I didn't realize before this class that 'form' and 'genre' are distinct in poetry: form relates to the structure of the poem, the way it is composed on the page, while genre relates to the content. I found when reading the examples given for this unit that I was not particularly fond of any of the genres we studied, yet gave this one a try nevertheless due to my background in and fondness for drama, and was happy with the result. Dramatic Monologue:
Why The Monster Lurks Under Your Bed It’s never the nightmares that I’m after, darling, it’s the dreams that spool like honey on your tongue, the ones that puff out of your ears like a steamboat’s spray, or the toy engines you used to watch spiral round and round. The dreams that leave you gasping, (in awe or disbelief, it’s never apparent,) well, those can be fine with the proper seasoning, Thyme can temper them if they’re a bit bitter, Too sweet, I’ll add a dusting of flour - I’ve always got some planted right under the bed. The quiet dreams, softer dreams, those I’ll gobble up like custard, as they cascade like a warm summer rain-shower, wrap you up in the tightest of hugs. Those dreams are my warm milk on a blustery midnight, but as fragile as fairy floss, so quick to dissolve. No, it’s never the nightmares that I’m after, child for terror burns like a ghost pepper, cold heat, no cinnamon-sugar. But for you, darling, though my stomach protests, I’ll devour them like jelly beans, every one.
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I will readily admit that this unit challenged me as a poet. I tend to fancy myself a free-verse writer, and generally am not comfortable with the confines of form. However, I found sestina to be an interesting enough technique and form that I chose to experiment with it. Though my professor ended up telling me that my result was 'too traditional' and 'not surprising enough' for a contemporary poem, I was still proud of the effort I put into it and the way writing this poem pushed me out of my comfort zone. A Sestina of Autumn
Autumn seemed to come early that year, carried aloft on the wings of the goddess, with a chill that made all the townsfolk curl by their hearth And in the breeze-swept lane, a single child chasing her ball through the piles of leaves, while inside the cottages, voices are singing. The off-kilter pitch of a child singing roamed about all corners of the lane that year as townsfolk stocked cupboards and gathered leaves to twine into wreaths to form crowns for the goddess, that would be later delivered by an overeager child, lain in the temple, encircling the hearth. As shadows lengthened, embers glowed in the hearth, the crackles and hisses a fiery singing, tended long through the night by a dutiful child as darkness slipped over the town that year. The townsfolk slept, kept safe by the goddess, their dreams brightly colored, like the hues of the leaves. As any last warmth of summer leaves the last heat is stored in the stones of the hearth. It’s trapped there, they say, through their love of the goddess. This they recite in their autumnal singing, praying for mercy at the turn of the year. These stories are bestowed to each wide-eyed young child. This is the season for being a child a last chance to romp in the perishing leaves. As children grow older, another year turning, their height marks adorning the walls by the hearth, their carefree laughter turns to soft, measured singing: another year blessed through their pleas to their goddess. The whispered tales of the wrath of the goddess cause tremors at night for even the smallest child. So all of the townsfolk carry out their singing, instruct their youth, entwine their leaves. They leave their offerings to smoulder before their hearth A ritual abandonment, year after year. The autumn wind chimes with the singing of the goddess, and as the year turns, so does youth of the child, and leaves cluster and die at the side of the hearth. The assignment for this unit was to write a prose paragraph, then break up the lines three different ways to examine the effect of line breaks and syntax on the meaning of the poem. This was another exercise I took great joy in. I also wrote a reflection for the class on the effects I noted: In judging the results, think about the following: which words have been emphasized in each version? How are you working with the sentence structure--when are you highlighting it or undercutting it? Is there a tone or mood that one version captures best? In the first version, I started with the entire block of text as a single paragraph, to mimic its prose form - I wanted to evoke the narrative quality of the original text, and create a kind of prose poem. I then decided to put breaks both where there were natural pauses in the lines, and where there were words I thought were significant or wanted to emphasize. In crafting this version, I found I thought a lot about what the poem would sound like aloud to decide where I wanted my breaks and pauses. Because of the nature of the format, the breaks between lines themselves became less significant than the gaps between words within the text - a different kind of line breakage. This format also lost the pause between paragraphs, which made the whole text sort of bleed together in one long stream of words. In the second version, I wanted to shift the text into true verse format, to see how it would change, but wasn’t playing around too much yet with different breakages. All the pauses in this version were essentially the same as in the original prose forms, with lines breaking at periods or significant commas, and stanzas breaking where paragraphs were originally. This to me was the least exciting of my newly invented versions, although perhaps the most true to the original form. Not much was highlighted or revealed here that wasn’t in the original prose. For my third version, I decided to combine some of the effects of the previous two. I put the entire poem into traditionally lined verse, but pulled in some of the breakage patterns of the first version, particularly in emphasizing single important words, alone on their own lines. This version ultimately reads the most like how I hear this poem in my head. I like the way it breaks the poem down, allowing readers to concentrate more on each individual moment in its short lines, rather than hurrying on to the next sentence, as in the long-lined versions. We are driving, wandering, flying. Speeding up the coast that is laced with the scents of seawater and cold. Rumbling through forests with the trees bending before us like they’re matchsticks, my sister’s shoulder pressed against my own and the engine roaring. We’re going north, and there’s no stopping now.
Through a crack in the window I can smell the fragrances of wind and earth that drench this place. It is a terrain that few have roamed, that few ever will. Stretched out before me, a never-ending map, is the vast emptiness of treeless tundra. This is a land beyond the familiar, a land where humans bow to the wild. As a flurry, a pack, my siblings and I clamber from the warmth of our van, anxious to get to the sea. The icy surf nips at our ankles and the sea breeze lashes at our cheeks and we breathe in the exhilaration, the freedom, the tang of salt heavy in the air. My hair whips around my head and my heart rises until it soars above the waves. Someone once told me the name “Alaska” means “that which the sea breaks against,” yet this place is the opposite of broken. It is feral and fierce and utterly whole, a land that has not yet been shattered. It is humankind and nature in harmony, each providing for the other. It is my siblings and I, with chapped lips and dirt-streaked clothes and our hands pressed together, gazing out into the vast unknown. We are driving, wandering, flying. Speeding up the coast that is laced with the scents of seawater and cold. Rumbling through forests with the trees bending before us like matchsticks, my sister’s shoulder pressed against my own and the engine roaring. We’re going north, and there’s no stopping now. Through a crack in the window I can smell the fragrances of wind and earth that drench this place. It is a terrain that few have roamed, that few ever will. Stretched out before me, a never-ending map, is the vast emptiness of treeless tundra. This is a land beyond the familiar, a land where humans bow to the wild. As a flurry, a pack, my siblings and I clamber from the warmth of our van, anxious to get to the sea. The icy surf nips at our ankles and the sea breeze lashes at our cheeks and we breathe in the exhilaration, the freedom, the tang of salt heavy in the air. My hair whips around my head and my heart rises until it soars above the waves. Someone once told me the name “Alaska” means “that which the sea breaks against,” yet this place is the opposite of broken. It is feral and fierce and utterly whole, a land that has not yet been shattered. It is humankind and nature in harmony, each providing for the other. It is my siblings and I, with chapped lips and dirt-streaked clothes and our hands pressed together, gazing out into the vast unknown. We are driving, wandering, flying. Speeding up the coast that is laced with the scents of seawater and cold. Rumbling through forests with the trees bending before us like they’re matchsticks, my sister’s shoulder pressed against my own and the engine roaring. We’re going north, and there’s no stopping now. Through a crack in the window I can smell the fragrances of wind and earth that drench this place. It is a terrain that few have roamed, that few ever will. Stretched out before me, a never-ending map, is the vast emptiness of treeless tundra. This is a land beyond the familiar, a land where humans bow to the wild. As a flurry, a pack, my siblings and I clamber from the warmth of our van, anxious to get to the sea. The icy surf nips at our ankles and the sea breeze lashes at our cheeks and we breathe in the exhilaration, the freedom, the tang of salt heavy in the air. My hair whips around my head and my heart rises until it soars above the waves. Someone once told me the name “Alaska” means “that which the sea breaks against,” yet this place is the opposite of broken. It is feral and fierce and utterly whole, a land that has not yet been shattered. It is humankind and nature in harmony, each providing for the other. It is my siblings and I, with chapped lips and dirt-streaked clothes and our hands pressed together, gazing out into the vast unknown. We are driving, wandering, flying. Speeding up the coast that is laced with the scents of seawater and cold. Rumbling through forests with the trees bending before us like they’re matchsticks, my sister’s shoulder pressed against my own and the engine roaring. We’re going north, and there’s no stopping now. Through a crack in the window I can smell the fragrances of wind and earth that drench this place. It is a terrain that few have roamed, that few ever will. Stretched out before me, a never-ending map, is the vast emptiness of treeless tundra. This is a land beyond the familiar, a land where humans bow to the wild. As a flurry, a pack, my siblings and I clamber from the warmth of our van, anxious to get to the sea. The icy surf nips at our ankles and the sea breeze lashes at our cheeks and we breathe in the exhilaration, the freedom, the tang of salt heavy in the air. My hair whips around my head and my heart rises until it soars above the waves. Someone once told me the name “Alaska” means “that which the sea breaks against,” yet this place is the opposite of broken. It is feral and fierce and utterly whole, a land that has not yet been shattered. It is humankind and nature in harmony, each providing for the other. It is my siblings and I, with chapped lips and dirt-streaked clothes and our hands pressed together, gazing out into the vast unknown. This poem ended up being one of my very favorites I wrote for this class. Our assignment was to write a poem that focused around the sounds of words: both alliterative and rhyming. I ended up taking this a step further and writing an abecedarian, an alphabet poem, which I didn't even realize was a real technique until we studied form poems several weeks later. In writing this, I thoroughly enjoyed giving myself over to sound, not worrying about the meaning I produced. It ended up feeling more like play. Go on, try reading it aloud! alpha beta
all the absolutely asinine keep time, beat with the boldly bubbling bowl, not cold, but crisper than the cape that snaps - the daredevil, draped in dark - a spark: exuberant, excellent, execution of flight, falling, stalling, fleeting, gone. go, with the gasps and gallops, rasps in the hallowed hollows where home hurts. i hunt inside. icicles invade: interlopers, intruders on juvenile justice, juices jogging recollections. kaleidoscopes of kings, killing lightly, lovingly, the lilts and lines of yesterday’s memory. mort, mortal, mortality - morality’s the number, numb into nothingness. night, the opalescence, over the outside oracle, perfection. piercing the pointed ears and pointing past quince, cast in a quilted quest for the rest of the ruins. ramble, rampion, remember - safety: soft, secure, though sorrow does not cure, but sings. to travel, taste the trickles of time between teeth and lips, under which universes unravel. utopia: vulnerable, voices for the voiceless or vessels for vices? wonder is water - whipping, slipping, weaned and whistling, what xenophobes examine under xeroxes and x-rays - yours. and mine. younger and younger, years zip by. their zests zenith, and fall. I was very excited initially for this unit, having studied Where I'm From poetry in the past. But I ended up having a lot more trouble than I expected writing this poem. Maybe my expectations for myself were just too high, or maybe I was just too ambitious. This poem was the result. I'm still not incredibly happy with it, but maybe this would be an opportunity for me to go back and revise my work, reflect on what it is I was trying to accomplish, and grow and improve as a poet. A Pacific Northwest Fairytale
Once upon a time, I was a princess in the woods. My glass slippers were hiking boots, my crown formed from coils of tangled braids. Instead of piles of mattresses, I curled up at night atop a sheet of foam lain alongside the steering wheel, winter coats shrouding the windshield to keep out the chill. The hoofbeats of my coach were the growls of an engine. Every tree was my knight, every mountain my kingdom, as I ventured forth on a quest for adventure. Everything seemed simple then, back before the world rushed in. Once upon a time, I locked myself in a tower of expectations. The court only saw my fairytale surface, the most perfect of princesses, pristine and proud. They never saw the damsel who trembled at night, never felt the scalding dragonfire of doubt burn in their bellies, or heard the snickers of goblin’s taunts, drifting in the dark. Even the greatest heroine can’t stay young in the forest, forever dance in the balls of dappled-sunlit groves, be coronated to the heartbeat of waves, steady against the shore. My poetry composition class spent its first few weeks exploring different elements of poetry, such as sound and constellations of images. It wasn't until the fourth week that we finally composed a piece. I was at first uncertain about this assignment due to its lack of requirements - compose a poem of any style and type that includes 'leaps' between unlikely images. This poem came to me through an in-class prompt we were given, and an observation I made in our lull between two massive February snowstorms. I was very happy with the result. a winter hearth
zoë mertz the phoenix shivers. her swooping falters as she trembles in ice&snow&cold. on and on she circles, searching, only her own fire to keep warm. there’s no spot for a nest in a treeless tundra. we salt the ground to keep the snow from blossoming there, and so alike they look, the snow and the salt, with footprints pressed in both, calling, calling us home. |
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