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Poetry Ramblings: Maybe all poems are...
1. love poems: for what words can do, for a reader to whom trust is given that the poet's vulnerability will not be shrugged off. Eros as physical affection, as fingers to keyboard, graphite to page, inhale, exhale, sweat. A sharing.
1. love poems: for what words can do, for a reader to whom trust is given that the poet's vulnerability will not be shrugged off. Eros as physical affection, as fingers to keyboard, graphite to page, inhale, exhale, sweat. A sharing.
2. self-portraits. The particularities of the speaker as rendered by a self in flux because forced into/out of hiding. How do poems reveal the self but how they reveal their material(s)?
3. first person poems, inasmuch as the existence of an "eye," and observer regardless of position, there too is an "I." That the "he" or "we" or "you" is more "universal" assumes the artist has the godlike ability to render reality *for* someone other than their self.
There is always a self involved, which is how every poem can be a love poem, if love is merely the recognition that the self requires care and in order to be cared for it must be seen. What one sees is rooted in how, and how one sees is rooted in how they move through the world.
4. elegies, a way of recalling the past, by making it a kind of permanent by transcribing it. The past, here, meaning memory, experience, and the fleeting imagination, the visions that come against our will and leave against our trying to hold on. Image as a living-dead thought.
5. political. What is said versus what isn't. A poem about money that does not mention poverty, about climate change that don't mention Indigenous people, about abuse that don't critique the culprit. Where the camera lands is where the care (attention and concern) lies.
And this is not to say that poems "missing" a thing are bad poems. Not every poem (or poet) can encompass all things, but we could learn a lot about our writing process and understandings of the world if we paid attention to what we pay attention to, to what attracts us.
Even poems about harm reveal how we view harm. How do we write about injustice? How do our speakers, regardless of point of view, resist new knowledge or rebuke old knowledge? Are all of our speakers the same religion as us? Do our speakers not change because we haven't?
6. unfinished. I believe that all poems are simply abandoned, sometimes at peaks of the poem's life, sometimes too early. We could edit a poem forever if allowed, assuming our worldview morphs as we age, thus affecting our rendering of the world. on the page. But we publish.
And publishing requires a pause in time (not a stop), where the poem's appearance in a book or journal or wherever can be its final form if we decide to leave it there. But poems change in our hard drives, our notebooks, our imaginations, from first appearance to re-publication.
One poem performed one way in the summer can be performed differently come fall, the weather itself an editor. I say a strange things to my students: "Poems are organic." I assume they see tentacles or branches growing from their poems, but I see the poem growing out of them.
Nothing like a typo in a thread. Nothing. lolol
That "but" in Number 2 should be "by"
That "but" in Number 2 should be "by"
