You'd think I would be far from being in a poetic state of mind. The last 24 hours of my private life have been turbulent, to put it mildly. My husband spent yesterday driving to Woodstock to investigate a long-term care facility for a family member; on the way, he stopped at our new house to see how things were coming along, and found out that the contractor had run out of bathroom tile. As a result, my husband had to get up very early to go fetch some more tiles today and deliver them to our new home.
I was up early, too, because I'd spent the night compulsively running in and out of my eighteen year old son's room to make sure he was still breathing. My husband kept shaking his head at me deprecatingly and saying, "You know you're crazy, right? He's perfectly fine." And I kept acknowledging that yes, I probably was crazy, but on the other hand Caleb had just had all four of his impacted wisdom teeth taken out and was lying there looking pretty ghastly, so better safe than sorry, and anyway, you had to be a Mom to understand.
Perhaps it was this Nervous Mom thing that prompted me not to watch where I was going yesterday. I'd been hurrying back from the pharmacy with Caleb's prescriptions, tried to leap up the front stoop of my building, and came down hard, with a resounding crash, on both of my middle-aged knees. My husband returned from his Woodstock trip at six o'clock to find each of us - Caleb and me - lying on our separate beds, with ice bags stuffed around the bruised and swollen parts. Of this sorry pair of Instant Invalids, my son was by far the more stoical - I was the one who was crying.
Luckily, I am better today, and am once again able to walk without the dragging gait of Charles Laughton chanting "Esmeralda!" as he limps up the bell tower of Notre Dame. Which is good, because I am conducting this poetry writing workshop for two, and I do not want to scare the other poets.
The "Poetry for Two" package at the Library/Casablanca/Hotel Elysée /Hotel Giraffe allows guests to spend an hour and a half familiarizing themselves with various poetic forms in a short tutorial session with me, after which they write a poem - or two, if they wish - in a guided writing workshop. It can be a romantic occasion for writing love poems to one another - indeed, one gentleman, as you may recall from one of my earlier posts, capped the poetry writing session with a proposal to the lady of his heart, and was graciously accepted by her.
Today, I am a little nervous. I have learned from the hotel staff that the gentleman I'm about to meet is an English teacher. Moreover, he bears the name of one of the most illustrious poets of nineteenth century British literature - an instantly quotable writer whose words have thrilled me since I first encountered him in college. What if he knows a whole lot more about writing poetry than I do?
It turns out I needn't have worried. Like most of the poetry-loving people I have ever met, this couple is delightful. People who like to write poetry almost always are. (Unless there's a literary agent in the room - then it turns into Black Friday at Walmart's.) Another thing about people who enjoy reading and writing poetry - they like to bat around ideas and get playful with words. And - poetry people are curious to expand on what they already know and explore new concepts. This couple is no exception.
They are quite taken with the idea of writing a love poem - only, their love poem is going to have a twist. They are going to write a love poem to their young daughters, ages 6 and 11, who are now at home being babysat by Grandma while their parents have a weekend in New York. What a great idea!
We rifle through a few pages of notes I've brought along - some prompts about poetic forms and devices, designed to get our creative juices flowing. It's a funny thing - I have seen it time and time again, and observed it in myself, as well. You can be sitting there, trying to write a poem, and drawing a blank. Then you flip through a few pages of unfamiliar forms - things you've never tried - and something strikes a spark. Perhaps an acrostic? Or a, Italian sonnet? We briefly consider trying our hand at a ghazal -a kind of verse rooted in ancient Arabian poetry, in which there is a series of couplets, with a refrain phrase at the end of each couplet, preceded by a word that rhymes with the word that comes before the refrain in the couplet above it. Interesting...but not quite the thing. Perhaps something to keep in mind to try with the eighth graders he teaches back at home? We keep looking. Suddenly, it jumps off the page, and it is she who puts a decisive finger down on the paper, saying, "Oh, I really like that one! Why don't we try it? I'll bet the girls will love it!"
Shaped Poetry (Carmina Figurata):
This is simply a fun way of conveying the intention of the poem by making its shape on the page visually resemble what the poem is about. The example I have selected is:
Swan and Shadow (John Hollander)
Dusk
Above the
water hang the
loud
flies
Here
O so
gray
then
What A pale signal will appear
When Soon before its shadow fades
Where Here in this pool of opened eye
In us No Upon us As at the very edges
of where we take shape in the dark air
this object bares its image awakening
ripples of recognition that will
brush darkness up into light
even after this bird this hour both drift by atop the perfect sad instant now
already passing out of sight
toward yet-untroubled reflection
this image bears its object darkening
into memorial shades Scattered bits of
light No of water Or something across
water Breaking up No Being regathered
soon Yet by then a swan will have
gone Yes out of mind into what
vast
pale
hush
of a
place
past
sudden dark as
if a swan
sang
We catch fire immediately. First - what shall the poem look like? Something that will be meaningful to the children...something not too hard to shape on the page...something instantly recognizable. Aha! The camper the family just bought, in which they have already taken their maiden voyage! And, just for fun - let's take the letters of the names of each of the two daughters, and form those into circles - their names will be the wheels. After all - it's the girls who make these trips go! Mom and Dad? They are the hitch-knob that connects the camper to the car.
With the roar of an imaginary engine, we are off. We scribble on a writing tablet...cross things out...add things in...change a two-syllable word into a one-syllable word, because it sounds better that way... substitute "windy" for "breezy," because "breezy" isn't cold enough, and we want to convey how nice it feels to be warm and snuggly inside the camper with your family, even when that early-Spring trip feels more like a mid-Winter dash across the Yukon.
When we are done, we type it all up on the laptop, spacing the words on the page to look like a camper. By the time we are finished, we have had a great deal of fun, have a completely unusual gift for the girls that bears no resemblance whatsoever to a souvenir T-shirt, and have given John Hollander a run for his money.
I get home, still smiling as I put my key in the door, to find that my son is sitting up, able eat applesauce and pudding, and my husband is already home from his tile-delivery errand, telling me that the new bathrooms are looking splendid.
Ah, the healing powers of poetry!
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