic. However, poetry readers are not your average readers; many have an active interest in other arts. The Helga pictures were quite the art world sensation for a time. In evoking them, Alsop restricts her audience, yes, but she offers a satisfying sense of intimacy and companionability to those in the know. Poet and reader are going to stand together and converse about these fascinating objects. To my mind, therein is the appeal of an ekphrastic.
Now obviously, poets are inspired by works of art of all types, famous, infamous and obscure. Works that are all already whole unto themselves; they do not need a poem to make them more complete. So the poem, to be worthwhile, must shed a new light upon the work.
The first step toward this goal is striking the correct balance between description and interpretation. An obscure piece will require significantly more description than one that a reader can easily locate on the Internet. Such description may weigh the poem down, or simply make it confusing. In revision, one must ask if the allusion is actually adding to the finished product. There is nothing wrong with simply removing the pointers to the poem's inspiration and letting it breathe on its own.
At the other extreme, why describe the Mona Lisa? Simply grabbing the coattails of an important work will not, in itself, result in an important poem. The key to a worthwhile ekphrastic of an iconic work is finding a fresh—and more importantly, expressive—strategy or insight.
That is the challenge this month's contributor faced. "Guernica" is possibly Pablo Picasso's most famous work and definitely one of the most well-known masterworks of the twentieth century. What new view can our poet offer?
It is a challenge worthy of at least two attempts, and Barrett has made a good start. "Again Guernica" tries to help the reader see this familiar image better or anew by illuminating it with description. Despite strong diction choices ("the flower/of baked bones"; "Buttonhooks/scatter like quince"; "frantic elbows of the lifeless") the project of describing an iconic piece in a way that provides fresh insight is exceedingly hard.
Though not completely impossible: allow me to present a counterexample. Consider Mary Alexandra Agner's poem, "Under the Waves off Kanagawa", in Poemeleon. Certainly Hokusai's woodblock print sometimes called "The Great Wave" comes as instantly to mind as "Guernica" if not more so. So, to describe it, Agner offers her notion that the wave looks like a grasping hand. Each detail not only supports the conceit but is also original in its description (clothes "the color of depth"; "pale and creased" boats).
In revising "After Guernica", one approach would be to conjure an overarching conceit upon which to hang each descriptive phrase. In Agner's piece, the wave equals a hand. For "Guernica", the fractured chaos = x. Barrett's job would be to do the algebra.
Or maybe not. Perhaps the more expressive approach would be something like "Lesson at MoMA", a narrative poem in which depicts not the painting itself, but a young artist's response to it. Here, the description of the painting does not enter the poem until the eighth line of the second stanza, with "a ziggurat of limbs".
Notice how specific the next seven lines are to Guernica, unlike the lines "multiples a woman/ deconstructs a face" or "horns of astonished bulls" from "After Guernica" which might be applied to any number of works by Picasso. Personally, I find the seven lines just cited ample—actually more than ample—to evoke a work as readily recognized as Guernica.
It is always worthwhile to ask, when revising a narrative, where is the best beginning? Although we often compose our first drafts with a beginning, middle, and end, the goal for the final draft is to pique and invite the reader in the first few lines. Some poets talk about finding the place where the poem begins to pulse—where it becomes most lively. (For a demonstration of this see Critique Corner, August 2010.)
Where the narrative begins, obviously, affects where it ends. Bear in mind that the word "verse"—even in the expression "free verse"—originally meant "to turn". Poems, especially narrative poems, frequently leave us off in a different place from where we began.
So Barrett might, for example, skip the preamble and open with the student. Next he could describe the painting and then turn the poem to his own response, tucking in the most meaningful information from the original first stanza thus:
"I, a witness of many seasons,
stand coveting the black tear on a young cheek"
Another strategy would be to begin with the painting, move to the student, and finally to the poet. As we have seen, most ekphrastics ground the reader in the context of the painting by the end of the first stanza. Of course, Barrett could accomplish this with his title or with an epigraph. Alternatively, though, he could select a phrase from "After Guernica", for example, "A Century of Scalding Skies", or even, "Again", as a title. In either case, he could certainly mine "After Guernica" for its finest diction, most specific to the particular painting.
One advantage to this strategy is that I, as a reader, am asked to bring my knowledge of "Guernica" and its storied history to my reading, inviting my participation much as the poem on the Helga paintings did. But that is not the main reason I am advocating for the narrative strategy taken in "Lesson at MoMA". Both poems, at heart, convey a sad weariness of humankind's endless warring. "Again Guernica" states it whereas "Lesson at MoMA" dramatizes it, or, as the overused writing adage goes, one tells, the other shows. Sometimes there are reasons adages are overused.
Where could poems like "Again Guernica" and "Lesson at MoMA" be submitted? The following contests may be of interest:
Split This Rock Poetry Contest
Entries must be received by November 1
Prizes up to $500 for "poems of provocation and witness" from a festival sponsored by progressive think tanks in Washington, DC; enter online
Founders Award
Postmark Deadline: November 15
Georgia Poetry Society gives prizes up to $75; no simultaneous submissions
Anita McAndrews Award Poetry Contest
Postmark Deadline: November 30
Poets Beyond Borders gives prizes up to $100 for published or unpublished poems relating to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights
These poems and critique appeared in the October 2012 issue of Winning Writers Newsletter (subscribe free).
Sea Constellations of the Northern Sky Offer No Consolation
Astride whale roads with barques poorly equipped,
scrawny sages descry immense high blue
circling views, decanting nature into
canticles of land, or sea, or air that
congeal at polar meridian to
northern marine lung of hibernal hue.
Bulleting sky in starry satellite,
Cetus congregates to fangles shapely
arrayed in a sea of constellations.
"Listen to the Logos as blue merges into white then black and magnitude dims."
The sages pray and contemplate Jonah.
Jonah, insignificant spume, blindly
susurrates hymns in asterisms of
autumnal tone. Held in aquamarine
cinctures, unrequited songs burst in pared
watery syllables. Belched onto strange
shores, harps unstrung, speaking in partial tongues,
finding empty habitation and no
relief, they turn to baboon-watch a squall:
scrying the altitude for another sign to gather around.
Copyright 2012 by Rich Hoeckh; contact the author at richh1095@yahoo.com
Critique by Laura Cherry
Don't these lines just cry out to be read aloud? Rich Hoeckh's poem "Sea Constellations of the Northern Sky Offer No Consolation" plays a complex music starting with its title and sings sweetly through its last line.
The conceit of the poem—a group of seafaring (then shipwrecked) prophets look to the elements for divine communication—is conveyed through goofily archaic diction ("barques poorly equipped", "decanting nature into / canticles of land or sea", "scrying the altitude") and a veritable thesaurus of synonyms. In this poem, the important thematic elements are the sea ("whale roads", "northern marine lung", "aquamarine cinctures"), songs (hymns, canticles, "pared / watery syllables"), and constellations (asterisms, "starry satellite", "fangles shapely / arrayed"). The songs are a plea for a sign, and the sea and constellations provide the only available answer. The poet chooses a nonce form of nine-line stanzas, each followed by a longer single line that summarizes or concludes the preceding stanza.
What truly draws me into this poem, though, is its music. In calling a poem musical, or referring to its music, I mean everything that goes into its sound: its rhythm, meter, and the sounds of the words themselves, its chewy or hushed consonants, the way it clacks and swishes and pings.
When we think of poetry as music, we may first think of songs and song lyrics, whose primary sound strategy is usually rhyme. However, poems can make use of a whole range of less showy techniques for subtler and more nuanced effects. Just for starters, these can include consonance (the repeated use of the same consonant), assonance (repeated use of vowel sounds), alliteration (the repetition of initial sounds in the words of a poem), and sibilance (perhaps most easily described as repeated hissing sounds).
Check out the sibilance in this fragment, for example:
Scrawny sages descry immense high blue
circling views, decanting nature into
canticles of land, or sea, or air
The "s" and "z" sounds are carried throughout the poem and evoke the sounds of sea and air. These soft sounds are contrasted with harder clicking sounds like those in "canticles", "congeal", "congregates", "constellations", and "contemplate". These two strands of sound provide counterpoint for each other, and keep the poem lively and fun to read aloud. The strands come together at times, particularly in the later lines of the poem, in phrases like "harps unstrung, speaking in partial tongues" and in words like "scrying" and "squall".
Sound-play like this has a rich precedence, of course, and I'm glad to have a reason to mention some of my favorite sound-intensive poems. For superb canonical examples, see Dylan Thomas, "I See the Boys of Summer"; Sylvia Plath, "Dream with Clam-Diggers"; Gerard Manley Hopkins, "Pied Beauty"; or Wallace Stevens, "Sea Surface Full of Clouds". For a more contemporary example, take a look at Sarah Hannah, "The Colors Are Off This Season".
A different matter altogether, worthy of a full discussion of its own, is slam poetry, written not just to be spoken aloud but performed and judged by the audience. See, for instance, "Hip-Hop Ghazal" by Patricia Smith, whose work is rooted in slam poetry. (To learn more about writing in the ghazal form, see our August 2012 critique.)
Having discussed what I see as the main strength of Hoeckh's poem, how would I critique it for revision? I'd first assess it for technique. There are small moments here that throw me out of the world of the poem, disrupting its thrall.
"Baboon-watch" is one of those for me, standing out in both diction (plain) and sound (that lengthy "oo"). The baboon image does not fit easily into the tapestry that has been woven of sage-sky-sea-stars, and while diversity can be refreshing, the uniqueness of this particular image gives it more weight than I suspect it is intended to have.
Also, that archaic diction, while providing a wild ride, can be hard to follow: "blindly / susurrates hymns in asterisms of / autumnal tone" sounds magnificent, but comes close to breaking the poem's tenuous thread of sense. Also, a number of the line breaks in the poem fall after prepositions like "to", "into", and "of", which hobbles the line as a sense unit and squanders multiple opportunities for more interesting enjambment. I'd encourage the poet to take more care in crafting those breaks.
The second area I'd assess is my emotional connection to the poem as a reader. There are many poems I admire simply for their mastery of technique. However, the poems that mean the most to me are the ones that grab me and shake me viscerally. Plath is far better known for her poems of rage and despair and love (as well as technical mastery) in Ariel (see "Lady Lazarus") than for her earlier, more apprentice poems in which she employed that same mastery but kept a respectful distance from her subject matter (see "Parliament Hill Fields").
This poem keeps its characters and action miles further than arm's length. We do not enter into the experience of the sages, nor really care whether they are sailing or capsized, as long as their exploits are described charmingly—as they are. The poem's words and manner draw us in, not its subject matter.
I mention this particularly because I have noticed a trend in the poems submitted to this column for critique: those that are well executed technically are often either light or emotionally distant or careful. They are well constructed, but do not take any sort of emotional risk, presumably for fear of being charged with sentimentality. Beginning poets should indeed take care to avoid melodrama, but it seems important to me to point out that beautiful sounds and precise construction are not necessarily ends in themselves. I'd recommend to any poet that at some point, you take the risk and leap into the fiery emotional core of your poem. To give pleasure in its reading is enough for a single poem to do, and it is a significant thing to do, but it is not all that poetry can do.
Where might a poem like "Sea Constellations of the Northern Sky Offer No Consolation" be submitted? The following contests may be of interest:
Abilene Writers Guild Contest
Postmark Deadline: November 30
Texas writers' group gives prizes up to $100 in a number of genres including rhymed and unrhymed poetry, short stories, articles, children's literature, and novel excerpts
Perform Poetry Magazine Competition
Entries must be received by November 30
British magazine with an interest in spoken-word and performable poetry awards 100 pounds for an unpublished poem on the theme of "seasons"; enter online
Soul-Making Literary Competition
Postmark Deadline: November 30
National League of American Pen Women contest awards $100 prizes for poetry, stories, prose poems, personal essays, humor, and literature for young adults; open to both men and women; previously published works accepted
Cecil Hemley Memorial Award
Postmark Deadline: December 22
Free contest open to members of the Poetry Society of America (we recommend joining) awards $500 for a lyric poem that addresses a philosophical or epistemological concern
Little Red Tree International Poetry Prize
Postmark Deadline: December 31
Prizes up to $1,000 and anthology publication for unpublished poems, from an independent small press in Connecticut whose motto is "Delight, entertain and educate"; enter by mail or online
This poem and critique appeared in the November 2012 issue of Winning Writers Newsletter (subscribe free).
Critique Corner Finale: Our Best Advice for Poets
The authors of Critique Corner collaborated to bring the series to an end with a special gift: a list of do's and don'ts to help your poem get into the winner's circle.
Dear Readers,
Each month for the past ten years, Critique Corner has demonstrated revision principles to a wide array of poets based upon poems selected from your contributions. This month, we conclude our series. We hope you have enjoyed these monthly essays, learned something, and felt inspired to take a fresh look at your own poems.
Each of the reviewers at Critique Corner has been in the position of selecting poetry for publication and/or judging contests. Not surprisingly, most editors and judges will describe the same selection method, at least initially: make two piles, one for "pass" and one for "read again".
So, as our final send-off, we have prepared two short lists that you can keep and review. The first list is what to avoid if you want to get into that "read again" pile. The second, shorter, list are the signs that we are looking at a winner.
Topping all three of our "avoid" lists:
- Spelling Mistakes
It's like showing up to a job interview with your shirt unbuttoned. We all have spell checkers these days. Use them! - Fancy Formatting
Most gimmicks—colored fonts, huge fonts, flashing pictures—tire the eyes of any reader sorting through lots of poems. They often get garbled in transmission, and they complicate printing and online publication.
Our chief general recommendations:
- Read contemporary poetry
Just as much as you can cram into your schedule, and let its innovations filter into your work. You'll find lots of great examples here. - Engage the senses
When you actively evoke sights, sounds, smells, tastes and textures, the reader is more likely to share the experience with you. Always favor the tangible over the abstract.
And now, our lists:
JENDI REITER
Jendi Reiter is the author of the poetry collections A Talent for Sadness (Turning Point Books, 2003), Swallow (Amsterdam Press, 2009), and Barbie at 50 (Cervena Barva Press, 2010). Awards include a 2010 Massachusetts Cultural Council Artists' Grant for Poetry, the 2012 Betsy Colquitt Award for Poetry from Descant magazine, and the 2010 Anderbo Poetry Prize. She is the final judge of the Sports Fiction & Essay Contest and the Wergle Flomp Humor Poetry Contest, both sponsored by Winning Writers.
Please avoid:
- Merely descriptive poems
Show me why I should care about the thing described. For instance, a nature scene, by itself, is not a satisfying poem for me. Something emotionally involving has to happen, to demonstrate why this scene is worthy of my attention. This can take place in a number of ways: a character in the poem having a meaningful interaction with nature (e.g. James Wright, "A Blessing"); a character's internal reflections inspired by his or her surroundings (e.g. Robert Frost, "Stopping By Woods on a Snowy Evening"; Mary Oliver, "The Summer Day"); or the nature scene as metaphor or allegory for the author's philosophical point (e.g. Robert Frost, "Design"). - Poems that are really prose with line breaks
Poetry should not be a throwaway format for prose passages that are too insubstantial to comprise a full-length story or essay, such as straightforward narratives or expositions of views. Use poetic devices such as metaphors, unexpected juxtapositions of ideas, and formal patterns of sound and rhythm. (See our August 2010 Critique Corner for a discussion of the "poetic turn" that structurally distinguishes it from prose.) - Poems that list your emotions by name
Find images and anecdotes that will produce those emotions in the reader. For instance, if you're writing a love poem, don't tell me that your beloved is kind; show the reader something kind that she does, and make it as unique as possible. - Ungrammatical omission of articles ("a" and "the")
Some recommend this as a way to "tighten" a poem, but to me it sounds like an awkward computer-generated English translation. - Monotone stylistic choices
Capitalization and punctuation add texture to a poem. Like rests in music, or shadows and light in a painting, they tell us where to linger, making room for important moments to sink in. One can use them effectively in nonstandard ways, as Emily Dickinson demonstrated. However, think carefully before omitting them altogether. If you take away the visual variety and rhythmic cues that capitalization and punctuation provide, you'll have to heighten the poem's appeal to the other senses, with stronger sound patterns and more intense meaning. Otherwise, the colloquial immediacy of the first few lines may shade into drabness as the poem goes on and on with no tonal changes.
Aim for:
- Poems that display pleasure in the richness and variety of the English language
Think sonority. A poem should be delicious to speak. Some examples from past critiques include Karen Winterburn, Akpoteheri Godfrey Amromare, Judy Juanita, Laura Van Prooyen, and Laurie J. Ward. - Poems that teach the reader something new
As a contest judge, I love when I come across entries that draw me into another world, whether it's a historical period, an exotic place, or a look behind the scenes at a particular type of job or pastime. Well-chosen details make me feel that I've experienced someone else's life, first-hand. Examples from our critiques include Isa "Kitty" Mady, Ken Martin, Babs Halton, Martin Steele, and Heather McGehee.
TRACY KORETSKY
Tracy Koretsky is the author of three novels: Ropeless (Present Tense Press, 2005), a 15-time award-winning novel that challenges cultural perceptions of disability; The Body Of Helen, inspired by modern dancer Martha Graham; and The Novel Of The Century, a romantic comedy about the importance of love, books, and choosing both. She offers her memoir in poems, Even Before My Own Name (Raggedbottom, 2009), at www.TracyKoretsky.com as a free download. Also on the website: recent work, audio poems, interviews and reviews.
Please avoid:
- Saying it all
Like a case in a museum over-filled with small objects, a poem with too large a scope can be impossible to appreciate. Rather than offer a full family history or list all the conflicts in the world under a title such as "Give Us Peace", choose the most meaningful images and memorable lines and expand upon them. Got more to say? Write more poems! Some poems that fill their containers admirably and leave the reader wanting more are "No Salvage" by Barb McMakin and "Quilts" by Thelma T. Reyna. - Following the rules
Contemporary form poetry demonstrates a knowledge of the form but delights the reader in its digressions from it. Writing form is not about proving that you can count meter and select rhyme, it's about understanding the expressive possibilities of the particular form and exploiting them. Formal constraints give one something to work against, helping to tease out words and ideas that one might not otherwise arrive at; they are the framework, not the finished piece. For the reader, though, forms can fatigue if they fail to evolve in meaning, simply re-stating the same idea with different words. Try inventing a nonce form like Rich Hoeckh's "Sea Constellations of the Northern Sky Offer No Consolation". For demonstrations of how to revise formal poems, have a look at this essay on sestinas, this one on sonnets, and this one on ballads. - Repeating the repetition
The single most noticeable poetic device is repetition. Used well, it can offer musical structure or emphatic urgency. But because it is instantly and powerfully perceived, it can quickly overpower meaning. Rather than repeating a phrase in exactly the same way without nuance or change, strive for subtlety and variation. "Praise Poem" by Stephen Derwent Partington is a fine example. For a full discussion of what works and what doesn't, see our discussion of poems by Changming Yuan. - Centering your poem
Did I say repetition is the most noticeable poetic device? Well, I apologize. Nothing is more noticeable in a poem than centered text. In my own defense, however, I will add that centering is not a poetic device. Rather it is just an option made easily available by our word processors. Not only does it make one's poem more difficult to read and work with, it demonstrates a lack of awareness of good contemporary poetry. Nothing makes me personally reject a poem faster than centering. For a fuller justification (pun intended) of this prejudice, see our critique of "Growing Up Once More" by Gargi Saha. - Not going anywhere
A poem that makes the same point over and over, or for that matter, even twice, is a poem in need of revision. (The good news is, the draft has given you more than enough material to select from.) The essay is the best form for a linear argument. Poems, by contrast, take readers on journeys, leaving them off someplace other than where they began.
Aim for:
- Universality
Be generous with your poetry; make it a gift to readers. Poetry is form of communication, not a puzzle to solve, so seek metaphors and images that are fresh but easy to relate to. Try writing about something other than yourself, or take a poem about yourself and revise it so that it becomes about all of us. For an example of how to do that, see "Garden" by Kelechi Aguocha. - Titles that contribute
A good title can convey tone or efficiently provide context, but the best titles can add a whole layer of meaning. One example is "Michiko Dead" by Jack Gilbert, published in 1994 by The Virginia Review.
LAURA CHERRY
Laura Cherry is the author of the poetry collection Haunts (Cooper Dillon Press, 2010). Her chapbook, What We Planted, won the Philbrick Poetry Prize. She co-edited the anthology Poem, Revised (Marion Street Press, 2008) with Robert Hartwell Fiske. Her work has appeared in various journals, including LA Review, Newport Review, Tuesday: An Art Project, Printers' Devil Review, and H_NGM_N.
Please avoid:
- Using the most obvious ending
If your ending seems too facile, cut it off and see what that does to the poem. Here are some past critique poems with strong endings that shed new light on what preceded them: Joem D. Phillips, L. Kerr, Hank Rodgers, Walter Bargen, and Lisa Suhair Majaj. - Using the first word/idea/rhyme that occurs to you
Push yourself to find an unexpected, surprising, challenging alternative. Try rewriting your poem from memory to see if you can get to some fresher images and phrases. For an example of striking images and details, see "Gotham City" by Charles Kasler. For some ideas on how to reclaim memories in poems, see "On Battery Hill" by Niki Nymark. - Writing as if you hail from the nineteenth century
Beware rhyming ballads, capitalization of first letters in a line, and archaic language. If you always write rhyming poetry, go on a no-rhyme diet. Rhyme is very difficult to pull off convincingly, especially for a beginning poet. A rhymed poem will almost automatically be taken less seriously than an unrhymed one. For a discussion of contemporary rhyming methods, see "Coal Country" by Christina Lovin. - Making shapes with your poem: concrete poetry
This is difficult to do in a way that will be given serious consideration by a reader or judge. - Weak line breaks
Always breaking after the same phrase, or after a period or other unit of grammar, is predictable. Breaking after prepositions, dribbling off, or random-seeming breaks just look sloppy. Unexpected line breaks, such as in the middle of a phrase, so as to change the meaning of the phrase, are welcome.
Aim to:
- Demonstrate precise, even obsessive attention
Write in unsparing detail about something you know a great deal about or have researched thoroughly or observed closely. Choose a topic with a specialized vocabulary that will sound lively and engaging to the reader. For such a specialized lexicon, see Allen Gray's "Tar Sticks to Everything". - Take risks, particularly emotional ones
Yes, this is hard to do, especially in the face of all these caveats. But the poems that readers will remember are the ones that have a powerful emotional center. Avoiding emotion altogether creates safe but bloodless poems.
Our observations are guidelines, not iron-hard rules. Kyle McDonald submitted a masterful old-fashioned poem to our 2007 War Poetry Contest. L.N. Allen's concrete poem, "The Matrushka Maker", matches its subject perfectly. If you want to break a rule, do it consciously, and for a good reason.
A special thank you to our contributors. It is not easy to have your work critiqued publicly. We all learned from the privilege of being able to consider your work.
Keep writing and consulting the Critique Corner archives. You will find the full series here.
This essay appeared in the December 2012 issue of Winning Writers Newsletter (subscribe free).
For Love of a Soldier
Heartfelt collection of interviews with military families who have become activists against the Iraq war. These brave parents, spouses and relatives of Iraq war veterans must contend with their loved ones' PTSD, injuries or death, while also facing accusations of being "unpatriotic" for speaking out against what they see as a senseless waste of life. Among those interviewed are the founders of Military Families Speak Out.
Being Frank with Anne
This poetry book for young adults fleshes out the emotions and events narrated in the classic Holocaust memoir The Diary of Anne Frank. Read sample poems on her website.
