Monthly Archives: October 2022

6 posts

Idioms in Poetry

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“They” say. But who are “they”? Often it’s nobody and everybody, but you can at least pin it down if an idiom is one familiar to your family.

Louis Jenkins’ poem “If It Was a Snake” plays on the idiomatic expression “If it was a snake, it would have bit you” to signify a lost object we are searching for that happens to be not only nearby but in the open for all to see.

Funny thing is, in my family, the saying doesn’t go that way at all. In my family, we say, “If it was a bear, it would bite you.” Maybe a regional thing, though I admit New England is home to both snakes AND bears (oh, my).

Using idiomatic expressions in your poetry is usually not advisable. The poetry powers-that-be will throw a flag on you, calling, “Cliché, ten yard penalty,” or something. But if the poem’s point hangs on the idiom, it’s a whole nother kettle of fish!

Anyway, for Jenkins, the snake part is important to the ending of his poem. See what I mean:

 

If It Was a Snake
by Louis Jenkins

You’ve lost something, your car keys, or your watch
and you have searched for what seems like hours. But
then suddenly it appears, right there on the table, not
two feet away. “If it was a snake it would have bit you,”
Mother said. That’s what you remember, a phrase,
an old saying. My sister said, “Grandma told me,
‘Never wear horizontal stripes, they make you look
fat.’ That’s one of the few things I remember about
Grandma.” Or the words disappear and an image
remains. I was getting a lecture from my parents
about riding my tricycle all the way downtown. I don’t
remember anything they said. I remember looking
out the window, it was just dark, and a block away
a man wearing a white shirt and a tie passed under
the streetlight and vanished into the night. That’s all.
Out of a lifetime, a few words, a few pictures, and
everything you have lost is lurking there in the dark,
poised to strike.

 

It’s a gamble, that last line. I call it a gamble when you separate a line at the end, making it an envoi in the same bleeding vein as Aesop’s morals. Sometimes it works wonders; other times it looks too self-consciously cutesy.

Here it is not separated from the body of the poem, but notice how Jenkins truncates the final line so that it’s visually unique from the others.

More noticeable to me, however, is how an anecdote about losing stuff and family sayings turns into commentary on memory’s quirkiness. We are all, Jenkins is telling us, a composite of hidden words, pictures, and images waiting to strike at any moment, sinking the two fangs of déjà and vu into our unsuspecting skins.

Ouch. I love it when life does that. It’s a poem, stupid, telling you to get writing….

 

***

Note: You can help me maintain this website and continue to write posts like this by purchasing one of my poetry collections available on the BOOKS page of this website. When it arrives, read it and give it a home on your bookshelf at home or — if you teach — in the classroom library. Thank you! — Ken C.

Reincarnation & Other Savings (Redux)

Ken Craft my poems poetry books Reincarnation & Other Stimulants

 

On September 4th, I wondered out loud about Amazon’s pricing policies vis-a-vis my most recent book. While the first two books remained at suggested retail, Reincarnation & Other Stimulants had somehow been enrolled in one of Amazon’s “Huh?” pricing schemes. Back then, it had sunk to 22% off. But then it bounced back up in price as September gained momentum. And now? Now it is trending down again, as if the Princes of Price are passing away a rainy day.

Seriously. I checked this morning and they’ve got it down 39% , where it’s enjoying (for how long, who knows) another life at $11.22,far below it’s suggested of $18.50.

How does this make a poet feel? Conflicted. On the one hand, I feel like I have no control (a typical, Amazonian-type affliction). On the other, I feel it might draw a few bargain-hunters, causing more people to read my work (a feeling every poet can relate to).

Who knows, however, how long it will last? In real life, the sun rises in the East and sets in the West. On Planet Amazon? The price is more fickle than any sun I know. Meantime, I’ll continue to watch the prices various reincarnations.

 

*********************************************************************** Original Post (Sept. 4, 2022) below******************

Far be it for me to explain Amazon dot all-is-calm (in the Ridiculous Profits and Not Paying Much in the Way of Taxes World), but recently they’ve cut the price of my latest book, Reincarnation & Other Stimulants, by 22%. I would add that they offer “free shipping,” but that’s only if you are yet another member of Prime Nation (I am not a citizen but, like Ponyboy and Dally, prefer to be an Outsider).

Better still, I have cut the price of the remaining books I have on hand for readings, which pretty much haven’t happened due to that funny thing that happened on the way to the forum called “Covid-19” (you may have heard of it).

Not to be outdone by Amazon (even though I am past my Prime and still paying my unfair share of taxes), I’m offering what’s left of my stockpile of Reincarnation for $12 (that’s 35% by my sketchy math) with free shipping as well if you’re living within the States. Not only that, these books will be signed, meaning they may someday be worth something… or not. All you have to do is click BOOKS on the upper right hand corner of this screen and, voila (minus an accent aigu or grave or some such), you are there on the “Add to Cart” page.

It doesn’t hurt to mention that I have a few of my two earlier books available, too. These are on sale as well — while supplies lasts, anyway. What can I say? Christmas in September? Black Friday every day? Whatever marketing coinage (“Pennies a day, Mr. or Mrs. or Miss Customer”) works!

If you do choose to support your local (if you live in Maine) or far-flung (if you don’t) poet, all appreciation goes to you. Like small independent bookstores, up and coming (read: not household names yet) writers need your support more than our friends at Amazon, Barnes, & Ignoble. It keeps sites like this available. It also keeps me writing more poems.

Cheers, and thanks in advance if you choose to support poetry. I’m almost sure you’ll like some — maybe even a lot — of the poems that will come your way, Snail Mail Express.

The Art of Writing a Poem’s First Lines

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In his book The Poetry Home Repair Manual, Ted Kooser writes, “The titles and first few lines of your poem represent the hand you extend in friendship toward your reader. They’re the first exposure he or she has, and you want to make a good impression. You also want to swiftly and gracefully draw your reader in.

“Too often it seems as if, in the poet’s first few lines, he or she is writing toward the poem, including information that is really not essential but is there because it was a part of the event that triggered the poem. It’s the background story, and it may not be necessary for us to know it to appreciate the poem.”

Taking Ted at his word, you can spend days working on your opening lines alone. That’s the good news. The bad news is, you may still have a problem. Ted adds, “One caution, though: We can spend so much effort on our opening lines that sometimes they turn out to be the best part of the poem. We polish and polish and polish them until the rest of the poem feels weak by contrast.”

Beginnings and endings. It doesn’t matter the genre, they tend to bedevil writers more than any middle ground. How do we get the reader’s attention? How do we quickly establish a voice? As for the ending, there has to be something about it–some exclamation point, some brilliant turn of phrase, something unexpectedly delightful.

Is that asking too much?

To put opening lines to the Kooser-standards test, I randomly pulled ten poetry books from my shelf, then randomly opened to a page. Here are ten openings (first four lines). Which ones would YOU say best follow the Kooser rules?

  1. Of memory, the unhappy man’s home. / How to guess time of night by listening to one’s own heartbeat. / Why we can’t see the end of our nose. / On the obscurity of words and clarity of things.
  2. Brooklyn’s too cold tonight / & all my friends are three years away. / My mother said I could be anything / I wanted–but I chose to live.
  3. Here is a coast; here is a harbor; / here, after a meager diet of horizon, is some scenery: / impractically shaped and–who knows?–self-pitying mountains, / sad and harsh beneath their frivolous greenery
  4. Stress of his anger set me back / To musing over time and space. / The apple branches dripping black / Divided light across his face.
  5. Our talk, our books / riled the shore like bullheads / at the roots of the luscious / large water lily
  6. He climbed to the top / of one of those million white pines / set out across the emptying pastures / of the fifties — some program to enrich the rich
  7. Into the mute and blue- / green marble mailbox my dust deserves to go, / though not for that which I’m going. / I deserve to go, and not alone,
  8. In those days you could buy a pagan baby for five dollars, / the whole class saved up. And when you bought it / you could name it Joseph, Mary, or Theresa, the class took a vote. / But on the day I brought in the five dollars”
  9. Then my mind goes back to the summer rental, / the stairs down into the earth — I descend them / and turn, and pass the washing machine, and go / into the bedroom, one wall the solid
  10. Jaspar, feldspar, quartzite, agate, granite, sandstone, slate. / Some can be rounded, some not. / Some can be flaked, some not. / A person, too, holds her lines of possible fracture.

 

Granted, I did not seek out the best of these books, I just opened them and planted a finger on a poem. It so happens, of the 10 I picked in this manner, I could only recall one.

So, which is your favorite? Which did you prefer? If you’re looking for titles and authors, they are below. Any surprises?

 

  1. “Late-Night Chat” by Charles Simic
  2. “Thanksgiving 2006” by Ocean Vuong
  3. “Arrival at Santos” by Elizabeth Bishop
  4. “The Revelation” by James Wright
  5. “Club 26” by Lorine Niedecker
  6. “Fergus Falling” by Galway Kinnell
  7. “Ode While Awaiting Execution” by Thomas Lux
  8. “Buying the Baby” by Marie Howe
  9. “Sea-Level Elegy” by Sharon Olds
  10. “Jaspar, Feldspar, Quartzite” by Jane Hirshfield

What’s in a Name? More Than You’d Think.

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Lead-off batters. In baseball, they’re the table setters. The speed. The possibility and the hope facing a first pitch.

In a poetry collection, the first poem is no small matter, either. St. Billy of Collins says it is damn near everything when it comes to the Department of Importance (a branch of the Department of Interior, I think). All at once, the first poem sets the tone, the tenor, and the expectations for the anxious reader.

As Exhibit A, let’s look at Ada Limón’s collection, The Carrying. How does it  begin, you ask? Softly, softly:

A Name
by Ada Limón

When Eve walked among
the animals and named them—
nightingale, red-shouldered hawk,
fiddler crab, fallow deer—
I wonder if she ever wanted
them to speak back, looked into
their wide wonderful eyes and
whispered, Name me, name me.

 

What strikes me about this opener is how unassuming it is. Limón has a penchant for lists, and we get one—emphasized between dashes, yet—right out of the gate. For themes, short poems do wonders. It’s like catching a whiff of something in the October air and trying to identify it. Is it identity? The female experience? How about nature, then?

Yes, yes, and yes.

The last line is almost childlike. “Name me! Name me!” It has an “I want to play, too!” slant to it.

Beyond that, simplicity all around. A few alliterative flourishes (fiddler crab / fallow deer, wide / wonderful / whispered), but hardly the poetic arsenal.

As for the line-break nazis, they’ll have to read it and weep: among, into, and all anchor lines in most unspectacular fashion. Most poets would park those at the beginning of the next line, but Limón seems little concerned with this “chicken or egg” game wherein the last word (no, the first word!) of each line is deemed supreme. In my view, it’s the poet’s prerogative. Period.

In any event, we can always look to the title for importance. Names are precious commodities. We have but one to protect and nurture, and it’s net worth beats any bank’s bottom line. How will we be named? How much control will be have over what comes to mind when people hear our name? And how much innocence does that name harbor, anyway? Is it (gulp!) an original sin waiting to happen?

Only Eden knows. And that snake, the lovely page, if the first poem does its job and tempts us to the second. And third. And so forth.

Quiet Poems. Desperate Poems.

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“The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation.” Thoreau. And the epigraph to my first book of poetry.

I will forever associate Thoreau’s quote with Sherwood Anderson’s collection of short stories, Winesburg, Ohio. Anderson called his characters “grotesques,” but I thought that a little strong. To me they were just “people,” because, frankly, by Anderson’s ledger, we’d all be grotesques.

Quiet desperation is what pushes me to write, to make sense of things, and I love best poems that speak to Thoreau’s great truth. In George Bilgere’s book, Blood Pages, I came across one:

Schwinn
by George Bilgere

One day my mother astonished me
by getting astride my bike,
the heavy old balloon-tired Schwinn
I used for my afternoon paper route,
and pedaling away down the street,

skirt flying, hair blown back,
a girl again in the wind and speed
that had nothing to do
with pulling double shifts at the hospital,
or cooking meatloaf, or sewing up my jeans,

the old bike carrying her away
from my father dead of booze,
and her own nightly bottle
of red wine in front of the news.

She flew down the road so far
I could barely see her,
then slowly pedaled back to me,
and stepped off the bike, my mom again.

It’s the perfect quiet desperation poem, the kind I like to write myself. For one brief, shining moment, the narrator’s mother, infinitely sad and trapped by life’s circumstances as so many adults are, is a little girl again, hair blowing and skirt flying in the wind, hopes and dreams still ahead of her.

Briefly, the boy loses sight of his mother, as if she has escaped maybe, as if her pursuit of happiness has ended with an actual capture.

But that is the stuff of Hollywood and fairy tales. In life? People pedal back slowly. They step off their what-was-I-thinking bikes. They are moms and dads again. Quietly. Desperately.

The Poetry of One Brief, Shining Moment

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Ours is a God of Irony. I often invoke this fact when people confront me about my illogical fear of flying, especially if they know I love roller coasters.

“Wait a minute,” they say. “You won’t get on the safest form of transportation known to man, the airplane, but you will get into a car to drive all over hell and gone. And on top of that, you strap yourself into roller coasters each summer? Freakin’ roller coasters?”

OK, OK. Point made. And if I die in a car or roller coaster accident, the God of Irony will chalk another one up (with an omnipotent chuckle because, in this world, you take laughs where you can get them).

These thoughts dawned on me as I read Ginger Murchison’s poem “Roller Coaster.” Why? Because the average roller coaster ride lasts 112 seconds, which means, as a writer, you have less than two minutes to absorb all the sensory shocks your body is subjected to by the experience, followed by all the time you want to think about it and craft a poem.

In that sense, the roller coaster ride is an apt metaphor for writing. Many instructors suggest you “explode the moment” or “zoom in” and describe an event that lasts only minutes or less.

Why? Because less experienced writers get trapped by “dawn-to-dusk” writing or, worse, “Monday-to-Sunday” writing or, worse still, “How-I-Misspent-My-Summer-Vacation” writing.

No, no, no. If you squeeze yourself into a teeny-tiny clown car, you will be subjected to an overload of sensory details and figurative language ideas to describe the cramped experience.

In the case of poetry inspiration, however, it will be brief experience alone, not a brief (and very scary, if clowns are in there) automobile experience you’ll be writing about.

I’ll leave you with Murchison’s example and my own encouragement to write about a brief, shining moment from your life. Think about all those sights, sounds, smells, tastes, and experiences of touch. Think about what everything’s like. And make it a metaphor for life, if you want to show off (and you do). Good luck!

 

Roller Coaster
Ginger Murchison

It starts with the climbing in,
nerved-up enough
for that defiance
of gravity, the slow-grind
rackety-clack one-inch cog
at a time—the mystery of machinery,
the sane and safe weightedness
of stiff-starched values,
wondering if there were
sins we’d committed
since our last confession, then
at the top, out on the edge,
beyond the solid-ground world
parents live in, test life,
theirs and our own, up where
we are a hole in the sky,
wholly abandoned in the eyes-
shut, heart-stopped drop,
like lawlessness on falling’s
crisp speed, the first curve, a blur,
the world’s suddenness,
metal, air and a prayer
half-mouthed, spun,
flung into another plunge,
a curve swerving,
a tiny boat in a tempest—
and isn’t this how we want
to live, live higher up,
hungry to leave the ground,
flinging sparks, the lights brighter,
the dark darker, bodies at war
with mere air, but still obedient
to the tracks laid down
to keep us on track.