In the vernacular gallery

A new ekphrastic poem published this week in The Christian Century.

A favorite from Wislawa Szymborska

The great Polish poet Wislawa Szymborska passed today. Here is one of my favorite of her ekphrastic poems.

Post Pome: A New Project

I am embarking on a new project.

Ekphrastic Rapture

Wanted to write a poem about the apocalypse (and as you all know I have a Sat. deadline). Came across this article about restoring a damaged old triptych. I guess when you paint the apocalypse you don't expect your work to have to last forever.

What Did You See? by Fanny Howe : Poetry Magazine [poem/magazine]

What Did You See? by Fanny Howe : Poetry Magazine [poem/magazine]

One for the season

Trying out a tumblr, just because my web presence isn't already dispersed enough. Here's Mandy Thursday on the Run, from my old book.

My 64 Poetic Go-To Words

This is a scan of the title page for my MFA thesis, a new collection of poems that is due in the next few weeks. After two years of generating new poems and a semester-long wrestling match with the overall shape of the manuscript (another post), it’s finally near completion. In a somewhat manic rush over the past week or two, the manuscript came together, including a few new poems that filled in gaps and some recasting of individual pieces, as well as much tuning and twisting and, I hope, sharpening up of line, sound, image, etc.

I’m at the point now of copy editing and proof reading and formatting the mss according to the school’s guidelines: margins/pg. # lower right/Where do acknowledgments go? But as I’m making notes on typos and double-words, etc, I’m also facing my habits, my fallbacks, my linguistic crutches and tricks. So I began making a list of poetic “go-to” words, terms that appear again and again, poem after poem. It’s a daunting list, and now what to do with it? The number of considerations, often simultaneous, is hard to catalogue, and something I usually do unconsciously. But consciousness can be really useful too. It may even be what poem making is all about--a set of conscious choices in language that tell a truth you did not know or suspect until you set them in motion.

So, first, I need to see if each instance of a term is necessary within each particular poem—does it denote and/or connote what I want it to say? is it the best image? do I need or like the sound it makes on its own or with the words around it? what about the syllables and the emphasis of the term? does it fall at the best place in the line? is it an allusion to something else that matters, or to something to0 heavy for the poem to bear? is the word true, honest in its capacity to make a tactile version of the poem’s intellectual, emotional, linguistic set of experiences? is it a lie or an evasion? if it is an abstraction--“love” or “beauty”—can it be concrete? does it need to be there at all?

Then I consider the whole book, how this poem and the ones next to it work together. Does the repetition of “palm” or “light” or “small” show the development of a theme or vision or idea? Or is it just linguistic laziness? I would never use “small” nine times in a single poem, so why am I doing this in a single section of the book? If I replace it with “tiny” or “slight” or “thumb-sized” what levels of new pleasure or what barriers does that create for the poem’s readers?

At what point does micro-editing individual poems take away their own energy and stand-aloneness in favor of a larger whole? And what if, as I suspect, this list shows me what my real preoccupations might be. From the look of things, I am obsessed with body parts—especially hands, seeing, various beverages, wounds, dark and light, theological abstractions, art, music, eating and naming. Perhaps those very obsessions ARE what the work is about. Finding synonyms or replacements is perhaps too easy or unnecessary?

Here’s the real secret—this work of considering and reconsidering each poem in the light of the whole, of discovering the texture of my preoccupations and obsessions , or getting sick of my own words and hoping to find new ones that teach me something, of taking the poems seriously even if no one else ever does—this is the work I love to do, as both writer and reader. Fire up the coffee (that appeared a lot in the last collection) or pour me a whiskey (shows up a few too many times here) and let me discover what it is I had (and have) to say.

My 64 poetic “go-to” words

palm

light

digital

cup (v.)

shoulder

body/bodies

mouth

name(s)

scar/wound

still

just

come/coming

eye

“my own”

pale(d)

small

music/song

tender(ed)

several

flesh

skin

word

blue

wings & birds of all kinds

how

tongue

pinot

remember

hands

skype

herb(s)

love

name

time

Ambien

lemon

air

echo

empty

beer

hips

dark

belly

together

full

bless/blessed/blessing

balm

attend

porch

voice

throat

Bach

Rothko

God/god/gods/Jesus

bones

break

sweet

garden

loss

core

breath/breathe

forgive

confess(ion)

crush

scent