I don't think I ever thought about form as much as I have in the last year. It has become a part of what I see on the page as much as the content of the poem. In my own writing, I experiment with form now and then (or as the poem requests). So this week's look at form helps me continue an internal conversation with all of you.
I've always thought of poetic form as a sort of "order" to the writing. By that I mean, the poem's form is a way for the poet to use the page to "order" the words and sometimes the meaning so that the reader can interact with the writing more closely to the way the poet intends. Of course we (poets) have no real control over what the reader does once they are alone with the poem, but form gives us a false sense of security over the poem. I guess I think of form as the outside of the poem and the content as the inside, but that they cannot (and should not) be separated (if done well). [I already know the stage folks are saying, but what if a poem doesn't live on the page? -- right, right. I'm talking about page poetry here! And I do know/believe that stage poetry has form as well -- that's another discussion.]
So, with all that rambling done, here's what this week's reading made me think:
The shape of a poem gives me the first impression. I look at the poem and before I read anything, I see the shape it has on the page. It's kinda like meeting someone for the first time. Before they say anything, you've already made a "judgment" or assessment based on the way they look. (And if you are digging them, you look at their shape -- right?)
Then, I look past the outside and try to connect to the inside, the content. Once I interact with the content, I try to find a relationship to the form and the content. Sometimes I see it right away and sometimes I must look a little deeper than the surface and still other times, I realize that there isn't a relationship, it was just a choice (or lack of choice) the poet made.
The inherited form in beauty rituals 2000 by Nwenna Kai caught my attention as I flipped through the beauty is moving us forward section of Bum Rush. I call it inherited (not my original idea) because it reminds me of Ntozake Shange's For Colored Girls poem. The slashes catch me first and I go to my brain file for Shange and remember Kearney, who we read last week, and then I read Kai.
Kai's poem gives us a list of what makes her ritual of beautification. It's a list and so I find the slashes work to separate the list while simultaneously giving the reader direction on how to read the poem and where to breath. I also think it was a conscious choice to use only one stanza (another element of form). The compactness of this one stanza gives the feeling that all of things must be in place for the ritual to take place; well, except the item that reads /maybe maple brown lip gloss open-toed shoes/
Ending with God is an interesting choice. Because we've gotten use to the listing of items, it almost seems like Kai wants us to know that in the end, God is the item that matters. And God can represent nature and natural-ness in this case. The list starts with really unnatural elements: comb/toe rings/titty rings/rings for the clitoris too/ and gradually shifts to more natural items:
extra virgin olive oil
shea butter
maple brown
cypress leaves
cranberry
henna
oranges and lemons
hot steaming water
exhalation
In this instance, the poem and the form are working with one another. Kai's list and use of slash marks provide a dual reading of the poem -- as a list slowly written out or as a rapidly fired list of things one must check off. Either way the reader interacts with the poem, the form serves it well.
peacelovelight
Kiala
Showing posts with label Week 9. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Week 9. Show all posts
Sunday, October 25, 2009
Form & Alsadir
My housemate, who is a visual artist, told me the other day she was going to separate form and content in her process. Once she decided what her content would be, and entered into creating the form, she found herself questioning her original vision to the point of distraction and reconsidering her content. (Her current project involves stitching lines of prose into a canvas...) This got me to thinking about whether form and content can be divided in the creation of poetry—do we come up with an idea, or a collection of words and see how they tumble onto the page? Or is form integral in the planning/creation of a poem?
When I was working in letterpress last fall, I found myself constantly adjusting my text to fit within the boundaries of handset type. This line won’t fit into the typestick, or there aren’t any more g’s in 12 pt Garamond, etc. There was something very powerful about these limitations. Choices had to be final because there was so much tedious work to undo them (breaking down lines, letter by letter, into their appropriate cubbies). It made me consider how valuable each word was, and what it was doing (as a prose writer, I tend to overuse them). So, in this case, form dictated content. The poems I printed were not the ones I had originally typed up on my laptop or typewriter, or scribbled in my journal—but this was the only way these poems could be expressed in the form. And one could run your fingers over the page and feel the debossed letters—an experience far more intimate than reading a longer, or more explicit, line on an offset page.
So, that is my tangent, now to the texts at hand. I’ve been considering Nuar Alsadir’s use of couplets in all three of her poems. The first thing couplets make me think of is that each line needs to be paired with another, needs a partner. This is a consideration for a poet who is crafting the poem—everything that wants to be said must fit within the decided structure. I noticed in “Bats,” (which was so special to me, because I am seduced by the lives and secrets of bats, and feel they are such ill-treated, underappreciated beings!) that each set of lines served a dual purpose that could not be replicated had the lines been shuffled.
In “Bats,” each couplet offers a physical description or visual element (of the bat) and also a reflection, or connection to the outside world (often, the human’s world).
ONE:
description – wings, not like rodents
reflection – “—not like you” (the m-dash pointing to those words is stern and intentional, a warning about the tone of the poem.)
TWO:
d – clicking of fangs
r – “they are not ashamed”
By the end of the poem, the descriptive and reflective elements have merged; they are no longer easy to separate, their meanings overlap and enhance one another.
FIVE:
d – “swim the air”
r – rising from dreams to belief
SIX:
d – clap/applause, changing direction
r – not needing applause, changing direction
Another thing that came up for me with the couplets was a feeling of authority and calm in the voice. The information is supplied steadily, uniformly (in terms of space on the page). Reading the couplets makes the pace of the poem slower and puts me at ease with the poet. The lines are almost aphoristic in this manner, particularly in “The Riddle of the Shrink.” There is so much continued white space between the lines that we are invited to read between them, to add our own impressions within the poet’s observations and reflections.
Primarily the language and form, but also the content, made me trust Alsadir—I feel entranced by her words, and I want her knowing, poetic voice to guide me & accompany me from this point onwards!
When I was working in letterpress last fall, I found myself constantly adjusting my text to fit within the boundaries of handset type. This line won’t fit into the typestick, or there aren’t any more g’s in 12 pt Garamond, etc. There was something very powerful about these limitations. Choices had to be final because there was so much tedious work to undo them (breaking down lines, letter by letter, into their appropriate cubbies). It made me consider how valuable each word was, and what it was doing (as a prose writer, I tend to overuse them). So, in this case, form dictated content. The poems I printed were not the ones I had originally typed up on my laptop or typewriter, or scribbled in my journal—but this was the only way these poems could be expressed in the form. And one could run your fingers over the page and feel the debossed letters—an experience far more intimate than reading a longer, or more explicit, line on an offset page.
So, that is my tangent, now to the texts at hand. I’ve been considering Nuar Alsadir’s use of couplets in all three of her poems. The first thing couplets make me think of is that each line needs to be paired with another, needs a partner. This is a consideration for a poet who is crafting the poem—everything that wants to be said must fit within the decided structure. I noticed in “Bats,” (which was so special to me, because I am seduced by the lives and secrets of bats, and feel they are such ill-treated, underappreciated beings!) that each set of lines served a dual purpose that could not be replicated had the lines been shuffled.
In “Bats,” each couplet offers a physical description or visual element (of the bat) and also a reflection, or connection to the outside world (often, the human’s world).
ONE:
description – wings, not like rodents
reflection – “—not like you” (the m-dash pointing to those words is stern and intentional, a warning about the tone of the poem.)
TWO:
d – clicking of fangs
r – “they are not ashamed”
By the end of the poem, the descriptive and reflective elements have merged; they are no longer easy to separate, their meanings overlap and enhance one another.
FIVE:
d – “swim the air”
r – rising from dreams to belief
SIX:
d – clap/applause, changing direction
r – not needing applause, changing direction
Another thing that came up for me with the couplets was a feeling of authority and calm in the voice. The information is supplied steadily, uniformly (in terms of space on the page). Reading the couplets makes the pace of the poem slower and puts me at ease with the poet. The lines are almost aphoristic in this manner, particularly in “The Riddle of the Shrink.” There is so much continued white space between the lines that we are invited to read between them, to add our own impressions within the poet’s observations and reflections.
Primarily the language and form, but also the content, made me trust Alsadir—I feel entranced by her words, and I want her knowing, poetic voice to guide me & accompany me from this point onwards!
The Riddle of the Shrink
I wondered about the use of couplets in Nuar Alsadir’s “The Riddle of the Shrink.” The couplets in this poem are open-ended, and the words in the lines continue into the next couplet, but the structure forces a pause between each one. The white space breaks up the reading of the poem and, as it creates a disjointedness between the lines, it also magnifies the tension described in the poem.
The language of the poem talks about “distress,” “disconnects,” “fear,” and “strain,” and the form of the poem parallels and reinforces the language. The overriding feeling I got from the poem, even trying to read it without the breaks between lines, was anxiety. It starts in the first line, “It is the distress of losing a ticket/or any other document granting passage.” What is “it” that’s causing the distress? We sense that we won’t get where we’re going. The unease builds when “the phone disconnects” and increases because we expect “to be let in” and gain access, but we miss “a secret.” By leaving us hanging, and then taking us someplace we didn’t expect to be, the split between couplets emphasizes the separation. The poem continues but without the continuity we were anticipating; this adds to the discomfort we are experiencing.
The form of the poem interrupts the flow of the reading, but there is flow in the language. If the poem were written in stanzas with complete thoughts grouped together, it would still create the unease, but perhaps without as much “strain.” Because most of the poem is written in the present tense, we feel like the action is either taking place right now or it happens on a regular basis. We go from one state of being to another; we "become the letter/that never receives a response;” we become “the ball/that rolls under the neighbor’s fence and stays.” The metaphors shift, but we are in the moment, and, at the same time, becoming something else. There’s a state of constant transition. It is the form of the poem that adds the hesitation and gives us pause.
Midway through the poem we are told, “The image of the future is the memory of the dream...” It’s a vivid image of living both in the future and in the memory of the past, but we’ve “forgotten [the] code,” so where do we go from here – forwards, backwards, or in-between? It feels like we ourselves are “suspended between this world/and the next.” This is consistent with being a letter that doesn’t receive a response – do we belong to the writer or the recipient? The ball stays in the neighbor’s yard, but it’s still our ball. Later, when we “strain/to hear another’s conversation while feigning/involvement in [our] own,” the conversations continue, but we belong to neither. The content of the poem is reinforced by its design. The words are arranged so that the language exists in more than one couplet.
The placement of the page break also felt like a significant transition. We start out on page 47 “rush[ing] to take a seat” on the subway, but continue on page 48 with changing lanes on the freeway. The division of these passages on two separate pages makes us feel like we’ve missed the train altogether (after all, we’ve lost our ticket), or that we’ve literally been “cut-off” in our lane, and life is moving too fast to ever be where we’re supposed to. The detail is “trying to get over to the right lane/in fast traffic” and the feeling is that our exit is coming up, but we might not make it in time. Again, we won’t get to where we are going.
The dream imagery works well when the last line mentions “dreaming that the alarm is about to go off.” The poem does feel like a dream where things happen but the transitions don’t always make sense. We feel like we are on the verge of something that is going to happen, but there are frustrations and white spaces that get in the way. The language expresses this tension, and the form of the poem in couplets heightens it.
Sheila Joseph
The language of the poem talks about “distress,” “disconnects,” “fear,” and “strain,” and the form of the poem parallels and reinforces the language. The overriding feeling I got from the poem, even trying to read it without the breaks between lines, was anxiety. It starts in the first line, “It is the distress of losing a ticket/or any other document granting passage.” What is “it” that’s causing the distress? We sense that we won’t get where we’re going. The unease builds when “the phone disconnects” and increases because we expect “to be let in” and gain access, but we miss “a secret.” By leaving us hanging, and then taking us someplace we didn’t expect to be, the split between couplets emphasizes the separation. The poem continues but without the continuity we were anticipating; this adds to the discomfort we are experiencing.
The form of the poem interrupts the flow of the reading, but there is flow in the language. If the poem were written in stanzas with complete thoughts grouped together, it would still create the unease, but perhaps without as much “strain.” Because most of the poem is written in the present tense, we feel like the action is either taking place right now or it happens on a regular basis. We go from one state of being to another; we "become the letter/that never receives a response;” we become “the ball/that rolls under the neighbor’s fence and stays.” The metaphors shift, but we are in the moment, and, at the same time, becoming something else. There’s a state of constant transition. It is the form of the poem that adds the hesitation and gives us pause.
Midway through the poem we are told, “The image of the future is the memory of the dream...” It’s a vivid image of living both in the future and in the memory of the past, but we’ve “forgotten [the] code,” so where do we go from here – forwards, backwards, or in-between? It feels like we ourselves are “suspended between this world/and the next.” This is consistent with being a letter that doesn’t receive a response – do we belong to the writer or the recipient? The ball stays in the neighbor’s yard, but it’s still our ball. Later, when we “strain/to hear another’s conversation while feigning/involvement in [our] own,” the conversations continue, but we belong to neither. The content of the poem is reinforced by its design. The words are arranged so that the language exists in more than one couplet.
The placement of the page break also felt like a significant transition. We start out on page 47 “rush[ing] to take a seat” on the subway, but continue on page 48 with changing lanes on the freeway. The division of these passages on two separate pages makes us feel like we’ve missed the train altogether (after all, we’ve lost our ticket), or that we’ve literally been “cut-off” in our lane, and life is moving too fast to ever be where we’re supposed to. The detail is “trying to get over to the right lane/in fast traffic” and the feeling is that our exit is coming up, but we might not make it in time. Again, we won’t get to where we are going.
The dream imagery works well when the last line mentions “dreaming that the alarm is about to go off.” The poem does feel like a dream where things happen but the transitions don’t always make sense. We feel like we are on the verge of something that is going to happen, but there are frustrations and white spaces that get in the way. The language expresses this tension, and the form of the poem in couplets heightens it.
Sheila Joseph
What struck me immediately in the form of Mroue's Beirut Survivors Anonymous is the way in which he uses the the minimal white space to provide shifts in focus, narrative and voice.
Initially we are in the midst of an attack, present to the flying of rockets and living in the dark of war so as not to provide any more targets. In this process the narrator talks about,
on the radio, putting faces to names,
scars to bodies, burns to flesh.
The war is personalized, taken out of the realm of the abstract and distant, faces receive names, scars are bodies, burns are flesh, it presents these victims as whole people not disconnected dead bodies as western media often portrays them. From the immediacy of that stanza the white space leaps us ahead a number of years. It now presents us with a remembered incidents, we are not in the war but in memories of war, a very different perspective. This stanza also contains the last instance of a singular voice for this narrative.
The lines,
I fly coach cross-continent
searching for someone
to recreate my childhood with.
We are walking to school. It is May.
with this moment of communal we is then disrupted by a return to I for the rest of the stanza; however it is a foreshadowing of the rest of the poem. The next white space involves the shifting of the voice from a singular personal experience to a shared one. The someone the narrator is searching for is found and merges into a seamless voice that nevertheless positions itself as multiple with We being the voices of many raised to say the same thing. Through the remaining stanzas the We is deepened and processed into a more clear identity for the reader.
The positionality continues to shift in the white space between the stanzas. In the third stanza we are back in America, wrapped in memories of war that are preferable to the place they find themselves now. Isn't this a function of memory, a yearning for times/places that the passage of years has rendered into a soft focus that erases the more negative aspects of the experience? I think so, and while I do see some of that there's also a fierce honesty in regards to the realities of war, evident in the fourth stanza.
We jump back in time, in memory, back to the war but the shelling is only the framing:
It is for nights of unrelenting shelling
we long, for the calm of corridors and neighbors
boiling coffee until dawn, for gunpowder seeping
through shut windows and the wails
of a single ambulance.
While the first and last lines of the stanza enclose it in the acts of war and the results the placement of the words we long puts it in an inbetween position. Is it longing for the shelling or for the things that follow, the community that forms through survival of war? When we keep in mind the We voice and the title of the piece it becomes an obvious call for connection. It is not actually the war that is missed but the personal connections and support that formed in opposition to it.
The next white space provides another switch back to the States, it also builds on the the search for community. The We tries to return to the memories of Beirut by links to arak, belly-dancers and hummous but the connection is false, in the end the last two lines of the stanza
longing for green plums and salt,
the ecstasy of Howitzers on a school night.
show us a longing for the reality of home not the falseness of American narratives of Arab culture that focus on the exotification of watered down pieces of the society taken completely out of context. It is a longing for the truth of home set against the facade of home that America presents for consumption.
The white space after that stanza gives another huge shift, this time from concrete to abstract. The focus on physical interactions of things, places and people is replaced by the psychic space and scars of those who've lived through the war and been transplanted into America. As opposed to previous stanzas when the communal we is connected to actions such as "lived", "long", "drink", "watch", "vomit" while in the final two stanzas the wes "are", "don't", "still", "can" positioning them in a space of being as opposed to doing.
The exploration of the identity of a Beirut Survivor happens in the white space where changes of voice, place and position happen silently and without fanfare.
Initially we are in the midst of an attack, present to the flying of rockets and living in the dark of war so as not to provide any more targets. In this process the narrator talks about,
on the radio, putting faces to names,
scars to bodies, burns to flesh.
The war is personalized, taken out of the realm of the abstract and distant, faces receive names, scars are bodies, burns are flesh, it presents these victims as whole people not disconnected dead bodies as western media often portrays them. From the immediacy of that stanza the white space leaps us ahead a number of years. It now presents us with a remembered incidents, we are not in the war but in memories of war, a very different perspective. This stanza also contains the last instance of a singular voice for this narrative.
The lines,
I fly coach cross-continent
searching for someone
to recreate my childhood with.
We are walking to school. It is May.
with this moment of communal we is then disrupted by a return to I for the rest of the stanza; however it is a foreshadowing of the rest of the poem. The next white space involves the shifting of the voice from a singular personal experience to a shared one. The someone the narrator is searching for is found and merges into a seamless voice that nevertheless positions itself as multiple with We being the voices of many raised to say the same thing. Through the remaining stanzas the We is deepened and processed into a more clear identity for the reader.
The positionality continues to shift in the white space between the stanzas. In the third stanza we are back in America, wrapped in memories of war that are preferable to the place they find themselves now. Isn't this a function of memory, a yearning for times/places that the passage of years has rendered into a soft focus that erases the more negative aspects of the experience? I think so, and while I do see some of that there's also a fierce honesty in regards to the realities of war, evident in the fourth stanza.
We jump back in time, in memory, back to the war but the shelling is only the framing:
It is for nights of unrelenting shelling
we long, for the calm of corridors and neighbors
boiling coffee until dawn, for gunpowder seeping
through shut windows and the wails
of a single ambulance.
While the first and last lines of the stanza enclose it in the acts of war and the results the placement of the words we long puts it in an inbetween position. Is it longing for the shelling or for the things that follow, the community that forms through survival of war? When we keep in mind the We voice and the title of the piece it becomes an obvious call for connection. It is not actually the war that is missed but the personal connections and support that formed in opposition to it.
The next white space provides another switch back to the States, it also builds on the the search for community. The We tries to return to the memories of Beirut by links to arak, belly-dancers and hummous but the connection is false, in the end the last two lines of the stanza
longing for green plums and salt,
the ecstasy of Howitzers on a school night.
show us a longing for the reality of home not the falseness of American narratives of Arab culture that focus on the exotification of watered down pieces of the society taken completely out of context. It is a longing for the truth of home set against the facade of home that America presents for consumption.
The white space after that stanza gives another huge shift, this time from concrete to abstract. The focus on physical interactions of things, places and people is replaced by the psychic space and scars of those who've lived through the war and been transplanted into America. As opposed to previous stanzas when the communal we is connected to actions such as "lived", "long", "drink", "watch", "vomit" while in the final two stanzas the wes "are", "don't", "still", "can" positioning them in a space of being as opposed to doing.
The exploration of the identity of a Beirut Survivor happens in the white space where changes of voice, place and position happen silently and without fanfare.
Saturday, October 24, 2009
Poetry and Form: Mroue and Powell
In Beirut on good
nights I watch rockets fly
over rooftops until my eyes hurt.
I listen for names of the dead
on the radio, putting faces to names,
scars to bodies, burns to flesh.
I remove my contacts by candlelight
and flush my eyes with Detrol.
In Haas H. Mroue’s poem “Beirut Survivors Anonymous” (Inclined to Speak, p 240) there is not much white space. There is little room for rest or peacefulness in a history of haunting violence that Mroue in title and the poem’s beginning, locates as Beirut. “I” turns to “We” in the second stanza and the poem does not lose it’s intimacy. It is consistent in form and content and does not stray from heavily holding on to the left sided margin, like a weight that keeps Mroue from falling into an abyss of despair and loneliness. The trauma from surviving war, is steadily piercing but in a numbed ritual, an everyday pattern of remembering.
The poem “Civil War” is similar in theme, but the form is slightly different. The lines are shorter in some areas, more white space. Mroue uses less words, but the impact is more intense with a volatile imagery. Here are a few lines that were particularly jarring (Inclined to Speak, p 246),
Give me back my testicles
my sister’s nipples...
On a balcony of a bombed out skyscraper
I dangle my soul out for you.
Snipers where are you?
Don’t ignore me now...
I scrape my eyes out with the cross,
collect my gushing blood
on the pages of the Koran...
In reading Kevin Powell’s “What the deal son?” from Bum Rush The Page it reminded me immediately of Mroue’s first poem in form, leaning to the left but in this case with no line breaks at all. Ideas and images intersect, conflict, overlap and flow together like a chaotic dream-in the form of a question that loops. “Will I? We hear again and again in an almost defeated repetition like falling in a dream. There is an ominous intensity that builds quickly in the beginning lines of this poem, especially with the imagery of falling into “a pit of purple rats,” “apocalypse,” “welts”, “darkness,” “gunshot residue”and “mother’s two failed abortions.” His poem takes a surprising turn as it becomes specific, a story within a church of a feared reverend. Here Powell is a boy never quite the same (Bum Rush The Page, p 168)
bow-legged black boy
who became an insomniac
as a man so terrified of sleeping
The form of this poem is a fast pace tempo and with no breaks we are thrown into this feeling of a child not being safe who has become an adult. At the end of the piece Powell questions religion, declares his own belief in God. All of these poems mentioned use form effectively because the line’s tempo speeds up giving immediacy to the words, or in some instances, slows down for contrast and breath between images. The block form on the left gives the content a sense of importance and weight. This is why form in poetry is so important to express ourselves in various ways, whether it is elusive or declarative, singular or plural, etc.
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