Get ready for Poetry and Lesson 15 of Write it! in parts
Why writers of fiction and memoir should read poetry
My heartfelt thanks to all my subscribers who opened their hearts to me. If you write me at marytabor@substack.com, I’ll give you a free week to Write it! How to get started.
To get ready for poets who started late, for an introduction to meter—and more, let’s go back to Why prose writers should read poetry:
Poetry can seem daunting. Here’s my next guest poster
from her blog: As a writer, am I not supposed to understand and appreciate writing in its many forms? I devour literature of all types, all the time. Why is poetry so hard?So, let’s get started:
A verbal Rorschach test, part 1: I give you an image. You write down the first feeling for each that comes to mind:
A dozen long stemmed roses
The lion and the lamb
A black cat
A verbal Rorschach test, part 2: Again, I give you an image. You write down the feeling:
An empty doorway and a maple leaf
The leaning grasses and two lights above the sea
Please put your answers to both Rorschach poetry exercises in comments.
Save your answers (no right or wrong). Lesson 15 will address the exercise. The full lesson will come in parts over a few weeks, starting, briefly, now.
Here’s our mantra: “Starting Late”—meaning NOW! Or my mantra, the more trite, “It’s Never Too Late” brought me to two poets we’ll read and talk about, among many others: Gerard Manley Hopkins and Amy Clampitt.
Some advice:
Read the poems keeping in mind their sentence structure instead of the line breaks. This approach will help you read for their sense, the way one reads a sentence.
Try not to look for a moral or a truth; don’t worry if you don’t “get” the poem.
Read out loud at least one or two other poems you like. Read them for the sound. Identify how the sound affects you and how it affects the sense of the poem—not its moral—only what it makes you see, hear or feel.
Poems via Poetry Foundation The second poem may seem harder than the first. Don’t give up! We’ll talk.
Pied Beauty
Glory be to God for dappled things –
For skies of couple-colour as a brinded cow;
For rose-moles all in stipple upon trout that swim;
Fresh-firecoal chestnut-falls; finches’ wings;
Landscape plotted and pieced – fold, fallow, and plough;
And áll trádes, their gear and tackle and trim.
All things counter, original, spare, strange;
Whatever is fickle, freckled (who knows how?)
With swift, slow; sweet, sour; adazzle, dim;
He fathers-forth whose beauty is past change:
Praise him.
Source: Gerard Manley Hopkins: Poems and Prose (Penguin Classics, 1985)
The Kingfisher
BY AMY CLAMPITT
In a year the nightingales were said to be so loud
they drowned out slumber, and peafowl strolled screaming
beside the ruined nunnery, through the long evening
of a dazzled pub crawl, the halcyon color, portholed
by those eye-spots’ stunning tapestry, unsettled
the pastoral nightfall with amazements opening.
Months later, intermission in a pub on Fifty-fifth Street
found one of them still breathless, the other quizzical,
acting the philistine, puncturing Stravinsky—“Tell
me, what was that racket in the orchestra about?”—
hauling down the Firebird, harum-scarum, like a kite,
a burnished, breathing wreck that didn’t hurt at all.
Among the Bronx Zoo’s exiled jungle fowl, they heard
through headphones of a separating panic, the bellbird
reiterate its single chong, a scream nobody answered.
When he mourned, “The poetry is gone,” she quailed,
seeing how his hands shook, sobered into feeling old.
By midnight, yet another fifth would have been killed.
A Sunday morning, the November of their cataclysm
(Dylan Thomas brought in in extremis to St. Vincent’s,
that same week, a symptomatic datum) found them
wandering a downtown churchyard. Among its headstones,
while from unruined choirs the noise of Christendom
poured over Wall Street, a benison in vestments,
a late thrush paused, in transit from some grizzled
spruce bog to the humid equatorial fireside: berry-
eyed, bark-brown above, with dark hints of trauma
in the stigmata of its underparts—or so, too bruised
just then to have invented anything so fancy,
later, re-embroidering a retrospect, she had supposed.
In gray England, years of muted recrimination (then
dead silence) later, she could not have said how many
spoiled takeoffs, how many entanglements gone sodden,
how many gaudy evenings made frantic by just one
insomniac nightingale, how many liaisons gone down
in a stroll beside the ruined nunnery;
a kingfisher’s burnished plunge, the color
of felicity afire, came glancing like an arrow
through landscapes of untended memory: ardor
illuminating with its terrifying currency
now no mere glimpse, no porthole vista
but, down on down, the uninhabitable sorrow.
Amy Clampitt, “The Kingfisher” from The Collected Poems of Amy Clampitt. Copyright © 1997 by the Estate of Amy Clampitt. Used by permission of Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc.
Source: The Collected Poems of Amy Clampitt (Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., 1997)
See next Lesson 15, in easy to understand parts: click ➡️ How Poetry Means
Love,
I'm afraid that whenever I'm asked to think of the first thing that comes to mind, my mind goes blank. I think it must be a hangover from school. I loved both poems, but I especially enjoyed G M Hopkins; the alliteration, assonance and rhythm. His poetry always sounds like music to me. I apologise for making a comment that is off-topic.
Another informative and lovely post. At my third consecutive read.
Happy Thanksgiving xo