Tag: Review

Learning to read poetry

2 Comments

1.
Los Angeles stays warm through winter. You know this. You know
this desert where we come to, this final outhouse

that binds with wood and those who eat. Here unless there are lights
there is no light. I cannot drive as you did, but I can wipe

your mouth, cover your punctured arm with your sleeve. I will not watch you
die on the carpet. It would be as if I had never been here.
2.
We are guests at an hour told to go home; sun and bells ring
in humble interval. We are what breaks in season, a homely

outgrowth, boring. I cause you no heartache with my indifference,
even your limbs bend toward mine. My nose hurts in desert air,

in bars where I am unwelcome even as I pretend to be famous
for seduction. Sleep is what does not come when as much as I want it.
3.
You pick up every glowing penny, let them burn your hands
unrecognizable until you find yourself holding out your luck

all the way up route ten. You consider then how your father
once told you that you had a skinny neck, how you held onto that,

logged it as a sign of heart. It could happen; this man could
pull you to the back seat. And what if he took your straw hair

into his crusted hands and yanked so hard as to break your neck.
Possible. Almost becoming. So when you arrive at another

unbroken wild, dust left dust under feet, you will say to yourself:
What haven’t I known? Who haven’t I loved all my life?

Lynn Melnick’s “Mojave”

 

Above is the poem Mojave by Lynn Melnick, whose book If I Should Say I Have Hope was one of my favorites in high school. One of the first useful exercises I was taught to help me read, evaluate, and understand poetry was metacognition. In layman’s terms, this just means consciously acknowledging, and maybe writing down, every thought you have while reading a poem. Join me on my reading of Mojave and then I’ll leave you with an assignment.

 

(1) We’re in California and it’s warm. Is it winter now? We are familiar with the city, “desert.” This “outhouse.” Glad we like it so much here. “I cannot drive,” what does that mean? Is this a matter of not having a license or what? Is the speaker underage? So what’s happened to this person (the reader?) with the speaker? Punctured arm? Dying on the carpet? Big yikes.

 

(2) Now we’re guests, the reader/subject and the speaker both, and we’re being told to go home – it’s too late. “Sun and bells ring,” but how does the sun ring? I like the image. We are broken (or are we breaking through?) and homely and boring and growing outward from god knows what, but the subject doesn’t care about these harsh words I guess. I’m not sure how we got here, but now there’s a bar, or bars plural, and the speaker is lying about who they are and trying to get with someone, but they’re unwelcome. Probably not underage. Unless that’s why they’re not welcome. Doubtful. It is unclear if they are unwelcome at the bar or with the people inside. Sleep does not come when they want it.

 

(3) Glowing pennies, warm from the heat of the sun, I suppose. I like the lucky penny metaphor we’ve got going here. But now we’re thinking about the father of the subject/reader and his kid’s skinny neck. What is a “sign of heart”? A sign that there is a heart at all? A sign of love? Maybe not, if dear old dad would snap your neck. It probably wouldn’t be that hard, if the neck in question was so skinny. But this is all just to make a point. What is an “unbroken wild,” and what is the function of the line “dust left dust under feet”? I don’t get it. But there are questions here too. “What haven’t I known? Who haven’t I loved all my life?” What do they mean?

 

Now, reader, I’d love for you to write down your own thoughts on Mojave, but I also think a great stepping stone for new poetry readers would be to choose any one of the poems I’ve shared here already, or one that’s entirely new, and write your own metacognition on it.

Starting with Szybist

Leave a comment

There is something magnificent about reading poetry, as it is often meant to be read, in a collection. So often we are exposed only to “stand alone” poetry, cherry-picked by English teachers or sensationalized by media, and few are ever encouraged to pick up a full volume of the stuff to get the context of the piece.Getting to see these concepts explored across many pieces which come together to make a larger whole is a special and underrated part of appreciating poetry. I enjoy following motifs between different poems and watching similar vocabulary and enjambment choices that track movement throughout the collection. The first book of poetry I ever read was a piece called Incarnadine by Mary Szybist, and I read it in AP Literature my junior year of high school thanks to a teacher, Mr. Kleeman, with an enthusiasm for poetry. To this day, it’s one of my favorite books.

Poetry is generally published in a short book, all of the poems inside designed to be consumed together. A good book of poetry lets its contents play off of each other, continues ideas from one poem to another, and follows some kind of overarching theme which binds all the pieces together. In Incarnadine, Szybist uses biblical imagery and allusion to communicate ideas about her own life, feminism, and the world at large. She lingers in multiple pieces on the coincidental overlap of her own name with the Virgin Mary’s, letting that ambiguity resonate throughout her semi-biblical narrative. Though the source material suggests a conservative leaning, Szybist never seems to be constrained by her inspiration. In this book, she experiments with prose poetry (what’s on the box — poetry that looks like prose), concrete poetry (those are the ones that look like shapes), redaction poetry (take some source material and cross out words until it sounds pretty/means something), and many other creative and unique ways of expressing her theme. She uses biblical material to discuss modern ideas and confront modern issues, exemplifying the ways you can use vastly different ideas to communicate things about each other and find the similarities where you might think there are none.

 

Incarnadine blog image 4

A concrete poem: Mary Szybist’s “How (Not) to Talk of God”

 

The procession of new styles and techniques used in modern poetry and shown by Szybist and many other modern poets are a small window into the ongoing changes in poetic trends over time, particularly as exists within books and anthologies of poetry. I intend to continue this discussion over the course of this blog.

 

Mary Szybist is a National Book Award winning poet who teaches at Lewis & Clark College and has written two books (Incarnadine and Granted). I highly recommend reading more of her work!

It is so and so and not the dusty world
who drops.

It is their mother and not the dusty world
who drops them.

Why I imagine her so often
empty-handed

as houseboats’ distant lights
rise and fall on the far ripples—
I do not know.

I know that darkness.
Have stood on that bridge
in the space between the streetlights
dizzy with looking down.

Maybe some darks are deep enough to swallow
what we want them to.

But you can’t have two worlds in your hands
and choose emptiness.

I think that she will never sleep as I sleep,
I who have no so and so to throw

or mourn or to let go.

But in that once— with no more
mine, mine, this little so, and that one—

she is what

out-nights me.

So close. So-called

crazy little mother who does not jump.

A favorite: Mary Szybist’s “So-and-So Descending From the Bridge”