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What Is Poetry?

You can look it up in a dictionary or a literature textbook, but I expect most poets have their own definitions of poetry. Here’s a compelling one from Virginia poet Patsy Bickerstaff:

Definitions
By Patsy Anne Bickerstaff

Poetry is a butterfly with hawk’s talons,
cry of a lamb in barndark, before a January dawn,
fragrance of cedar, on wind tossing the dust of memories,
melody of a hundred instruments in one voice’s spoken word,
history and secrets and magic of chocolate on a child’s tongue,
thunder that announces the birth of a rainbow,
gleaming magnificent treachery of sunlight on ice underfoot,
restive ocean that rolls new wonders to every discoverer’s eye,
old woman who pieces a quilt from her daughters’ dreams,
pale-green buds that rise from charred forest floors,
thousand-faceted gem, different color from every viewpoint,
sparkle, and sharp bite, of sleet,
echo of a kiss that warms a cheek after decades,
flames wrapped in paper, waiting to set fire to a universe,
in a place where all that moves, dances.

Patsy Anne Bickerstaff, JD, is a retired attorney and Administrative Law Judge, whose work has appeared in about 200 publications, and won numerous awards, including the Robert Penn Warren Poetry Prize. She has served as president of both the Virginia Writers' Club and the Poetry Society of Virginia, taught poetry writing at the University of Richmond Osher program, and studied poetry at the University of Richmond, University of Virginia, VCU, and the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference.

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Other Views

In an occasional feature called “The View From Here,” Poetry magazine asks people from other fields to talk about their own experience of poetry. In a compelling commentary that appeared in the July/August issue, Chinese artist and activist Ai Weiwei reflects on his father, poet Ai Qing. An excerpt:

My father was punished for being a poet, and I grew up in its consequences. But even when things were at their most difficult, I saw his heart protected by an innocent understanding of the world. For poetry is against gravity … It transports us to another place, away from the moment, away from our circumstances.

Weiwei concludes: “To experience poetry is to see over and above reality. It is to discover that which is beyond the physical … to wonder about the world, … to be shared with another, old or young, known or unknown.”
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Limerick Challenge

At this month’s Northern Virginia Poetry Salon, one member read an amusing limerick, which got us quoting old favorites. And it got me thinking: Is it possible to write a serious limerick? Probably not, but I think I’ll give it a try:

Can a limerick really be serious
tragic or deep or mysterious?

Well, it’s a start … If you come up with something, send it along and we’ll publish our favorites next time.
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Home Run

I don’t follow sports and haven’t picked up a bat since high school. But like most parents, I watched with bemused love as my son progressed from toddler to teenager. Poet Eric Forsbergh has used a finely tuned sports metaphor to capture the heart and guts, the stumbles and successes, of his daughter’s passage through childhood:

Travel Softball
By Eric Forsbergh

Before the menses and the men,
she played on fields
a child in cleats.

Before the school’s “it takes a village” talk,
in team colors she blazed her way
urged on by a coach.

At early morning practices
footprints appeared behind her
in diamond dew.

Before she sneaked out late one night,
she bowled a catcher over in the dirt
on a dare to steal home.

Before that first furtive drink,
she scrubbed herself of dirt and dust
to sleep the bliss of being spent

Until she parsed her father’s few fallen moods
and viewed the man complete,
there was no guile in her speech.

The first time I held my infant girl aloft,
her hair mingled in the stars,
I thought not once she’d tumble to earth.

Eric Forsbergh lives in Virginia. His collection Imagine Morning: Poems of Companionship & Solitude was published in 2013 by Richer Resources Publications. Three of his poems appear in RRP’s Joys of the Table: An Anthology of Culinary Verse accompanied by two recipes..

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Life Without Boundaries

Congratulations to Juan Filipe Herrera, newly named U.S. Poet Laureate. The child of migrant farmers, Herrera went on to publish more than a dozen poetry collections, plus children’s books, young adult novels, and short stories. He is also a chancellor of The American Academy of Poets, whose website features this quote, from the poet’s “Let Me Tell You What a Poem Brings”:

Before you go further,
let me tell you what a poem brings,
first, you must know the secret, there is no poem
to speak of, it is a way to attain a life without boundaries

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Good Advice, the Sequel

Where would we be without librarians? In an earlier post, I quoted some good advice from the seminal modernist poet William Carlos Williams but admitted I couldn’t find the source. A librarian friend sent me to Against the Grain: The Literary Life of a Poet, a memoir by Reed Whittemore—and thereby introduced me to Furioso, the literary magazine launched in 1939 by Whittemore and Jim Angleton (yes, that Angleton, the CIA spy) while they were students at Yale. After Williams encouraged the two in their venture—“Go to it, and more power to you.—Whittemore and Angleton sent poems to Williams for his reaction. The quote I posted combines two passages from his reply, which concluded, “I’ve slashed your two poems to show you what I mean. Hope you’ll forgive me—you know. Baloney.”

Baloney? I don’t think so. What poet wouldn’t appreciate a critique—even a slashing one—from the likes of William Carlos Williams?
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Another Poet Gone

Franz Wright (1953-2015) had poetry in his genes. Son of Pulitzer Prize winning poet James Wright, Franz Wright began writing poetry as a child and went on to win his own Pulitzer Prize in 2004 for Walking To Martha’s Vineyard. I wasn’t familiar with him or his work until my friend Ingrid sent me his obituary from the Los Angeles Times, a newspaper that excels in its coverage of poetry.

Wright struggled with mental illness and addiction but turned his darkness into raw but lyrical poetry. One of his poems that I particularly like is “To Myself,” which includes these lines:

You are riding the bus again
burrowing into the blackness of Interstate 80,
the sole passenger

with an overhead light on.
And I am with you.
I’m the interminable fields you can’t see,

the little lights off in the distance
(in one of those rooms we are
living) and I am the rain

and the others all
around you, and the loneliness you love,
and the universe that loves you specifically, maybe …

Read more about Franz Wright at the Poetry Foundation.

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Delicious

Diane Lockward, whose wonderfully sensual poem “Linguine” appears in Joys of the Table, included two poems and a recipe from the book in her blog, “Blogalicious: Notes on Poetry, Poets and Books.”  (Hey, other contributors, who not link to Joys of the Table in your blogs or social media sites?) Diane ended her post with a suggestion: “This book would make a great gift for friends who love poetry and food. Don’t forget to be a friend to yourself. Bon appétit!”

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A Little More Shameless Promotion

Not long ago, I listed a few of my recently published poems, with links to the publications. Here are a couple more:

• “Nothing New,” Mothers Always Write, May 2015.
• “Returning to a Hotel in Uskudar,” Blue Minaret Literary Journal, which will post two more of my poems in coming months.  

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What Are You Writing?

Why should we get all the bylines? Submit your latest poem—just one for now—and we’ll publish the poems we like best in an upcoming blog post. Simultaneous submissions are fine, but please let us know if the poem is accepted or published elsewhere. Send your poem, plus a few lines about yourself, in the body of an e-mail message to:

            poetryeditor@RicherResourcesPublications.com

 
   

 

  

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Welcome to But Does it Rhyme?
 We're a small, but hopefully growing, band of poets who like to talk about our craft and share what we've written. We'll highlight favorite poets, review new books, and explore the process of writing poetry from inspiration to conclusion. (We might venture into essays and short fiction, too.) We hope you'll like our blog — and contribute your own thought and poems.
Sally Zakariya, Poetry Editor
Richer Resources Publications

 Charan Sue Wollard (LivermoreLit)
 Kevin Taylor (Poet-ch'i)
 Sherry Weaver Smith (SherrysKnowledgeQuest)

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'The impossible language’

“Translation can’t be done; it’s the impossible language,” said poet W.S. Merwin in an interview in the February 2015 issue of The Writer’s Chronicle. Merwin, who has translated many volumes of poetry himself, went on quote Auden on translating from a language you don’t know. “This is the best way of doing it, because if you know the original, it just confuses you,” he said. “It’s much better to have it at several removes.”

I thought about that when a Brazilian friend who’s a sculptor asked for my help translating a poem she wrote in Portuguese. “As pedras falam,” it begins, and then recounts what stones say, presumably to the sculptor. She provided a literal translation, which didn’t say who the stones were speaking to. My translation (or maybe I should say my adaptation) put my friend in the poem and added some details to the stones’ speech:

The Stones
by Elizabeth Freire, adapted by Sally Zakariya

The stones speak to the sculptor, each
in its own language.
Listening, she understands.

The stones choose their own shape and size,
their own destiny.
The granite chooses to be a monolith,
standing strong.
The soapstone chooses to be carved,
transformed.
The marble chooses to flaunt its
rosy color.

To decipher the stones’ desires is to bring
out what has been in them since
the world was new.

The sculptor’s work is hard, but she is patient.
She takes time to know the stones.
She gives them time to reveal themselves.

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A Little Horn Tooting

A few of my poems have been published recently:

• “What It’s Like When You Escape,” Lunch Ticket, Winter/Spring 2015. Try to ignore the photo of the author …
• “The End of the Day,” ELJ Black Orchid Designs (broadside), 2014. This one was written in response to a photograph supplied by the publisher.
• “U.S.S. Jeannette,” “Home Improvement,” and “Maine Ghosts, 1952,” Broadkill Review, Nov/Dec 2014.
• “Why We Live with Cats,” Purrfect Poetry, Lost Tower Publications, 2014. An anthology about, well, cats.
• “May Meteor Shower,” Emerge Literary Journal, Issue 9: 2014

And watch for one more: “Mackerel Sky,” The Northern Virginia Review, vol. 29, spring 2015, forthcoming.

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Protest Poetry II

A little while ago I quoted NPR critic Juan Vidal’s call for protest poetry. “We need our poets now more than ever,” he said. Canadian poet Kevin Taylor, author of Between Music and Dance, stepped up to the plate and sent us this reminiscence:

This poem was written 15 or 20 years ago. At that time Vancouver was passing bylaws to restrict street artists, an oppressive move. Today there are few buskers left, many were forced to beg instead. I took this poem down to the art gallery, to the old courthouse steps, where a protest rally had formed, and I read it with a bullhorn in hand.—Kevin Taylor

Members of the Jury—

It was a drive-by versing
A poem invasion
An act of irresponsible aesthetics
Unmitigated form and passion
Premeditated meter
Alliteration
Aggravated by both rhythm
And rhyme

It was a drive-by vision
A prose inversion
A wilding of fact and fantasy

By all accounts
A Declaration of Words

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In and Out

My friend Jacqueline Jules and I meet each month at a friendly bagel shop to read and critique each other’s poems. I’ve noticed that frequently, all our poems really need is judicious pruning—deleting those extra words (and even lines) that elaborate rather than illuminate. Sometimes, too, the critique boils down to a simpler, more direct way to say something.

This month, after our meeting, I got to thinking that the word “while” in one of Jacqueline’s poems seemed if not unnecessary at least a bit soft, so I emailed her to that effect. She emailed back, “I took the ‘while’ out and put it back in several times this morning. I am happy to have the incentive to take it out again.”

All of which leads me to one of my very favorite poetry quotes. It’s from the inimitable Oscar Wilde: “I was working on the proof of one of my poems all the morning, and took out a comma. In the afternoon I put it back again.”

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Are You a Walt or an Emily?

A class I’m taking is reading Emily Dickinson and Walt Whitman, two very different 19th-century American poets who, each in his own way, transformed American poetry—Dickinson with her reclusive, particularist rhymed verse, and Whitman with his loose, expansive, universalist lines. Many contemporary American poets fall into one camp or the other, the lyric or the bardic. Am I an Emily or a Walt? More likely neither, but here, for the sake of argument, is a little poem of mine inspired by Emily’s line “In the name of the bee.”

Why I Do Not Trim My Mint

In the herb garden the mint slants
north, each stalk its own compass needle

Finding their way, three bees hover over
the blossoms, drawn by the promise of pollen

Their busy buzz lulls me as I laze
here on the porch, dreaming of blooms

and of the world bees make possible
for us, a world of fields and fruitfulness

Cut the mint before it flowers, they say
but where would these three forage then?

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Galway Kinnell, 1927-2014

With the death of Galway Kinnell in late October, America lost one of its premier poets. Winner of the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award, among other distinctions, Kinnell blended the political and the philosophical in his work, which was often compared to that of Walt Whitman. In a 1985 speech, he recalled having been a silent child who felt isolated from others. “Gradually I felt that if I was ever going to have a happy life,” he said, “it was going to have to do with poetry.” That kind of happiness can be a quietly private thing, as suggested by the closing lines from Kinnell’s 2006 poem “Why Regret?”

Doesn’t it outdo the pleasures of the brilliant concert
to wake in the night and find ourselves
holding hands in our sleep?

For more on Kinnell’s life and work, visit the Poetry Foundation and the Academy of American Poets.

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What Are You Writing?

Why should we get all the bylines? Submit your latest poem—just one for now—and we’ll publish the poems we like best in an upcoming blog post. Simultaneous submissions are fine, but please let us know if the poem is accepted or published elsewhere. Send your poem, plus a few lines about yourself, in the body of an e-mail message to:

            poetryeditor@RicherResourcesPublications.com