The Poetry Blurb Poem

Look back over the poems you have written this month.  Pretend that they, even in their rough-draft imperfection, comprise a chapbook.  The prompt is to write cover blurbs or a short review of your supposed chapbook in the form of a poem. Separate blurbs might become stanzas, or a longer review might fill a number of stanzas.

The blurbs or review, if credited, can be credited to “anonymous” or to your own aliases or perhaps to obviously imagined or long deceased poets or critics. I suggest not making up blurbs and crediting them to living individuals due to obvious potential for confusions and legal repercussions.  Your poem commenting on your other April poems can be earnest and sincere or over-the-top and tongue-in-cheek.  The poem can be a joke, an apology, or a careful analysis of your April poems’ strengths and weaknesses.  The trick here is that whatever you write has to become somehow a poem in its own right.

Peruse the backs of your poetry books.  Imitate tone, borrow language and transform it into your own.

Poetry critic David Orr, in Beautiful and Pointless: A Guide to Modern Poetry, refers to an anonymous review that Whitman wrote in which he describes himself as: “[o]ne of the roughs, large, proud, affectionate, eating, drinking, and breeding, his costume manly and free, his face sunburnt and bearded…”

Ron Rosenbaum  wrote:

“Let me explain the roundabout way it came to me, the discovery that the praise of contemporary poetry, either in blurbs or reviews, is itself a neglected form of poetry, meta-poetry. Even if it comes from the most corrupt and sordid favor-trading, grant-grubbing, academic back-scratching sources, it’s clear that those who are good at it are so verygood at it that their work rises above its origins and deserves special recognition. It is not some degraded adjunct of contemporary poetry but perhaps its very apotheosis. It would be a tragedy to lose the poetry, of course, but to lose the even more brilliant blurbs! Sometimes I wonder whether in fact the poetry being praised even exists or has been dreamed up to provide the rationale for the praise.”

Here are some two-liners Rosenbaum collected

From <http://www.slate.com/articles/life/the_spectator/2008/09/new_literary_art_form_discovered.single.html>   (9/5/2008) culled from: <http://thepagename.blogspot.com/>

“James K. Baxter can be crabby, difficult, bombastic, tortuous and tricky. He is, in nearly equal measure, astonishing and heartbreaking.”—Rebecca Porte, Contemporary Poetry Review

“Juan Felipe Herrera’s worst poems seem disorganized, excessive, frantic; his best seem disheveled, excited, uncommonly free.”—Stephen Burt, the New York Times

“Matthea Harvey has Stevie Smith’s knack for writing throwaway lines that in the end seem less like Post-it notes than ransom letters.”—David Orr, the New York Times

“If there is one lesson to be drawn from Shelley’s life and work, it is that you can’t trust a man who believes he is an angel.”—Adam Kirsch, The New Yorker

“To test oneself, Oppen recognized, is to know failure. Oppen’s victories are no less great for being small.”—James Longenbach, The Nation

“Only rarely do lay readers experience poems as a cross between an orgasm and a heart attack.” —David Orr, the New York Times

Things I Learned Last Week

Ants, when they meet each other,

usually pass on the right.

Sometimes you can open a sticky

door with your elbow.

A man in Boston has dedicated himself

to telling about injustice.

For three thousand dollars he will

come to your town and tell you about it.

Schopenhauer was a pessimist but

he played the flute.

Yeats, Pound, and Eliot saw art as

growing from other art.  They studied that.

When I die, I’d like it to be

in the evening.  That way, I’ll have

all the dark to go with me, and no one

will see how I begin to hobble along.

In the Pentagon one person’s job is to

take pins out of towns, hills, and fields,

and then save the pins for later.

William Stafford

What I Have Learned So Far

Meditation is old and honorable, so why should I

not sit, every morning of my life, on the hillside,

looking into the shining world?  Because, properly

attended to, delight, as well as havoc, is suggestion.

Can one be passionate about the just, the

ideal, the sublime, and the holy, and yet commit

to no labor in its cause?  I don’t think so.

All summations have a beginning, all effect has a

story, all kindness begins with the sown seed.

Thought buds toward radiance.  The gospel of

light is the crossroads of — indolence, or action.

Be ignited, or be gone.

~ Mary Oliver ~

You can “look back down the cool street of the past”  or

look for “the moth of some feeling” that “still flutters unspoken.”

Find new images for speaking about your past.  Your poem might be written as an extended metaphor about your past in general as Ted Kooser does in the poem below with his streetlamps lighting smaller and smaller circles of time.

Just Now

Just now, if I look back down

the cool street of the past, I can see

streetlamps, one for each year,

lighting small circles of time

into which someone will step

if I squint, if I try hard enough —

circles smaller and smaller,

leading back to the one faint point

at the start, like a star.

So many of them are empty now,

those circles of roadside and grass.

In one, the moth of some feeling

still flutters, unspoken,

the cold darkness around it enormous.

Ted Kooser

One World at a Time

Write a poem that includes synesthesia—at least three incidences of cross-sensory metaphor.

Some people actually see flavors; others taste, hear, or smell colors. True synesthesia is a congenital, involuntary neurological condition in which the perception of one sense is experienced in terms of a different sense. To actual synesthetes, tones or smells can have color or shape. Some famous writers have been synesthetes, but synesthesia has been used as a poetic device by non-synesthetes since the beginnings of poetic expression.

Note the wonderful “color of the desperation of wolves” line in the following poem:

Year One

I was still standing

on a northern corner.

Moonlit clouds the color of the desperation of wolves.

Proof

of your existence?  There is nothing

but.

Franz Wright

“If you think it’s hard to see the shape of water”

If you think it’s hard to see the shape of water,

you should try to feel the shapes of smells.

(And shapes they have, to yield or strike.)

Lean over a pot of simmering vinegar

that’s changing cucumbers

into pickles.

One inhale and you’ll know that shape for life:

sharp, spiked, and aggressive.

Contrariwise,

the smell of lilacs is silken, quilted, and  slides

like a satin, down-filled comforter.

The smell of roses full blown is soft, dusty.

Soap has an uncertainty about its edges;

it’s like moving your hand slowly along a planed,

but as yet unsanded wooden plank.

Screen doors, during a rainstorm,

have a tart scent, tautly textured, fresh,

lovely, regrettably evanescent.

An orange peel, sharply folded between thumb

and forefinger,

spurting its tiny flares through the candle’s flame,

has a cool roundness in the smell of its oily mist,

and a glisten, like the gleaming bells

of horns in the sunlight: trumpets, bugles, cornet.

You can see and feel so interchangeably.

Pine needles

spongey  and hot where they’re pressed to the ground

by shafts of sunlight, have a scent

as luxurious as plunging your hands into deep, soft fur.

That smell can hook you back into the past,

as can the smell of new books, a rubber bathing cap,

a pencil box, a salt marsh quiet at low tide,

cinnamon

and the smell of snow.

Pamela Perkins Atkinson

Let your poem address the issue of why we tell stories.

Examples:

Why We Tell Stories (part 3)

Lisel Mueller

3.

Because the story of our life

becomes our life

Because each of us tells

the same story

but tells it differently

and none of us tells it

the same way twice

Because grandmothers looking like spiders

want to enchant the children

and grandfathers need to convince us

what happened happened because of them

and though we listen only

haphazardly, with one ear,

we will begin our story

with the word and.

Why We Tell Stories

Tell your story endlessly

or let it drop.  Whatever works

until forgiveness wanders in

like an old gypsy woman

lost from the caravan.

You gather sticks for the fire.

She instructs you to sit.

“This fire is your heart”

she confides.

“Its warmth is all we have.”

She plays a flute-like instrument,

invites you to ride

the waves of her melody.

How can such quirky joy

arise in a minor key?

You make up words

to fit her tune,

so near the fire of your heart.

“In the circus of our lives,” she laughs,

even our stories turn cartwheels..”

jch 11/25/11b

To live in this world

you must be able

to do three things:

to love what is mortal;

to hold it

against your bones knowing

your own life depends on it;

and, when the time comes to let it go,

to let it go.

Mary Oliver (final lines of In Blackwater Woods)

‘He loved three things, alive:’

He loved three things, alive:

white peacocks, songs at eve,

and antique maps of America.

Hated when children cried,

and raspberry jam with tea,

and feminine hysteria.

…and he had married me.

Anna Akhmatova

Three things cannot be long hidden:  the sun, the moon, and the truth. Buddha

(Oops.  This one has four things)

Mankind owns four things

That are no good at sea–

Rudder, anchor, oars,

And the fear of going down.

–Antonio Machado

In all, there were three things:

the certainty one is always beginning

the certainty one must go further

and the certainty that one will be interrupted before finishing.

From the interruptions, to make a new path,

from falling, a dance step,

from fear, a ladder

from dream, a bridge, from search…the encounter

By Fernando Pessoa

Translated from the Portuguese

by Cecilia Ramon and Sheila Packa

Inside the poem,

the queen waits for something

unlikely yet particular.

Perfect snowflakes fall gently,

but look, each is as large

as your open hand.

A dark blue thread becomes visible,

linking into a community

all those who share a certain sadness.

The visitors all shed shawls

and sweaters to release their new,

bright, opening wings.

jch

1/4/2012

Make unlikely, yet particular, offerings to the queen.

You get twelve lines —

four three-line stanzas,

or three four-line stanzas.

Make each stanza able to stand alone as can each couplet of a ghazal.

All the rules are arbitrary.  You are free to ignore them.  The queen has no hold over you.

Write a poem about the thread you follow through life.  Describe your thread, the following of this thread, or perhaps the longing for a thread you cannot find.  Go anywhere with it.

Examples:

The Thread

Something is very gently,

invisibly, silently,

pulling at me — a thread

or net of threads

finer than cobweb and as

elastic.  I haven’t tried

the strength of it.  No barbed

hook pierced and tore me.

Was it not long ago this

thread began to draw me?

Or way back?  Was I

born with its knot about my

neck, a bridle?  Not fear

but a stirring

of wonder makes me

catch my breath when I feel

the tug of it when I thought

it had loosened itself and gone.

Denise Levertov

The Way It Is

There’s a thread you follow.  It goes among

things that change.  But it doesn’t change.

People wonder about what you are pursuing.

You have to explain about the thread.

But it is hard for others to see.

While you hold it you can’t get lost.

Tragedies happen; people get hurt

or die; and you suffer and get old.

Nothing you do can stop time’s unfolding.

You don’t ever let go of the thread.
William Stafford

With crayons or words, draw a picture of a window.  Hang it on a blank wall. Climb out the window into another world.

Examples:

The Room

Gregory Orr

With crayons and pieces of paper, I entered the empty room.

I sat on the floor and drew pictures all day.

One day I held a picture against the bare wall:

it was a window.  Climbing through,

I stood in a sloping field

at dusk.  As I began walking, night settled.

Far ahead in the valley, I saw the lights

of a village, and always at my back, I felt

the white room swallowing what was passed.

jch  2/6/04

Give the poem a picture

right off, BANG, from the beginning.

With hook and wire

and your small gold hammer,

hang it on the blank wall.

It’s a painting of a window.

There’s a ledge below the window

and a pond beyond.

From the ledge, then the sill,

step up and on through

into the rocking rowboat.

Weeping willows trail their fingertips

and cattails stand in the shallows.

You row with tiny strokes,

moving to the center.

Alone on the pond,

you could fish for meaning,

or just lie back

in your painted boat

and be.

Let your poem start with a dark mood, a negative statement, or a dire predicament.  Through the course of a short poem, rescue yourself.

A longer example:

Song for Putting Aside Anger

Four walls open to the sky: you are

in a small prison.  There is no door.

You are there for hatred, theft; it doesn’t

matter.  You might have been here all your life.

You might have come yesterday.  It feels like

your entire life.  It feels like your friends

have all died.  You imagine their bodies

in a white room.  Perhaps you killed them.

Your throat is too small for your hatred.

You sit sifting dirt through your fingers.

You say it is your heart:  a dry sand,

an encumbrance.  You wish it were a

red bird in the blue sky above you.

In the hills above you, a dozen monks

hurry along a road toward a mountain.

They wear blue robes.  They play flutes and

small cymbals.  In the midst of four walls,

you listen to the high notes of the flutes,

the chime of the cymbals.  The sounds turn,

spin together in the air around you,

weaving together into a thin rope.

Having found it, you must trust it.

This is how you put aside anger:

Pulling yourself up, hand over hand.

Stephen Dobyns (in Poetry, July? 1979)

Imagine,

when need be,

the rickety,

crooked ladder

rising

from the blue-walled

garden of the moods.

Climb up it now,

hand over hand,

heart lifting

toward

the wild skies

of Yes.

jch 11/28/11b