Elizabeth Bishop (1911-1979)

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Elizabeth Bishop is one of my favorite poets. This poem is one I would like to memorize. Do I have the cheek to use it as a model?

We can notice that it is a villanelle (nineteen lines; five tercets followed by a quatrain; full rhymes, and a repeated, or almost repeated line that shimmies all the length of the poem). But notice, too, how it’s a list poem, and an instruction poem, addressed to a beloved you.  You might borrow one or all of these techniques for your NaPoWriMo poem. (Why does typing that make me want to add a smiley face?)

Working in this form with students, I suggest that they think of a family saying, something they heard repeated throughout their childhood. (Take care of your teeth, and they will take of you! A place for everything and everything in its place!)

One Art

The art of losing isn’t hard to master;
so many things seem filled with the intent
to be lost that their loss is no disaster.

Lose something every day. Accept the fluster
of lost door keys, the hour badly spent.
The art of losing isn’t hard to master.

Then practice losing farther, losing faster:
places, and names, and where it was you meant
to travel. None of these will bring disaster.

I lost my mother’s watch. And look! my last, or
next-to-last, of three loved houses went.
The art of losing isn’t hard to master.

I lost two cities, lovely ones. And, vaster,
some realms I owned, two rivers, a continent.
I miss them, but it wasn’t a disaster.

—Even losing you (the joking voice, a gesture
I love) I shan’t have lied. It’s evident
the art of losing’s not too hard to master
though it may look like (Write it!) like disaster.

Tomas Tranströmer (1931-2015)

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I awakened late to the work of the Swedish poet Tomas Transtromer. I wasn’t aware of his impressive body of work until 2011, when he won the Nobel Prize in Literature. I didn’t buy a book of his work until recently, when Ted Kooser told me to.

I have been reading him greedily ever since. His poems strike me with the force of Expressionist paintings. They are often about whatever the poem seems to have laid his eyes upon. The globe of a light bulb “glows / an instant and then dissolves, like a tablet  / in a glass of darkness” (“The Couple”). “…in the evening I lie like a ship / with the lights out” (“Crests”). There is often a synesthetic quality to his images: colors “flow”; three o’clock “tramps.” Images surprise: a tree remembers, a man “is a half-open door / leading to a room for everyone” (“The Half-Finished Heaven”).

So here is a poem that I think I am brave enough to use as a model.

SLOW MUSIC

The building is closed. The sun crowds in through the windowpanes
and warms up the surfaces of desks
that are strong enough to take the load of human fare.

We are outside today, on the long wide slope.
Many have dark clothes. You can stand in the sun with your eyes shut
and feel yourself blown slowly forward.

I come too seldom down to the water. But I am here now,
among large stones with peaceful backs.
Stones which slowly migrated backwards up out of the waves.

Jane Hirshfield, “Woman in Red Coat”

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Beginning tomorrow I expect to have a bit more time for this project. Today, I thought I’d share a kind of smallish poem that, nevertheless, has stuck in my head. I think it might be the truck, “piled deep in cut wood,” that makes me come back to this poem by Jane Hirshfield. I like the painterly gestures of it, and how the title image is slipped in, as if by accident, at the very end.

Obviously a fall poem, and nothing to do with Easter. Unless everything has to do with Easter. Maybe our challenge can be to write a poem that, without ever saying “spring” or “April,” without tulips or daffodils or cherry blossoms, is obviously about spring.

Woman in Red Coat

Some questions cannot be answered.
They become familiar weights in the hand,
round stones pulled from the pocket,
unyielding and cool.
Your fingers travel their surfaces,
lose themselves finally
in the braille of the durable world.
Look out of any window, it’s the same–
the yellow leaves, the wintering light.
A truck passes, piled deep in cut wood.
A woman in a red wool coat
sees you watching and quickly looks away.

“Digging” by Seamus Heaney

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(For text, click on this link: Digging by Seamus Heaney : The Poetry Foundation.) Seamus Heaney (1939-2013) was an international treasure, a native of Ireland, and a longtime professor at Harvard. His poem, “Digging,” contrasts his own work of writing, with his father’s manual labor. I thought it would be a nice follow-up to Grace Paley’s, “The Poet’s Occasional Alternative.”

My habit–these past four days–has been to 1) post the poem here; then 2) write it out in my notebook; and then, 3) try writing my own poem, using the original as a kind of model. One way to do this is strictly, so if the poet begins with an adjective, you begin with an adjective, then a noun, and so forth. But another way is simply to free associate from the poem’s theme or approach. After rereading “Digging,” a few times, I think I’ll write about my mother’s work and the extent to which it has differed from mine.

If you’re looking for more inspiration, remember Chris Jarmick’s blog, Poetry Is Everything, and notice that he recommends the video prompts by Washington State Poet Laureate, Elizabeth Austen.