Happy Monday! I hope you had a good weekend. March is still being all March-y here in the Carolinas.
Last week I ended with this picture and asked if you’d ever colored one of these. They’re mystery pictures with color keys indicating which colors to use in which blocks. If one follows the directions correctly, your coloring reveals a picture. In this book the pictures are all holiday images–a pumpkin, angel, heart, etc. Because of how the directions are listed, the squares are colored in random order so the design isn’t revealed right away. I used them when I was homeschooling and introducing my kids to graphing. Now I’m just having fun with the Grands with them.
I thought about those as I worked on the Sister poems, the specific confines and perimeters of traditional poetic forms revealing a poem. Free verse is scribble-pictures, traditional forms are mystery pictures.
Most of us learned two traditional forms in high school poetry class–haiku and sonnet. At least those are the only ones I remember. (Sorry Mrs. Stepro and Mr. Spraw) I’ve learned and written others over the years, and what makes traditional forms interesting and challenging are the rules. These can include rhyme, rhythm, or repetition schemes, line or stanza lengths, syllabic feet, a specific emotion for particular stanzas within a poem–and some forms have a combination of these!
Several of my Sister poems cried out to be framed within traditional forms. I wrote A Ghazal for My Father because a ghazal created a way to honor my dad and our relationship in a tight space, simply a series of couplets. My poem, In the Beginning … is a haibun, a combination of traditional haiku and short prose, written for the opposite reason. I wanted the breadth of space to illustrate my family’s connecting to the land that became our family homestead. It’s a three-page poem. One of the prompts was to write a love poem, so I wrote an ode which includes not only a specific rhyme pattern, but each of three stanzas encompasses a specific relationship to the subject.
The epistle poem was easy only because it was a letter. It was the subject matter that was difficult. The letter is to my Grands’ birth mom who was murdered months after the youngest was born.
Other forms that forced their way into my Sister poems were a pantoum and a sestina, and because prompts dictated them, there’s an ars poetica and an ekphrastic poem. Out of my twenty contributions, eight of them are traditional forms. I didn’t plan it that way.
Writing in traditional forms forces the poet to ‘write inside the lines’ and stretches us to find new ways of saying things. How many words rhyme with ‘comes to talk’, can I use in the right way and have them make sense? What’s a three-syllable word to replace the one-syllable word that’s easier? What’s a phrase that can be chopped up by different punctuation so it can be the beginning of a sentence, middle of a sentence, or end of a sentence in the same poem? The feeling of exhilaration is pretty sweet when you find the answers.
Another way poets are told to ‘stay within the lines’ is when being outspoken and writing poems that reflect the times. Yesterday was our local poetry reading and open mic. Our Feature Poet was Michal Rubin, an Israeli-born poet who writes of her struggles over love of her homeland and shame and anger over what it’s doing in Gaza. When asked if she could read her poems in her homeland she hedged. She’d have to be very careful who she shared her poems with. When asked if she could read them in Palestine, she said she’d probably be arrested. I can’t wait to introduce her next month during National Poetry Month.
This censoring of poetry is real, even in the United States. Yesterday we also talked about the newly appointed South Carolina Poets Laureate–a non-poet who until recently didn’t even live in the state. No disrespect to the man but poets across the state are not happy. Despite what the news release states, we believe he was appointed because he’ll stay within the lines. The former Poets Laureate, who held the position for over ten years, was denied reading some of her poems because they were deemed controversial–some were about slavery, a significant part of our history–and had her collections and children’s books removed from state museums and bookstores for the same reason.
The position of Poets Laureate went unfulfilled for six years, despite a concentrated effort by poets and the Arts Commission to have one appointed. Despite several slates of worthy and vetted poets submitted for consideration. Despite the position being written into our state constitution. The delay was to silence ruffling feathers.
One of my poet mentors, Phillip Shabazz, preaches that poets have a responsibility to write poems that document history. That doesn’t mean we can’t write poems about our dads, nature, and things we find humorous, but we also need to be a voice.
National Poetry Month begins next week. I have my list of new poets and their work to introduce. There will be something for everyone … even if you think you don’t like poetry.
But first, next Monday is Book Review Monday! and I have two books to highlight. I hope you’ll join me at my window and we can talk books. May the world treat you kindly this week.
A Writer's Window 