Incendiary Lit

There it is right below us, so why not try to use the basic structure as a jumping point for a poem of your own? Use an interesting fact about an animal, such facts can be found here and here and here amongst a million other, likely better resources. Animal Planet, and National Geographic Channel often have really interesting animal stuff, take an hour out of your day and do some “research” for a poem. Learn a little.  Find a fact that can be used as a metaphor for a relationship. Begin the poem with a scientific sounding statement of that fact, be as specific as is feasible. Consider that metaphor in the terms of three other animals/earthy examples, then finally relate it to the relationship. Explain it as simply and quickly as you can, no more than two lines. Then move immediately (no dawdling, because dawdling is not trusting your reader is overwriting is weakening your poem) onto a recent event from the character’s relationship. Be it first or third person. (Second… well, if you want, but be wary of the second person.)  This event should expand the metaphor with a brief narrative. Move on to three things that once were, be it in the relationship, or before the relationship, depending on the lean you take (I love love! or One is the loneliest number, or any shades of tangerine in between) . Then take that metaphor to its end, as in, if the metaphor is about the negatives of dependency, then seperate (break up, walk away etc)  If it’s about animals migrating to a beautiful, far away breeding place, clear the hill and see the valley (This can be about happiness, a monumental event like marriage, erotica, plenty of room to make like a penguin, spread your wings and walk around.)

If this is seen separate from the poem, here it is: Lucia Perillo’s Martha 

Came across this wonderful poem by Lucia Perillo in Indiana Review’s Summer 2007 issue.

Martha
Nearly all the remaining quarter million Passenger Pigeons were killed in one day in 1896

They named the last one Martha
and she died September 1st, 1914 in the Cincinnati Zoo,
she who was once one of so many billions
the sky went dark for days
when they flew past.
Makes me wonder what else could go,

some multitudinous widget like clouds or leaves
or the jellyfish ghosting the water in autumn
or the shore-shards of crushed clams?
Goodbye kisses:
once I had so many of you but now I notice
your numbers growing slim—

Yesterday a man stood me up in the sea
behind the big rock where the sand dollars live.
And when I said: Now we should kiss
it seemed we’d grown too peculiar
and I thought: oh-ho, kisses are you leaving too
like the man’s hair? Or like

the taut bellies we once had
or the menstrual period that was mine alone—
time flew its coop
our days had skid
and now see my commas going too
the way they say art mimics life?

So I did no hem-haw with the man
I told him to grab hold of my ears
since daylight’s burning
time’s a wasting
let’s fire it to feathereens—
perhaps the last of our wild flock.

What Narcissism Means to Me to me, means a great deal. One of my favorite books of poetry. Its bold statements and hesitant conditioning. Witty conversations (Hoagland uses many proper names and dialog) and interesting observations. You get a chuckle out of almost every poem, and every poem is worth reading more than once. This is one of the few poems in the collection that was previously unpublished. Enjoy.

Wasteful Gesture Only Not by Tony Hoagland.

Ruth visits her mother’s grave in the California hills.
She knows her mother isn’t there but the rectangle of grass
marks off the place where the memories are kept,

like a library book named Dorothy.
Some of the chapters might be: Dorothy:
Better Bird-Watcher Than Cook;

Dorothy, Wife and Atheist;
Passionate Recycler Dorothy, Here Lies But Not.
In the summer hills, where the tall tough grass

reminds you of persistence
and the endless wind
reminds you of indifference,

Ruth brings batches of white roses,
extravagant gesture not entirely wasteful
because as soon as she is gone she knows
the deer come out of the woods to eat them.

What was made for the eye
goes into the mouth,
thinks Ruth to herself as she drives away,
and in bed when she tries to remember her mother,

she drifts instead to the roses,
and when she thinks about the roses she
sees instead the deer chewing them—

pale petals of the roses in the dark
warm bellies of the sleeping deer—
that’s what going to sleep is like.

I was writing a paper on Yusef Komunyakaa recently, and thought I came up with a pretty good reading of his awesome poem “You and I are disappearing” and it’s a really good poem, deceptively simple, so I figured I’d share, in case anyone cares, or needs to write an essay on this and searches for the poem. If so: Jackpot! Also, here is Yusef Komunyakaa reading the poem. So if you’re interested in a possible narrative progression through the poem, then this is the place for you.

“You and I Are Disappearing” is an anaphoric poem riddled with similes. It is free verse in its purest essence., holding no syllabic, metric, or rhyming patterns. The poem is about a young Vietnamese woman wronged. In this case she is burned alive in a fire set by the American soldiers, and the narrator carries the memory of her screaming like shackles. The sequence of similes used by Komunyakaa is very specific, and through these sidelong glances into the narrator’s guilt we see his true feelings about the war.

The poem’s first simile is “she burns like a piece of paper.” (L4) This indicates the quick burn of something small, inconsequential. But yet, he still hears it, the cry “still burning / inside my head.” (L2) The narrator is trying to think of the screaming as something small. It continues to “She burns like foxfire” (L5) which is the narrator trying to see the death as something natural, like foxfire. Then she burns “like a sack of dry ice” (L13) meaning that there was a false sense of smoke. Here the narrator’s trying to convince himself that it wasn’t as painful as it sounded, wasn’t as horrible. Immediately following that thought the narrator contradicts that defensive image with the next when “She burns like oil on water.” (L14) A distinct burning. This image is the narrator reminding himself that there is a stark difference between burning a section of field and burning a village. The human cost is intentionally called to mind, in a way, to remain human. That return to humanity returns the narrator to a familiar image from home, “a cattail torch / dipped in gasoline.” (L15) Yet, the narrator is still in Vietnam, and this fact draws out the next simile where she “glows like the fat tip / of a banker’s cigar.” (L16) The war is not one of the narrator’s choosing. He was stolen from his home to fight a war to keep the rich rich, and the poor, like himself, poor. That glowing tip, the real movement behind the war is “silent as quicksilver.” (L17) Komunyakaa then takes a brief respite from similes to lay on the beautiful and misleading image of a tiger under a rainbow at night. The tiger is a pretty, but deadly animal. The girl, whether only in the narrator’s mind or actuality, is a Viet Cong agent. A beautiful saboteur. But still, she is a real girl that died, and that thought “burns like a shot glass of vodka.” (L20) When vodka was not enough, the next step taken to forget the human cost: opiates from poppy fields. But still “she rises like dragonsmoke / to my nostrils.” (L21) He is still unable to forget her, to lose that cry. It has set in motion a major change in the narrator’s sense of humanity that is a very lengthy and painful process, a forced exodus, “a burning bush / driven by a godawful wind.” (L23)

Since Albert Goldbarth’s a self proclaimed Luddite, and refuses computers, he’ll never see this, so it’s OK right? A wonderful poem by the only living person to ever
win the National Book Critics Circle Award twice. This poem is in the first of those winning collections: Heaven and Earth: A Cosmology, there’s five used copies on amazon right now for under $2.50. Check it out.

An Explanation

They say this really happened, in the Church of Eternal Light:
a penitent dropped to the floor wearing nothing but sweat, she
spasmed like some snake on an electrified wire, she uttered
angel eldestspeech, and then she disappeared–they mean
totally, and at once. First the entire tarpaper room gave a shudder,
and then she disappeared–at once, and totally.
Nobody understands it. Well,
maybe I understand it. Once, in 8th grade, Denton Nashbell
had an epileptic seizure. Mrs. Modderhock squatted
above where he flapped like something half person
half a pennant, she was pressing a filthy spoon to his tongue.
I’ve remembered him 25 years now. And–that woman? she
was the universe’s tongue the universe
swallowed. That’s as good an explanation as any.
Once, in sleep, you started a dream soliloquy,
the grammar of which is snow on fire, the words are
neuron-scrawl, are words the elements sing to their molecules…
–I threw myself across you.
It wasn’t sex this time. I just wanted to keep you
beside me, in this world.

This is a fun, and intriguing piece of wordplay that first appeared in McSweeney’s, and then made it into Best American Poetry 2001. Why not try a little prose poem about word interplay yourself?

A Mown Lawn by Lydia Davis

She hated a mown lawn. Maybe that was because mow was the reverse of wom, the beginning of the name of what she was—a woman. A mown lawn had a sad sound to it, like a long moan. From her, a mown lawn made a long moan. Lawn had some of the letters of man, though the reverse of man would be Nam, a bad war. A raw war. Lawn also contained the letters of law. In fact, lawn was a contraction of lawman. Certainly a lawman could and did mow a lawn. Law and order could be seen as starting from lawn order, valued by so many Americans. More lawn could be made using a lawn mower. A lawn mower did make more lawn. More lawn was a contraction of more lawmen. Did more lawn in America make more lawmen in America? Did more lawn make more Nam? More mown lawn made more long moan, from her. Or a lawn mourn. So often, she said, Americans wanted more mown lawn. All of America might be one long mown lawn. A lawn not mown grows long, she said: better a long lawn. Better a long lawn and a mole. Let the lawman have the mown lawn, she said. Or the moron, the lawn moron.

A professor in a literature class I had last spring referred to Shakespeare primarily by calling him the biggest thief of them all. So why not steal from a thief? Take a sonnet, any sonnet. There’s a large list here at Shakespeare Online. Contemporize it. For instance, set Sonnet 19 in the San Diego Zoo, a zoologist falls in love with one of the zoo’s botanists. A tale as old as time. Or just use slang and popular references like this wonderful riff off of Shakespeare’s famous Sonnet 130 by Harryette Mullen, “Dim Lady”

Dim Lady

My honeybunch’s peepers are nothing like neon. Today’s special at Red Lobster is redder than her kisser. If Liquid Paper is white, her racks are institutional beige. If her mop were Slinkys, dishwater Slinkys would grow on her noggin. I have seen tablecloths in Shakey’s Pizza Parlors, red and white, but no such picnic colors do I see in her mug. And in some minty-fresh mouthwashes there is more sweetness than in the garlic breeze my main squeeze wheezes. I love to hear her rap, yet I’m aware that Muzak has a hipper beat. I don’t know any Marilyn Monroes. My ball and chain is plain from head to toe. And yet, by gosh, my scrumptious Twinkie has as much sex appeal for me as any lanky model or platinum movie idol who’s hyped beyond belief.

Also, for those interested in teaching High school English, or already doing it, here’s a lesson plan from Naropa University, home of the  Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics

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Well, why not. You see the poem, now try a little riff off of this of your own.

Write a poem that begins talking about a poem, movie, novel, whatever you like, it’s an ekphrastic poem anyway you poke it with a stick, so just deal with it. Somehow or another, that piece of art has suddenly vanished, or collective memory of it have at least. Intersperse bits of the piece (in your own words, almost like brief poetic translations) with what might’ve happened to them/it, and how the world is different, or the same, without that piece of art. Below’s the poem in case for some reason this post is separated from the poem post. Enjoy.

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I came across this fabulous poem in Red Wheelbarrow, a fine journal from De Anza College, and decided that more needed to read the poem. So here you go, enjoy.

His poem about the bakery in Paris with its white
tile, fluorescent light, and the alchemy of its ovens
disappeared from its archive. And the baker with flour

on his cheek and small petals of dough on his arms
and apron vanished too. The baguettes he baked
for his immigrant customers, loaves of a promised life,

were skimmed from the city’s surface, removed from
the strange streets that cut through the roots of buildings.
Had I imagined the poem as bread for their benefit,

the epiphany and leavening, confected it myself, offered
it as a gift, a wish for them who had lost their own rivers
and streets, their languages, their mothers and fathers?

Had I written the poem myself in his voice and slipped
it in among his work and had he blessed it not knowing
it was there because it bore his mark? Then, it reappeared

in memorable ink, just three lines, a triplet of hope
between the transport trains and the mind soloing
back, the poem itself nearly gone like all his ghosts­—

the river flowing again in its old direction, his first
alphabet like sugar on his lips, and the parents still
sleeping in the same bed they slept in the night he fled.

I was flipping through the 2005 Best American Poetry today and I stumbled upon a page marked with a lottery ticket from November 2006. Like a year after I’d bought the book, so apparently I’ve previously revisited the anthology. Although there’re poems that sacrifice substance entirely for wit, which are cute, (Best?) but there are quite a few really good poems. This one, Jessica Goodheart’s “Advice for a Stegosaurus” was funny, but also carried a cool message. Also it has something of a formula, which is like writing a poem in a formal structure, so let’s see the poem, and how to write your own “Advice” poem

Advice for a Stegosaurus

Never mind the asteroid,
the hot throat of the volcano,
a sun that daily drops into the void.

Comb the drying riverbed for drink.
Strut your bird-hipped body.
Practice a lizard grin. Don’t think.

Stretch out your tail. Walk as you must,
in a slow deliberate gait.
Don’t look back, Dinosaur. Dust is dust.

You’ll leave your bones, your fossil feet
and armored eye-lids.
Put your chin to the wind. Eat what you eat.

——–

Take either an animal (or perhaps person) and give it advice structured like the poem. As in:

“Never mind ____,
(another thing to not think about)
(another)

(Instruct to do something simple)
(and another thing.)
(One more short thing,) Don’t _____.

(another simple, everyday instruction)
(another instruction)
Don’t look (direction), _____. Dust is dust.

You’ll leave (insert a personal item or memento)
(another item)
Put your _____ to the wind. ______ what you ______

————–
Now, obviously you’ll be tweaking the form here and there, which is good, but use the form as a firestarter for the mammoth flames of your genius. Word. Oh, by the way, the poem originally appeared The Antioch Review, a fabulous magazine which is carrying on despite Antioch (OH) College closing. Then it was picked by the new New Yorker poetry editor for the 2005 Best American poetry (the red one). Enjoy.

Janet Holmes, poet, editor and teacher at Boise State, which is quickly climbing the ranks of MFA programs I’m interested in (you can rent a 3 bedroom house, with front and back yards in Boise for under $1000 a month. Wow.), has a blog called Humanophone, I just came across this little post from The end of August about teaching Frank O’Hara in Idaho in 2007, and some of the questions she fielded. Really entertaining, and relatively sad, how little some college students know. But it’s also entertaining. Check it out here.

I’ve been tossing this idea around in my head for awhile now… a melding of process and formula that can spark good poem after good poem, depending on the astuteness of the writer. There’s always blocks, but here’s a good way to get the ball rolling on a poem, after which you just describe the ball’s progress down the hill, then edit it together like a 20 second commercial for Froot Loops, with just the important stuff kept. Corn syrup and sugar. Very different. Anyway, here’s one way to write a poem without even trying:

Find an image, better yet, find two images. Any two images. For the purpose of this post let’s say a Hershey’s Kiss wrapper, and a small stain on the carpet shaped like Mickey Mouse.

Find a way that the two images are linked. With the Kiss wrapper and Mouse stain, they’re the aftermath of something. A wrapper and spilled glass of wine. Or it could be an imaginary connection, like the time you went to Disneyland and on the way you ate so many Hershey’s kisses that you threw up on the teacups, and they had to bring out the elementary school sawdust before they swept it up with a dustpan, shutting down the ride for 20 minutes. I can just see the little kids holding onto the fence bars like they were in prison, waiting, worried the ride might never be fixed, and their perfect day at Disneyland ruined. Not that that ever happened, but why write about what actually happens?

Now that you have that connection, find a third image that falls in line with the connection between the first two. For the case of the wrapper and the mickey ears reminding the narrator of a Disneyland trip, let’s add in one of those huge circle lollipops in rainbow colors.

Now that you have three solid images (and find a way to phrase your images interestingly… off the top of my head, maybe “the futuristic robe of a Hershey’s Kiss” or something) Think of the connotations of those images. With the candy wrapper, the stain and the lollipop, they’re pretty light images, I could go with that, or they could be deceivingly happy images. Sometimes you don’t want to go with the easy choice, find a way to make them seem a little darker, or perhaps ironic. But with three linked images, you can easily format some story around them, and then the fun game of exclusion comes in and you decide the most important elements for what you want the impact to be, sad, happy, excited, enthralled, though hopefully not bored or angry at poetry.

But once you have the narrative (or points, or whatever you have decided the poem will actually ’say’ or ‘really be about’ you can write the poem you’ve outlined and labeled. Sweet, huh?

I’m writing said poem, and will post it after the link, the first draft from the images I picked while writing this article. It’s 10:39, promise I’ll post by 11.
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From his wonderful book Crush, winner of the Yale Series of Younger Poets.

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The poem that launched a million emo-look-alikes. I’ve contributed at least one, I’m sure.
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